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WikiLeaks founder to use WeChat for talk in Cape Town

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been announced as one of the main draw cards for the Net Prophet 2014 conference in Cape Town on 21 May.

Assange is best known as the editor-in-chief of the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, which rose to prominence in 2010 when they published military and diplomatic documents leaked by former US soldier Chelsea Manning.

Assange has been under investigation by the US government ever since, and has also been placed on the radar of Sweden in 2012. He won’t however, be travelling to Cape Town to deliver his talk, as he has been granted political asylum from Ecuador after he took refuge in their London embassy.

His talk will instead be broadcast to attendees through social messaging application WeChat’s video conferencing facility.

“In my role as WikiLeaks editor, I’ve been involved in fighting off many legal attacks. To do that, and keep our sources safe, we have had to spread assets, encrypt everything, and move telecommunications and people around the world to activate protective laws in different national jurisdictions,” he explains in a press release.

Assange has been a fierce protector of freedom of speech and delivering information that the organisation deems important to the general public across the world. Releasing a number of diplomatic cables late last year, it came to light that the US government has been closely monitoring their South African counterparts – and discussed sensitive issues such as the 1973 South Africa Games, and South Africa’s relationship with other African states.

These revelations all form part of the Kissinger Cables, which is more than 1.7 million US diplomatic records for the period 1973 to 1976. In total, the Wikileaks Public Library of US Diplomacy (PlusD) consists of more than 2-million records comprising approximately 1 billion words – covering “US involvements in, and diplomatic or intelligence reporting on, every country on earth.”

[Source: Net Prophet 2014, Image: DarkHorseNet]

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