Ecuador has cut Julian Assange’s communications with the outside world from its London embassy, where the founder of the whistleblowing WikiLeaks website has been living for nearly six years.

The Ecuadorian government said in statement that it had acted because Assange had breached “a written commitment made to the government at the end of 2017 not to issue messages that might interfere with other states”. It said Assange’s recent behaviour on social media “put at risk the good relations [Ecuador] maintains with the United Kingdom, with the other states of the European Union, and with other nations”. 

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. 

Mr Assange has claimed asylum in the embassy since June 2012 against his removal to Sweden, where he is now. The British taxpayer has footed a bill of £10 million and rising to police the Ecuadorian embassy where the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is avoiding extradition over sex crime allegations.

His presence in the embassy means the Metropolitan Police has been forced to post a round-the-clock detail of officers to arrest Julian Assange should he leave the building in Knightsbridge. Meaning the total estimated cost including a further three months of cover is now thought to have reached millions of dollars.

WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange tells influential Internet giant ‘works for US government’. The event was organized to promote When Google Met WikiLeaks, a book in which Assange retells the story of how he met Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt.

The governments of the USA and the UK launched a furious campaign behind the scenes to do everything in their power to halt the publication of the cables, moves that were subsequently reported in the international press. WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of US State Department “diplomatic cables” that caused huge embarrassment in the White House.

Wikileaking embassy-stayer has accused Google of being born bad and getting badder as it grew. We know how Assange feels about Google, and we know how Google feels about Assange.

The WikiLeaks man, writing in a new book, entitled When Google Met WikiLeaks, says that Google is an evil, bad, government sanctioned and supporting blight on the internet. Google says that Assange is paranoid. Assange seems to have more muck to throw around, though, and accuses Google of being something of a state puppet that is possibly dangling from the arm of Hillary Clinton. He reckons that Clinton punked him through Schmidt and bagged a couple of State-suits a free lunch on his tab. 

Julian Assange has transcended the confinement of his Ecuadorian embassy asylum to attend the 2014 Nantucket Project – as a hologram. In his ghostly entirety Assange was speaking about censorship, control and manipulation of history. 

Speaking with filmmaker Eugene Jarecki, Assange closed the 2014 event, sharing his thoughts on importance of research and free access to information, and risks of censorship. “As a researcher, I'm all too well aware of what people are now calling Google blindness, that the information you can’t find on the Internet doesn’t exist,” Assange said, not missing a chance to take on the corporation and call it a “revolving door” of NSA and close partner of the US Government.