Wikileaks' Password-Protected Files Spark Legal Security Debate

Wikileaks, the online whistleblower is growing ever more daring. Three days after signing a deal with Piratpartiet, the Swedish pirate-friendly political party, it's put up a password-protected, encrypted file on its site that anyone can download--or host. Until the password is entered, however, it's unreadable. All of this is very Wikileaks--mysterious, slightly threatening--and, according to the editor of 2600 The Hacker Quarterly, could pose a serious challenge to the legal system.

"If you release it in encrypted form, nobody really knows if you've released it or not, or even what the material is," Emmanuel Goldstein told the BBC. "Then, if something happens to you, all it takes is the revelation of a simple, spoken phrase known by a select group of people and everyone who has this mystery file now has all of the secrets."