Russia’s FSB to WikiLeaks: We could destroy you

Russia’s internal security service, the FSB, seems to be taking WikiLeaks’ threat to spill dirt on the Kremlin pretty seriously, according to Russia Profile:

Preliminary analysis shows that there is no threat posed to Russia by Julian Assange’s resource. You have to understand that if there is the desire and the right team, it’s possible to shut it down forever," an expert from the FSB’s Center for Information Security was quoted by Life News as saying on Tuesday. Links between hacker cells and the FSB made in the past lend credence to this thinly veiled secret services threat. In his recent book on Russia’s secret services, investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov details how the Russian FSB "maintain a sophisticated alliance with unofficial hackers, such as those who carry out cyber attacks on the Web sites of enemies of the state," drawing attention to hacker forums such as Informacia.ru.

Another interesting wrinkle of this story is Assange’s claim that he’s receiving help in his Russia investigations from "the Americans." Inferring right off the bat that he’s getting help from U.S. intelligence — I’m not saying he is but that’s certainly the inference that will be drawn in Russia — would seem to undercut the validity of his documents right off the bat. If Assange has claimed that "the Chinese" helped him in assembling the Iraq war logs it would have changed the story quite a bit.