Wikileaks founder Julian Assange: more revelations to come

Whistleblowing site Wikileaks says it has a ‘backlog’ of further secret material after publication of Afghanistan war logs

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said he hoped for an ‘age of the whistleblower’. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

The Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, said today that the organisation is working through a “backlog” of further secret material and was expecting a “substantial increase in submissions” from whistleblowers after one of the biggest leaks in US military history.

Speaking in London after his website published more than 92,000 classified military logs relating to the war in Afghanistan, Assange said that he hoped for an “age of the whistleblower” in which more people would come forward with information they believed should be published.

Assange said that the site, which currently operates with a small dedicated team but has a network of about 800 volunteers, had a “backlog” of more material which only “just scratched the surface”.

While he would not be drawn into commenting on the nature of the material, he said that the organisation held “several million files” that “concern every country in the world with a population over 1 million”.

He said the site had undergone a “publishing haitus” since December during a period of re-engineering. Assange suggested a clear step-up of operations and said that there were difficulties in changing from a small to large organisation while ensuring it would still be able to work in a secure way.

“My greatest fear is that we will be too successful too fast and won’t be able to do justice to the material,” he said.

He said that from past experience the organisation was expecting more material to add to the backlog. He said that after the site leaked details of one incident that killed 51 people in Afghanistan, “we received substantial increase in submissions”.

“Courage is contagious,” he added. “Sources are encouraged by the opportunities they see in front of them.”

He said that a further 15,000 potentially sensitive reports had been excluded from today’s leak and were being were being reviewed further. He said some of this material would be released once it was deemed safe to do so. He added that the majority of this material was threat reports and that it included more than 50 embassy cables.

Assange’s plans will cause concern in government agencies, which argue that the site’s leaks are “irresponsible” and pose a threat to military operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere. But Assange and said that the site applied “harm minimisation” procedures before publishing material.

“We don’t do things in an ad hoc way,” he said. We’ve tried hard to make sure that it puts no innocents at harm. This material is over seven months old so it’s of no operational significance, although it’s significant for journalistic investigation.”

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