No, Julian Assange Is Not Dead (As Has Been Rumored), But His Internet Connection Is

Julian Assange may live out his existence within the walls of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, but that doesn’t mean he’s not prone to fits of exciting times after all of the Podesta email dumps last week. The WikiLeaks founder’s weekend has been a truly bizarre one, including a Friday morning vegan lunch with Pam Anderson, who told reporters that she’s concerned about Assange’s health, which butts up against Monday rumors of his demise.

Don’t worry — Julian Assange is alive and (presumably) well. But his Internet connection is dead, according to a tweet from the WikiLeaks official account, which fingers an unidentified “state actor” as the responsible party.

The BBC reports that the Ecuadorian embassy is staying mum on this act of possible sabotage, but their contingency plans should soon put Assange back in the game. And as if things couldn’t get weirder for him, people genuinely wondered if he was alive after these three cryptic tweets appeared on the WikiLeaks Twitter page.

Some of Assange’s followers (and Reddit) theorized that these tweets constituted a “dead man’s switch,” which would have been designed to pass on vital WikiLeaks information to a successor. However, Gizmodo reports that these tweets merely indicate a digital fingerprint for a “pre-commitment” of future document dumps: “Those unique codes are proof to anyone reading the documents in the future that their contents remain unchanged: alteration to the leaks will likewise alter those 64-character codes.” This won’t stop accusations that WikiLeaks has altered some documents before leaks occurred, but that’s a subject for another day.

(Via CBS News, BBC News & Gizmodo)