A Wikileaks editor, deciding not to risk a confrontation with federal agents, skipped a high-profile speaking engagement at a hacker conference here on Saturday. Instead, Jacob Appelbaum, a Seattle-based programmer for the Tor Project, who's involved in the Wikileaks Web site, took over the 1 p.m. ET keynote slot on behalf of co-founder Julian Assange.
Appelbaum used the opportunity to exhort a largely sympathetic audience to support Wikileaks by volunteering or by donating money, to address recent criticisms of the document-publishing Web site, and to boast that Wikileaks remains uncensorable. "You can try to take us down... but you can't stop us," he said.

"The whole idea of hunting" for Assange is misguided, Appelbaum said. "You can cut off the head, but there will be more."

CNET previously reported that organizers of The Next HOPE conference said that six Homeland Security agents showed up on Friday morning looking for Assange, who's at the center of a storm of publicity involving a video that a U.S. serviceman may have provided to document-sharing site Wikileaks.

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