EUROPE

July 26: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange holds up a copy of Britain's
Guardian newspaper during a press conference in London.
LONDON -- Online whistle-blower WikiLeaks has posted a huge encrypted
file named "Insurance" to its website, sparking speculation that those
behind the organization may be prepared to release more classified
information if authorities interfere with them.

At 1.4 gigabytes, the file is 20 times larger than the batch of 77,000
secret U.S. military documents about Afghanistan that WikiLeaks dumped
onto the Web last month, and cryptographers say that the file is
virtually impossible to crack -- unless WikiLeaks releases the key
used to encode the material.

"There's no way that anyone has any chance of figuring out what's in
there," Paul Kocher, president of US-based Cryptography Research, said
Thursday.

That hasn't stopped bloggers and journalists from speculating. Some
say the files could be the 15,000 or so intelligence reports which
WikiLeaks says it's held back for vetting. Others, pointing to its
enormous size, say it could be a compilation of the 260,000 classified
diplomatic cables allegedly accessed by Army intelligence analyst
Bradley Manning.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley acknowledged Thursday that the
government suspects that WikiLeaks is sitting on at least some of its
message traffic. The organization itself is keeping mum, at least in
public.