Federal prosecutors are weighing whether to bring criminal charges against members of the WikiLeaks organization, taking a second look at a 2010 leak of diplomatic cables and military documents and investigating whether the group bears criminal responsibility for the more recent revelation of sensitive CIA cyber-tools.

The Justice Department under President Barack Obama decided not to charge WikiLeaks for revealing some of the government’s most sensitive secrets — concluding that doing so would be akin to prosecuting a news organization for publishing classified information.

The US intelligence agencies are facing fresh embarrassment after WikiLeaks published what it described as the biggest ever leak of confidential documents from the CIA detailing the tools it uses to break into phones, apps and other electronic devices.

The thousands of leaked documents focus mainly on techniques for hacking and reveal how the CIA cooperated with British intelligence to engineer a way to compromise smart televisions and turn them into improvised surveillance devices. The leak will once again raise questions about the inability of US spy agencies to protect secret documents in the digital age.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange advised journalists to use the regular postal service instead of email to avoid government surveillance, while talking about how to protect information sources and whistleblowers in an interview.

“Journalists are treated by intelligence services as spies,” Assange told. He also suggested other methods to avoid spying and protect confidentiality, such as meeting with the sources at conferences. He claimed that, although improvements in both legislation and technologies were needed to improve protection for whistleblowers, the latter still played a greater role.

The US National Security Agency spied on French Presidents in 2006-12, Wikileaks says. The whistleblower website cites top secret intelligence reports and technical documents from the NSA.

A French official said spying between allies was unacceptable. The US would not confirm the veracity of the documents. In 2013 the NSA was accused of spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Wikileaks said it began publishing the files under the heading "Espionnage Elysee" - a reference to the French presidential palace. It said the secret files derive from directly targeted NSA surveillance of the communications of the three French presidents.

WikiLeaks has republished the Sony data from last year’s hacking scandal, making all the documents and emails “fully searchable” with a Google-style search engine. The move provides much easier access to the stolen information.

The hacked Sony documents were originally not much more than hard-drive images converted into common compressed file formats, meaning that anyone curious about the information could download it from a filesharing service like BitTorrent. But, if interested in company emails or financial data, users needed to wade through spreadsheet-like directory trees. 

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange equated Google with the National Security Agency and GCHQ, saying the tech giant has become “a privatized version of the NSA,” as it collects, stores, and indexes people’s data.

“Google’s business model is the spy. It makes more than 80 percent of its money by collecting information about people, pooling it together, storing it, indexing it, building profiles of people to predict their interests and behavior, and then selling those profiles principally to advertisers, but also others,” Assange told. “So the result is that Google, in terms of how it works, its actual practice, is almost identical to the National Security Agency or GCHQ,” the whistleblower argued.

Recently, the files of FinFisher, a set of malicious programs for monitoring the users‘ activities, have become available on the Wikileaks website. It can be found with the help of some antiviruses. 

The founder of FinFisher is the German company, which is engaged in information security products development, such as exploits, Trojans for Windows, Android, iOS, Linux and other known platforms. In 2011 Wikileaks published information on such a development, and since that moment Julian Assange with his employees are watching for FinSpy activity for all time and sometimes they publish new data for the SpyFiles program.

"I can confirm I will be leaving the embassy soon", Julian Assange told a press-conference in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

But that would not be for reasons of health. He also said he would not hand himself over to the British police. The Wikileaks whistleblower repeated his protestations of innocence over claims made against him in Sweden over allegations of rape. The Wikileaks founder said he had not been charged with anything in Sweden or the UK and that the basis of his asylum was the US Justice Department's bid to charge him with espionage. For two years, Julian Assange has remained inside the white painted rooms of Ecuador’s embassy in London. 

As WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange marks his 777th day in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, the Metropolitan Police has spent over $11.8 million on guarding the embassy.

Assange has been detained without charge for 1,337 days – and 777 of those days have been spent in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, according to the latest WikiLeaks statement. Meanwhile, the price tag for guarding Assange hit over seven million British pounds (US$11.8 million) early on Wednesday, according to govwaste.co.uk counter. Officers have been staking out the embassy around the clock since June 2012, with the cost to the London taxpayers surpassing $15,000 per day.