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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is still holed up in Ecuador's embassy in London.

(The Associated Press)

Just a few months ago, WikiLeaks stood at the epicenter of the 24/7 news cycle as it dribbled out hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

Since the U.S. presidential election, however, Julian Assange's anti-secrets outfit has fallen back into relative obscurity.

Which, for Assange, is not acceptable. WikiLeaks' 45-year-old Australian founder, holed up for the past six years in Ecuador's London embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden on a rape charge, loves the spotlight. And he knows that, with the internet reaching a chaotic maturity and President Donald Trump embracing various far-out scenarios, conspiracy theories have never been more popular.

And so WikiLeaks in the past week has been putting out cryptic tweets about a mysterious "Vault 7," which has piqued the interest of both conspiracy theorists and straightforward lovers of mind games. Here are some of the tweets, the most recent of which was posted this morning:

The message is so clear, right? Well, some folks on Reddit and Twitter think so -- or are having a laugh. Here's one theory:

Vault 7, goes this notion, is the "Doomsday Seed Vault" in Norway -- that is, the isolated Svalbard Global Seed Vault whose purpose, writes the international non-profit The Crop Trust, "is to provide insurance against both incremental and catastrophic loss of crop diversity held in traditional seed banks around the world."

WikiLeaks has obtained some documents about, say, mismanagement at the seed vault?

OK, maybe. That would be a meaningful story, if it were true. But it wouldn't exactly be explosive, which Assange considers his stock-in-trade. So some of the more popular theories involve so-called DUMBs -- Deep Underground Military Bases, a favorite of survivalist conspiracy theorists. Below is an 8-minute video that will bring you up to speed.

Then there's this possibility from an anonymous Redditer: Vault 7 represents "traitors," but "not those whom the government labels traitors."

Who are the traitors, then? That's not entirely clear. It has something to do with gold stolen by the Nazis and the Pentagon's "missing" budget and -- the alpha and omega of modern-day conspiracy theories -- the 9/11 terrorist attacks. "In other words," the Redditer writes, "9/11 was an op, and the real motive was what was in this vault. All the other motives -- the insurance payouts, the Iraq war, all that was distraction and/or 'hush' money."

These various theories, as you can see, range from "interesting but unlikely" to "way out there" to "please seek psychiatric help now," but Assange is no doubt enjoying the speculation. He may soon reveal all, though the important thing, for him, may simply be that the internet is talking about WikiLeaks again.

-- Douglas Perry