"It is our experience that courage is contagious," Assange said Monday, telling reporters at London's Frontline Club that his greatest fear was "that we won't be able to do justice to the material that we're getting in."
According to Assange, the torrent of leaked information being uploaded to his website is enormous, with a reserve of unexamined documents so unwieldy that the site has been more or less inactive since December.
What's in the backlog? The 39-year-old former computer hacker refuses to say.
"We have files that concern every country in the world with a population of over 1 million," he said. "Thousands of databases and files about all sorts of countries."
WikiLeaks has been posting sensitive information to the Web since 2006, when Assange set up the website from a house outside the University of Melbourne. Since then it has published everything from Church of Scientology documents to U.S. Embassy cables, passing along transcripts, secret videos and more. Its enemies have included everyone from British bankers to Kenyan politicians.
Assange has pledged to keep publishing — just as soon as he can get his website reorganized to handle the volume of data rushing in.
More than 250 news outlets around the world have signed an appeal that calls for the...
