The latest batch of WikiLeaks cables revealed Shell's grip on the Nigerian government and US fears about China's "pernicious" presence in China while Operation Payback continued revenge attacks across the net and Russia suggested Julian Assange deserved the Nobel prizeRead our latest WikiLeaks US embassy cables live blog

7.52am: MasterCard, Visa, the Swedish prosecution authority, Joe Lieberman, Sarah Palin, PayPal, Twitter, PostFinance, Amazon and EveryDNS.net. It is an very eclectic mix, but their websites are all under attack, or threat of attack, by supporters of WikiLeaks.

A full account of Operation Payback and its "major shitstorm" is available here.

The Daily Mail is alarmed. "WIKILEAKS: NOW IT'S CYBER WAR", shouts its front page.

More sober analysis is available elsewhere. The New York Times says the WikiLeaks storm poses an awkward dilemma for Facebook and Twitter.

Both Facebook and Twitter — but particularly Twitter — have received praise in recent years as outlets for free speech. Governments trying to control the flow of information have found it difficult to block people from voicing their concerns or setting up meetings through the sites. At the same time, both Facebook and Twitter have corporate aspirations that hinge on their ability to serve as ad platforms for other companies. This leaves them with tough public relations and business decisions around how they should handle situations as politically charged as the WikiLeaks developments.

Activists from Anonymous, the group behind Operation Payback, talk to the Economist in a revealing blogpost.

The reporter chatted online with the group as they appeared to be discussing whether or not to target the Metropolitan Police for arresting the founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange. They decided against.

Anons do understand their limitations. The ones I talked to know that to take down a Swedish prosecutor's website does not halt the prosecution in Sweden. They described their motivations, variously, as trying "to raise awareness", "to show the prosecutor that we have the ability to act" and "damage and attention". This is all that a denial-of-service attack can do: register protest. It is not cyberwar. It is a propaganda coup.

The two women whose complaints of sexual assault triggered Julian Assange's arrest have also been targeted in vicious online campaign, according to their lawyer.

The Guardian's Amelia Gentlemen travelled to Stockholm to meet Claes Borgström. He said his clients had been assaulted twice: first physically, before being "sacrificed" to a malevolent online attack.

Meanwhile, the latest cables make jaw-dropping reading about a number of African states.

• The oil giant Shell claimed it had inserted staff into all the main ministries of the Nigerian government, giving it access to politicians' every move in the oil-rich Niger Delta.

• US diplomats' fear that Kenya could erupt in violence worse than that experienced after the 2008 election unless rampant government corruption is tackled.

• One cable described China's presence in Africa as "very aggressive and pernicious economic competitor with no morals".

• America asked Uganda to let it know if its army intended to commit war crimes based on US intelligence – but did not try to prevent war crimes taking place.

• Washington's ambassador to the troubled African state of Eritrea described its president, Isaias Afwerki, as a cruel "unhinged dictator" whose regime was "one bullet away from implosion".

• Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe variously described as frail, fit, a superb debater and having 'lost the plot of normal human interaction'.

You can follow all the previous disclosures and reaction on our other live blogs about the cables. And for full coverage go to our US embassy cables page or follow our US embassy cable Twitter feed @GdnCables.

7.52am: MasterCard, Visa, the Swedish prosecution authority, Joe Lieberman, Sarah Palin, PayPal, Twitter, PostFinance, Amazon and EveryDNS.net. It is an very eclectic mix, but their websites are all under attack, or threat of attack, by supporters of WikiLeaks.

A full account of Operation Payback and its "major shitstorm" is available here.

The Daily Mail is alarmed. "WIKILEAKS: NOW IT'S CYBER WAR", shouts its front page.

More sober analysis is available elsewhere. The New York Times says the WikiLeaks storm poses an awkward dilemma for Facebook and Twitter.

Both Facebook and Twitter — but particularly Twitter — have received praise in recent years as outlets for free speech. Governments trying to control the flow of information have found it difficult to block people from voicing their concerns or setting up meetings through the sites. At the same time, both Facebook and Twitter have corporate aspirations that hinge on their ability to serve as ad platforms for other companies. This leaves them with tough public relations and business decisions around how they should handle situations as politically charged as the WikiLeaks developments.

Activists from Anonymous, the group behind Operation Payback, talk to the Economist in a revealing blogpost.

The reporter chatted online with the group as they appeared to be discussing whether or not to target the Metropolitan Police for arresting the founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange. They decided against.

Anons do understand their limitations. The ones I talked to know that to take down a Swedish prosecutor's website does not halt the prosecution in Sweden. They described their motivations, variously, as trying "to raise awareness", "to show the prosecutor that we have the ability to act" and "damage and attention". This is all that a denial-of-service attack can do: register protest. It is not cyberwar. It is a propaganda coup.

The two women whose complaints of sexual assault triggered Julian Assange's arrest have also been targeted in vicious online campaign, according to their lawyer.

The Guardian's Amelia Gentlemen travelled to Stockholm to meet Claes Borgström. He said his clients had been assaulted twice: first physically, before being "sacrificed" to a malevolent online attack.

Meanwhile, the latest cables make jaw-dropping reading about a number of African states.

• The oil giant Shell claimed it had inserted staff into all the main ministries of the Nigerian government, giving it access to politicians' every move in the oil-rich Niger Delta.

• US diplomats' fear that Kenya could erupt in violence worse than that experienced after the 2008 election unless rampant government corruption is tackled.

• One cable described China's presence in Africa as "very aggressive and pernicious economic competitor with no morals".

• America asked Uganda to let it know if its army intended to commit war crimes based on US intelligence – but did not try to prevent war crimes taking place.

• Washington's ambassador to the troubled African state of Eritrea described its president, Isaias Afwerki, as a cruel "unhinged dictator" whose regime was "one bullet away from implosion".

• Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe variously described as frail, fit, a superb debater and having 'lost the plot of normal human interaction'.

You can follow all the previous disclosures and reaction on our other live blogs about the cables. And for full coverage go to our US embassy cables page or follow our US embassy cable Twitter feed @GdnCables.

8.36am: Twitter and Facebook have been hit back at Anonymous, the group behind much of the online mischief making. Charles Arthur has the latest on overnight's cat and mouse game:



Facebook yesterday acted against the group by closing down its Facebook page.

Not long afterwards Twitter suspended the "Anon_Operation" account immediately after it tweeted a link apparently to hacked MasterCard numbers which were being posted to the code site Pastebin.com.

The account had around 22,000 followers at the time. But it rapidly reappeared under a new name, Anon_Operationn, offering links to the Internet Relay Chat servers where the members of the Anonymous group have been planning online attacks against sites and organisations deemed to be antagonistic to Wikileaks.

8.53am: Do the WikiLeaks Samba. It won't make the Christmas Number One, but it is quite catchy, and it's nice about the Guardian.

Here's a sample of the lyrics:

If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear

Our friends are thin skinned, feckless and vain,

with a crazy old man and another just strange,

Don't corner Merkel, she'll become tenacious,

She's risk averse and rarely creative

Some are abysmal or taking their meds

While others won't keep their promises

Fet frequent flyer miles of Ban Ki Moon

His biometric data, we'll need it soon

9.17am: When the WikiLeaks cables first started emerging, journalists from elsewhere, who hadn't been poring over them for months, were dismissive. They scoffed at them as "tittle tattle" and "nothing new".

At least one of them has repented. In FT blogpost Gideon Rachman writes:

In previous posts, I dismissed WikiLeaks as not such a big deal. Well, that was obviously wrong. I argued that everybody already knew that - for example - Nicolas Sarkozy is vain or Russia is a brutal and corrupt place, so the cables did not add much to the sum of human knowledge. But that was wrong on two counts. First, there is a difference between an idea being conventional wisdom in the media, and spelled out in a diplomatic cable - both in terms of authority and in terms of political impact. You can see that in the angry reactions to the leaks from everybody from Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey to Kevin Rudd, the foreign minister of Australia. (Apparently Rudd is a "mistake-prone control freak".) Second, with the arrest of Julian Assange on dubious-sounding sexual assault charges - and now the attack on Mastercard's web-site, apparently by Assange supporters, the whole thing is shaping up into an unpredictable conflict between western governments and internet-based anarchists. And, as more and more material is released, there are some genuine surprises emerging.

9.31am: Six out of ten Americans think the release of the cables has been harmful to the public interest in the US, according to Pew research.

Those polled also said the cables had been more damaging that the release of the Afghanistan war logs.

Six-in-ten (60%) of those paying attention to the story say they believe the release of thousands of secret State Department communications harms the public interest. About half that number (31%) say the release serves the public interest, according to the latest News Interest Index survey conducted Dec. 2-5 among 1,003 adults. Yet the public makes a distinction between WikiLeaks itself and the press' handling of the document release. While nearly four-in-ten (38%) of this group say news organizations have gone too far in reporting the confidential material, a comparable number (39%) say the media has struck the right balance. Just 14% say news organizations have held back too much of the classified material.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald takes issue with the poll. He tweeted:

The premise of this Pew poll is false - that WL indiscriminately dumped 1,000s of docs while media selectively released

9.54am: "The campaign is not over... I see this becoming a war but not your conventional war. This is a war for data we are trying to keep the internet open and free for everyone," Coldblood from Anonymous told Radio 4's Today programme.

If, like me, you missed it, you can hear the interview again here or here:

10.05am: Amazon may have ditched WikiLeaks but you can still buy Kindle versions of the leaked cables documents from the site.

My colleague Charles Arthur also points to other WikiLeaks books and booty available through Amazon, including a WikiLeaks Freedom T-shirt.

In a statement earlier this week, Amazon said it had dropped WikiLeaks because it had flouted its terms of service.

There were several parts they were violating. For example, our terms of service state that "you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity." It's clear that WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy.

John Naughton picks holes in Amazon's reasoning.

10.25am: Josh Halliday has been monitoring the latest developments on the Anonymous hackers.

Josh Halliday. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Operation Payback is claiming two major scalps in Sarah Palin's website and – separately – PayPal's API. The former is window dressing, the latter will be a worry for any third-party retailers using PayPal – quite possibly including eBay.

Shortly before 9.30 this morning, Sky News repeated an earlier AFP snap that 'WikiLeaks supporters' had forced the Swedish government's website offline. But the site is live at time of writing. "Mastercard might be next," according to the @AnonOpsNet account.

At least two new Twitter accounts have spawned from Twitter's closing down of the original account – @AnonOpsNet and @Op_Payback. The latter account has sought to distance itself from the unofficial spokesman for Anonymous, Coldblood, after the London-based 22-year-old spoke to the Guardian and other media organisations about the transient group of activists.

More later on Coldblood and the multi-headed Medusa that appears to be forming from Anonymous.

10.45am: Shell has issued an angry denial of the Guardian's story on cable claims about its grip on the Nigeria state.

It's "absolutely untrue, false and misleading" Shell told the oil industry paper Upstream.

It sounds as if its reporter got a right earful from Shell's spokesman:

You are seeking our views on a leaked cable to the Guardian newspaper allegedly containing information about the interpretation by a third party individual of a private conversation involving a Shell representative who has since left Nigeria. We cannot comment on the alleged contents of the cable, including the correctness or incorrectness of any statements it allegedly contains. The Guardian's assertion that Shell has somehow infiltrated the government of Nigeria is absolutely untrue, false and misleading.

11.06am: Anonymous is not a "group of hackers" but an "online living consciousness" the group said in statement straight out of pseuds corner:

The atoms it is comprised of have never been the exact same in number, consistency or form. In this regard, Anonymous is similar to a river." Operation: Payback is the codename for the joint effort of Anonymous to fight those who see to misuse the Internet. Operation: Payback is now directed towards those who employ unfair means to fight WikiLeaks.



Morally corrupt organisations such as Visa and MasterCard among others are facing attacks not to their critical infrastructure but to their corporate websites.

11.12am: Facebook has clarified why the official Wikileaks page - which, at the last look, had 1,131,211 supporters - remains live while the group Anonymous was taken down, writes Jemima Kiss.

A spokeswoman said the site doesn't take down pages on controversial topics, such the Cumbria spree killer Raoul Moat, but it draws the line on groups that attack others. The Anonymous page on Facebook, however, was removed last night for violating Facebook's terms: "We also take down Pages that attack an individual or group," said a warning message on the page where the Anonymous Facebook page used to be.

Here's the Facebook statement:

We haven't received any official requests to disable the Wikileaks page, or any notification that the articles posted on the page contain unlawful content. If we did, of course, we would review the material according to our rules and standards, and take it down if appropriate. But the mere existence of a Wikileaks page doesn't violate any law just like we don't take down other pages about controversial topics like Raoul Moat and Holocaust denial.

11.33am: Anonymous isn't targeting Lebanese newspapers over the release of leaked cables. But someone is, according to AP:



An editor of a Lebanese daily says the newspaper's website has been shut down following a hacker attack, apparently over its publishing of leaked US diplomatic cables. Omar Nashabe says he doesn't want to prejudge who is behind the attack on Al-Akhbar but says it's the most serious since the paper was launched in 2006. The privately owned Al-Akhbar is close to the militant Lebanese Hezbollah group and its allies. It was given an advance copy of documents by the WikiLeaks website and has been publishing them since last week. Nashabe says the paper is trying to reactivate the website and plans to investigate the attack. He says the website has been inaccessible since about 4am today.

11.54am: The Taiwanese news animators NMA have struck again with a video covering the arrest of Julian Assange. It features Sarah Palin with a rifle and a Canadian with bazooka. Enjoy:

12.24pm: Coldblood, a member of Anonymous but not its spokesman, plays down talk of an attack on Twitter, in this Audioboo interview with Josh Halliday.

"I don't think an attack on Twitter will happen.. [its] vital to the spread of information".

12.47pm: A message from Guardian editor in chief Alan Rusbridger

You ask: we search

We're now around 10 days into coverage of the embassy cables. We've done a thorough job of searching for themes, people and issues, but we know we'll have missed many intriguing and important stories. What have we missed? What would you be searching for if you were sitting in front of the database?

We'll do our best to look. We can't, as the agony aunts say, enter into personal correspondence or hand out information or individual cables. But we can look for material that could be reported in the Guardian, or on WikiLeaks' own site, or with the four other news organisations involved. The rule of thumb is that we'll use our news judgements, as we have with all the cables we've looked at so far.

Simply tweet @gdncables with the information you're interested in. We're working with a search engine, remember, so it would help greatly if you could give us:

- Search terms

- Rough dates (the main archive runs from 2005 to Feb 2010)

- The likely embassy involved ( eg 'Moscow', or 'Kampala')

So you might say @gdncables Oil Spills June 2003 Angola

Our resources aren't infinite - but we'll do our best, so please be a *little* patient!

1.06pm:

Louis Klarevas, a member of the clinical faculty at New York university's centre for global affairs, wonders whether it isn't time for the US to rethink the espionage act. He writes on the Atlantic website:

The world war I era law, intended primarily to punish government employees and contractors who pass classified information to foreign government agents, is wildly out of date. Written long before the internet changed how information and media work, the espionage act is unsuited to our era and long overdue for reform.

1.19pm:

Dan Gillmor at Salon, despite his ambivalence about some of what WikiLeaks does, condemns what the US government is trying to do as an assault on free speech. Journalists should realise that the attacks on the whistleblower are attacks on them too he argues.

No, Amazon is not bound by the first amendment. But if it's bowing to government pressure, it's helping a panicked government tear up one of our most basic freedoms.



He is also taken aback by the reaction of some journalists.

Two Washington Post columnists, among many others, have been racing to see who can be the more warmongering. The reliably bellicose Charles Krauthammer invited the U.S. government to kill Julian Assange, while his colleague Marc A. Thiessen was only slightly less bloodthirsty when he urged cyber attacks on WikiLeaks and any other sites that might be showing the leaked cables.

1.29pm: Luke Harding has a great new line: Russia has suggested that Julian Assange should be awarded the Nobel peace prize, in an unexpected show of support from Moscow for the jailed WikiLeaks founder.

Luke Harding byline. Photograph: Christian Jungeblodt

In what appears to be a calculated dig at the US, the Kremlin today urged non-governmental organisations to think seriously about 'nominating Assange as a Nobel Prize laureate'.

"Public and non-governmental organizations should think of how to help him," the source from inside president Dmitry Medvedev's office told Russian news agencies. Speaking in Brussels, where Medvedev was attending a Russia-EU summit yesterday, the source went on: "Maybe, nominate him as a Nobel Prize laureate."

Russia's reflexively suspicious leadership appears to have come round to WikiLeaks, having decided that the ongoing torrent of disclosures are ultimately far more damaging and disastrous to America's long-term geo-political interests than they are to Russia's.

Look out for the full story later.

1.37pm: The latest cables leaked describe Hugo Chávez's Venezuelan government as too shambolic and broke to exploit uranium or build nuclear reactors, writes Rory Carrol.

Rory Carroll byline. Photograph: Muhannad Fala'ah/Getty Images

A confidential cable from John Caulfield, the deputy chief of mission, said Washington had little reason to fear Venezuelan plans to exploit uranium with Iranian help and build a reactor with Russian help.

"Although rumours that Venezuela is providing Iran with Venezuelan-produced uranium may help burnish the government's revolutionary credentials, there seems to be little basis in reality to the claims," said the 2009 cable.

Rory also reports that Chávez is desperate to attract foreign partners after nationalisation frightened many away:

Venezuela's tottering economy is forcing Hugo Chávez to make deals with foreign corporations to save his socialist revolution from going broke. The Venezuelan president has courted European, American and Asian companies in behind-the-scenes negotiations that highlight a severe financial crunch in his government. Venezuela's state-owned oil company, PDVSA, is the engine of the economy but buckled when given an ultimatum by its Italian counterpart and has scrambled to attract foreign partners, according to confidential US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks.

1.53pm:Evgeny Morozov, a Stanford University academic who writes about politics and the internet, is troubled by the consequences of Anonymous' Operation Payback.



That Anonymous chose to go after Visa and MasterCard has created all sorts of other challenging issues. While the attacks targeted only the public web-sites of these companies – rather than the underlying infrastructure that allows card transactions to be processed – such subtleties are likely to get lost in the public debate. As far as policymakers are concerned, these attacks would be viewed as striking at the very of the global economy (even if they obviously aren't in reality). It's still not clear to me whether any credit card data has been leaked or compromised as a result of such attacks, even though Anonymous posted some links to such data on their Twitter feed. This too won't matter, as most people would assume that data has, in fact, been stolen.

He urges WikiLeaks to distance itself from Anonymous:



All in all, if the public continues to associate WikiLeaks with hacking and cyber-attacks – rather than, say, providing a safe platform for whistleblowers – this will greatly erode the goodwill that WikiLeaks has built over the course of the last few months by increasing their cooperation with media organizations and NGOs.

2.32pm: Atlantic has a novel approach to guiding readers through the sheer mass of leaked documents: cablegate roulette.

Click on the red button and a random cable will appear. It's like chat roulette for foreign policy wonks.

(Hat tip: @CharlieBeckett).

2.38pm: Here's more on that unlikely tale about Russia calling for Assange to be nominated for a Nobel Prize.

2.40pm:Anonymous is going after Amazon, Josh Halliday reports.

Josh Halliday. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Operation Payback appears to have just launched its most audacious attack to date.

Apparently bolstered by attempts by Facebook and Twitter to thwart the spate of illegal attacks, Anonymous is attempting to bring down the website of the world's largest online retailer, Amazon.

A tweet posted at around 2pm by @Op_Payback, which appears to be the most legitimate of the dozens that were spawned by Twitter's closure of Anonymous' main account yesterday, says: "TARGET: WWW.AMAZON.COM LOCKED ON!!!"

At the time of writing, Amazon.com is still live. It would take much more than a concerted effort to bring down the online retailer, given the nature of its servers and place as one of the most hi-tech companies on the internet.

It marks a change of gear for Anonymous, which has previously intimated that it wouldn't go after 'technology' companies because they generally have better protection against such attacks than, say, Sarah Palin's website.

Also, one of Anonymous' IRC backchannels, where ideas for attacks are essentially voted upon, suggests that the PayPal payment system is down. Operation Payback began targeting the API of Paypal, which enables third-party retailers to register payments through Paypal, at around 9.30 this morning.

2.46pm: Evgeny Morozov predicts:

2.57pm: Wikileaks is trying to distance itself from Anonymous, sort of:



WikiLeaks is aware that several government agencies and corporations, including the Swedish prosecutor, Mastercard, PayPal and State.gov have come under cyber-attack in recent days, and have often been driven offline as a result. The attacks are of a similar nature to those received – and endured – by the Wikileaks website over the past week, since the publication of the first of 250,000 US Embassy Cables. These denial of service attacks are believed to have originated from an internet gathering known as Anonymous. This group is not affiliated with Wikileaks. There has been no contact between any Wikileaks staffer and anyone at Anonymous. Wikileaks has not received any prior notice of any of Anonymous' actions. Wikileaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson said: "We neither condemn nor applaud these attacks. We believe they are a reflection of public opinion on the actions of the targets."

3.39pm:Time for a summary post

Hello from Mark Tran

• Anonymous targets Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, but decides not to go after Twitter. WikiLeaks, however, distances itself from the internet gathering.

• Russia comes out in an unexpected show of support for jailed WikiLeaks founder.

It suggests that Julian Assange should be awarded the Nobel peace prize

• Guardian editor in chief invites readers to suggest topics to be followed up from leaked material. What have we missed? What would you be searching for if you were sitting in front of the database?



• Shell dismisses Guardian story on cable claims on its grip on Nigeria. The Guardian's assertion that Shell has somehow infiltrated the government of Nigeria is absolutely untrue, false and misleading.



• Six out of ten Americans think release of cables hurt US public interest. According to Pew research, those polled also said the cables had been more damaging that the release of the Afghanistan war logs.

3.55pm:

The Guardian can report that Julian Assange met his team of lawyers at Wandsworth prison this afternoon. His solicitor, Mark Stephens, said he was "quite chipper, he seemed to be bearing up". Assange was wearing a grey prison tracksuit because he did not have three of his own outfits, a requirement for prisoners to wear their own clothes.

Assange, who is being held in a single cell in the prison's segregation unit, complained about the daytime television, Stephens said: "he doesn't have access to a computer, even without an internet connection, or to writing material. He's got some files but doesn't have any paper to write on and put in them."

Stephens was accompanied by Jennifer Robinson, another solicitor, and his barrister Geoffrey Robertson. They discussed Assange's case ahead of a second appearance at Westminster magistrates court next week. Stephens said Assange was concerned that "people have unjustly accused WikiLeaks of inspiring cyber attacks and they have in no way inspired cyberattacks."

4.04pm:

The WikiLeaks supporters behind attacks on various websites - including Mastercard and Visa, have sent footage to Channel 4 News of a cyber strike being carried out.

4.09pm:

Many thanks for your responses so far to Alan Rusbridger's invitation. We're combing through them and will get back to you.

4.20pm:

Facebook has updated its statement on why it left WikiLeaks alone but took down Anonymous from its site.

We take our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities seriously and react quickly to reports of inappropriate or illegal content and behavior. In this case, we removed a Page (Operation Payback) because it was promoting a DDOS attack. Additional point: The Wikileaks Page on Facebook does not violate our policies and remains up. We haven't received any official requests to disable it, nor any notification that the articles posted on the Page contain unlawful content. Section 3.10 of our SRR (http://www.facebook.com/terms.php) states: You will not use Facebook to do anything unlawful, misleading, malicious, or discriminatory.

4.30pm:

It looks like internecine fighting has broken out at Anonymous. Josh Halliday has just emailed:

Josh Halliday. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian



The latest I'm hearing is that an attack on Amazon has been put on hold after a number of Anonymous members protested that they should persist with attacks against Paypal's API instead. Anonymous announced its intention to attack Amazon at around 2pm this afternoon, alerting partcipants to set their weapons to the correct place. Two hours later it appears as though the fractious nature of the group has got the better of it. There will be more, rest assured.

4.35pm:

Time for some light relief. A spoof video from Rap News on Julian Assange vs Donald Rumsfeld, described as secretary of offence.

4.45pm:

There has been a small rally in Brisbane, Australia in support of Julian Assange. This from the Australian Associated Press

Many of the 250 people who gathered in central Brisbane on Thursday evening brandished masks of the WikiLeaks founder currently held in a British prison, claiming "we are all Julian Assange".

5.06pm:

Declan Walsh, the Guardian's correspondent in Islamabad, has this intriguing story on how WikiLeaks has been exploited for propaganda purposes.

They read like the most extraordinary revelations. Citing the WikiLeaks cables, major Pakistani newspapers this morning carried stories that purported to detail eye-popping American assessments of India's military and civilian leaders... An extensive search of the WikiLeaks database by the Guardian by date, name and keyword failed to locate any of the incendiary allegations. It suggests this is the first case of WikiLeaks being exploited for propaganda purposes.

5.09pm:

Around 100 suggestions an hour are coming through from readers suggesting subjects to search for in the cables database. We've set up a small team to go through them and so far the results look promising. Several people suggested searching for information on Madeleine McCann, the British girl who went missing in Portugal in 2007, for example. She is indeed mentioned in at least two cables from the US embassy in Lisbon. No clues to her fate, unfortunately, but some interesting observations on the involvement of British police, which we'll relay once we've checked them out. Similarly, lots of interest in the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was killed in 2006 and is mentioned in around 70 cables. Other popular requests for more infomation include the private security firm Blackwater (mentioned 159 times in the cables) and several themes that have already been trawled over by Guardian journalists such as Bosnian war crimes, but which may be worth returning to on the basis of more detailed search suggestions. Please keep the ideas coming by sending tweets to @gdncables (preferably with details of dates and locations) and we'll try to respond as quickly as possible and keep you updated on the 'you ask, we search' exercise via this blog.

5.21pm:

An interesting defence of WikiLeaks from the American right. Jack Hunter rounds on fellow conservatives - and those on the left - who have ganged up on the whistleblowing site.

But the worst hypocrisy throughout this controversy has been in conservatives reflexively defending the government and attacking WikiLeaks. Since when have conservatives believed that Washington should be able to shroud any action it likes in secrecy and that revealing government's nefarious deeds is tantamount to treason? Isn't it government officials who might secretly work for corporate, ideological or transnational interests — and against the national interest — who are betraying their country?

5.44pm:

This is for any Portuguese speakers out there. I don't speak it myself but I think I get the drift of what President Lula of Brazil is saying: bravo WikiLeaks.



5.55pm: Ian Black, our Middle East editor, has more on the cyberattacks on a Lebanese paper (11:33). He writes:

Al-Akhbar, the Lebanese paper that has been publishing leaks of selected Wikileaks cables, is still struggling to get back on line after being subject to a paralysing cyber-attack by anonymous hackers. Users today found only a link to a shimmering pink Saudi girl chat room site.

The leftist, pro-Hizbullah Beirut daily secured a Middle East scoop by somehow obtaining several hundred secret cables sent from US embassies in eight Arab capitals - though not, curiously, from nearby Damascus. The Lebanese revelations have confirmed suspicions about the country's ever-volatile politics and triggered some embarrassed denials from government ministers from the western-backed March 14 movement. The website was blocked for Tunisian users earlier this week after printing a warts-and-all description of the corruption of President Ben Ali's family.

"This is the first time any newspaper in the Arab world has been subject to such an intensive attack," its publisher Hassan Khalil told me. "Al-Akhbar is trying to set an example for the rest of the Middle East but in Lebanon we have no legal protection."

But Khalil refused to be drawn on who might be behind the cyber-assault. "This is not the work of a geek sitting in his bedroom," he says. "This is a professional job"

6.05pm:

John Pilger, the campaigning journalist, and others have written a letter to the Guardian in support of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.

We protest at the attacks on Wikileaks and, in particular, on Julian Assange (Report, 9 December) The leaks have assisted democracy in revealing the real views of our governments over a range of issues which have been kept secret and are now irreversibly in the public domain. All we knew about the mass killing, torture and corruption in Iraq and Afghanistan has been confirmed. The world's leaders can no longer hide the truth by simply lying to the public. The lies have been exposed. The actions of major corporations such as Amazon, the Swiss banks and the credit card companies in hindering Wikileaks, are shameful, bowing to US government pressure. The US government and its allies, and their friends in the media, have built up a campaign against Assange which now sees him in prison facing extradition on dubious charges, with the presumed eventual aim of ensuring his extradition to the US. We demand his immediate release, the dropping of all charges, and an end to the censorship of Wikileaks.

John Pilger, Lindsey German Stop the War Coalition, Salma Yaqoob, Craig Murray, Alexei Sayle, Mark Thomas, Caryl Churchill, AL Kennedy, Celia Mitchell, Ben Griffin (former soldier), Terry Jones, Sami Ramadani, Roger Lloyd Pack, David Gentleman, Miriam Margolyes, Andy Delatour, Katharine Hamnett, Iain Banks

6.14pm:

Sky News has this twist to the WikiLeaks saga: Inmates at Wandsworth prison are pushing notes of support under the cell door of Julian Assange.

A source at the prison said, among several notes Mr Assange received, are ones saying: "Hi Julian - good luck," "Sorry you're in here - it's wrong" and "We are one within here - Merry Christmas". Another said: "Dear Julian, welcome to the real Frontline Club," referring to the journalists' club in London where he was staying before his arrest.

6.31pm:

Luke Harding has that full story on Russia making mischief by suggesting Assange be awarded the Nobel peace prize. Meanwhile, the Russian strongman, Vladimir Putin (referred to as an "alpha dog" in the leaked cables), has also been sounding off at the US, accusing it of hypocrisy. Reuters reports on his mixed metaphors.

"If it is full democracy, then why have they hidden Mr. Assange in prison? That's what, democracy?" Putin said, in the strongest Russian criticism of the affair. "So, you know, as they say in the countryside, some people's cows can moo, but yours should keep quiet. So I would like to shoot the puck back at our American colleagues," Putin said at a briefing with his French counterpart Francois Fillon.

6.40pm:

Minerva7 has posted this suggestion for raising money for WikiLeaks.

Arrange a cake meeting (or a soup meeting), with for example £10 or $10 entrance fee and donate the money to Wikileaks. The arranger of the cake meeting offers cakes and sweets, while the guests spend the evening discussing Wikileaks and talking for example about how it works, what they have achieved so far, the present situation, what is possible to do etc. End the meeting by donating the cash to Wikileaks via one of the options on the Wikileaks homepage. I'm just about to arrange my first cake meeting myself... Spread the idea, and invite your friends.

6.51pm:

Mike Melanson at ReadWriteWeb has this tidbit about Wikipedia's less than fraternal relations with WikiLeaks.

One thing that keeps Wikileaks going, however, is the simple fact that it has hundreds of mirror sites in different languages and locales. One such listing of these sites hosted on name-in-kind service Wikipedia has been deleted by the collaborative encyclopedia's editors. Should we cry "Foul!" or is the deletion just more business as usual for the site?

6.57pm:

Josh Halliday has this on the arrest of a teenager in connection with the internet attacks on Visa and Mastercard.

Josh Halliday. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

A 16-year-old Dutch boy was today arrested on suspicion of being involved in the 1,000-strong group targeting internet attacks against Visa and Mastercard. The international credit cards are being targeted by a group of online activists protesting against their decision earlier this week to halt donations to the whistleblowing site. In a statement, the national prosecutors' office said the youth – whose name was not released – is believed to have participated in attacks by WikiLeaks supporters on websites "including MasterCard and Paypal, among others." Talk inside the internet backchannels, where many of these activists are discussing targets, immediately turned to the possibility of attacking the Dutch police's website, according to a source. In the past 24 hours, the Anonymous group behind most of the attacks has brought down sites belonging to the Swedish government and its prosecution agency, following the arrest warrant issued by the country for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

7.19pm:

The latest from the indefatigable Josh Halliday - before he heads home - at the goings-on at Anonymous.

Josh Halliday. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

In the name of true democracy, Anonymous is now carrying out an online poll among its supporters over which website it should target next. Sarah Palin's site, Mastercard, Visa, the US senate and Authorize.net, are the "most discussed options", according to the group. At present – and the vote has been live less than an hour – the crowd is split between Mastercard (44 votes out of 139) and the US senate (43 votes). Another attack on Visa is the least popular option. "We can either hit a new target, or strike even more panic by re-attacking an easy target again that is easy to take down. Either way the media will spread the news," the group says. Amazon, it says, is not listed because there are "not enough bots yet". Presumably, that means the earlier splintering of the group – when it couldn't decide whether to bomb Amazon or Paypal – lost it some momentum. We could link to the poll but as DDoS attacks are illegal under the Police & Justice Act 2006, we won't be doing that in a hurry.

7.23pm:

The 'you ask, we search' exercise announced earlier by Alan Rusbridger continues to generate some fascinating ideas for mining the US embassy cables. Nearly 500 messages have been received since lunchtime, and the volume is picking up again fast this evening. So far, we have whittled these down to around 100 promising leads for further investigation, throwing up references on everything from rendition flights and economic predictions for Ireland to mentions of David Beckham and Roman Polanski. We have a small team of journalists running the suggestions through the database looking for relevant cables and will report back on the findings over the next few days. The best way to alert us to ideas is on Twitter by messaging @gdncables. Twitter refuseniks can post on the thread below (not ideal, but we'll try to keep up) and we will continue the exercise in a blog tomorrow.

7.33pm:

Greg Mitchell in New York tweets that the book of Wiki cables on sale at Amazon is now #73 in its UK Kindle store.

8.02pm:

If you want variety try the New York Times' live blog of this saga, The Lede. Invariably, we cover some of the same material - the Lula video is a case in point.

8.14pm:

The Guardian's latest batch of WikiLeaks stories will appear around 9.30pm just in case you're wondering. In the meatime, I'm nipping off to our canteen.

9.12pm:

Greg Mitchell who is blogging at the Nation magazine in New York notes that the page for that book of Wiki cables is now offline. Amazon UK had been selling in its Kindle store - it ranked #73. "Whether it got hacked or Amazon pulled the book we don't know," says Mitchell.

9.30pm:

In case you want to know about the ructions during the tuition fees protest, that live blog is up and running again amid reports that Prince Charles's car, which was driving along Regent street, was attacked by a crowd of protesters. Camilla was in the car too. Once you're up to date with the protests you can come back here for those new Guardian WikiLeaks stories. Coming any moment now.

9.47pm:

Here are the latest WikiLeaks stories from the Guardian. And with that it's goodnight from me. Matthew Weaver will be back here tomorrow morning for the fallout. Thanks for all the comments.

Pfizer hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in order to persuade him to drop legal action over a controversial drug trial involving children with meningitis, according to a leaked US embassy cable.

The US fears that Europe will cave in to Serb pressure for Kosovo to be partitioned in a move which diplomats warn could trigger ethnic violence.

Russia may be withholding vital information about the whereabouts of the fugitive Serb general and genocide suspect Ratko Mladic.

Former prime minister Ivo Sanander has fled Croatia ahead of the release of cables accusing him of involvement in several corruption cases. US diplomats say prosecutors have evidence of him taking kickbacks.

Witnesses in Burma claim to have seen evidence of secret nuclear and missile sites being built in remote jungle, according to secret US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.

China is losing patience with the Burmese junta over its failure to implement political reforms. But the US is also scathing of the "sclerotic leadership" of the opposition.

Hosni Mubarak, the long-time leader of Egypt, is likely to seek re-election next year and will inevitably win, the US ambassador predicted in a secret cable last year. She said Mubarak, 82, is likely to die in office.

Venezuela is being forced to seek deals with foreign companies to save the ailing economy as the oil industry - which is officially thriving - falters. Cables also dismiss Hugo Chavez's nuclear ambitions as 'empty bluster'.