he knows too much

Apparently the Pentagon has sent out a team of investigators scrambling and in a hurry to locate Julian Assange, the founder and proprietor of WikiLeaks.org. So far, they have no idea where he is.

The peripatetic and nervous Mr. Assange, who is profiled in last week's issue of the New Yorker (June 7), has made a career of collecting and publishing government secrets on his now-notorious web site. In early April he was in the U.S., appearing at the National Press Club in D.C. to release a U.S. Army videotape of a helicopter attack on unidentified people on the streets of Baghdad. Shot in 2007, the tape shows copter gunners killing 12, including (as it turned out) two Reuters News Agency reporters. As Assange was presenting the tape at the Press Club, the video, which he calls "Collateral Murder," was released on the WikiLeaks site, YouTube, and a number of other places.

The Pentagon fears that Assange is about to publish a very large cache of State Department classified cables which the blog Daily Beast describes as containing information related to American diplomatic and intelligence efforts in the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Assange now lives everywhere and nowhere, moving on after each few days of intense work, from hotel rooms to rented houses and back again in several countries. His computer network is sequestered, encrypted, and secure, and spread out over numerous Scandinavian locales. He's a hyperactive man on a mission, very secretive and and very hard to track. Until he's apprehended and taken in for "questioning," he will continue to claim that a "social movement" to expose secrets could "bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality -- including the U.S. administration," and he'll continue trying to prove it.