Marianne Ny said his arrest warrant was being revoked as it was impossible to serve him notice of his alleged crimes.

Mr Assange, 45, has lived in the Ecuadorean embassy in London since 2012, fearing extradition to Sweden would lead to extradition to the US.

Police in London said they would still be obliged to arrest him if he left.

The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) said Mr Assange still faced the lesser charge of failing to surrender to a court, an offence punishable by up to a year in prison or a fine.

But the UK has not commented on whether it has received an extradition request from the US, where Mr Assange could face trial over the leaking of hundreds of thousands of secret US military and diplomatic documents.

Mr Assange’s Swedish lawyer, Per Samuelson, said the prosecutor’s decision on Friday represented “a total victory” for his client.

The plaintiff in the rape case was “shocked” by the decision, her lawyer said, and maintained her accusations against Mr Assange, Agence France-Presse reported.

‘Focus on UK’

At a press briefing on Friday, Ms Ny said that by remaining in the embassy in London Mr Assange had evaded the exercise of the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) that would have seen him extradited to Sweden.

She said: “According to Swedish legislation, a criminal investigation is to be conducted as quickly as possible. In order to proceed with the case, Julian Assange would have to be formally notified of the criminal suspicions against him.

“We cannot expect to receive assistance from Ecuador regarding this. Therefore the investigation is discontinued.”

But she added: “If he were to return to Sweden before the statute of limitation on this case expires in August 2020, the preliminary investigation could be resumed.”

She said it was “regrettable we have not been able to carry out the investigation”, and added: “We are not making any pronouncement about guilt.”

The rape allegation followed a Wikileaks conference in Stockholm in 2012. Mr Assange always denied the allegations against him, saying sex was consensual.

He also said the case was politically motivated, as it followed massive Wikileaks dumps of secret US military reports that year.

After the news was announced on Friday, Wikileaks tweeted that the “focus now moves to the UK”.

The MPS issued a statement saying that its actions had been based on a response to a “European Arrest Warrant for an extremely serious offence”.

It went on: “Now that the situation has changed and the Swedish authorities have discontinued their investigation into that matter, Mr Assange remains wanted for a much less serious offence. The MPS will provide a level of resourcing which is proportionate to that offence.”

The MPS said it would “not comment further on the operational plan”.

Last month, Mr Samuelson filed a new motion calling for his client’s arrest warrant to be lifted.

He cited a comment by new US Attorney General Jeff Sessions that the arrest of Mr Assange would be “a priority”.

Mr Samuelsson told Agence France-Presse: “This implies that we can now demonstrate that the US has a will to take action… this is why we ask for the arrest warrant to be cancelled so that Julian Assange can fly to Ecuador and enjoy his political asylum.”

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Source: BBC

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The anti-secrecy website has published thousands of the US spy agency’s secret documents, including what it says are the CIA’s hacking tools.

Founder Julian Assange said that, after some thought, he had decided to give the tech community further leaks first.

“Once the material is effectively disarmed, we will publish additional details,” Mr Assange said.

US federal agencies have launched a criminal investigation into the release of the documents.

In response to the revelations, CIA spokeswoman Heather Fritz Horniak told the BBC: “As we’ve said previously, Julian Assange is not exactly a bastion of truth and integrity.

“Despite the efforts of Assange and his ilk, CIA continues to aggressively collect foreign intelligence overseas to protect America from terrorists, hostile nation states and other adversaries.”

Microsoft told the BBC: “We’ve seen Julian Assange’s statement and have not yet been contacted.

“Our preferred method for anyone with knowledge of security issues, including the CIA or Wikileaks, is to submit details to us at [email protected] so we can review information and take any necessary steps to protect customers.”

In the first tranche of leaks, Wikileaks alleged that the CIA had developed what Mr Assange called “a giant arsenal” of malware to attack “all the systems that average people use”.

Tech firms, including Google and Apple, have said that they are developing counter-measures to combat any malware that the CIA may have developed.

Mr Assange said that his organisation had “a lot more information on the cyber-weapons programme”.

He added that while Wikileaks maintained a neutral position on most of its leaks, in this case it did take a strong stance.

“We want to secure communications technology because, without it, journalists aren’t able to hold the state to account,” he said.

Mr Assange also claimed that the intelligence service had known for weeks that Wikileaks had access to the material and done nothing about it.

He also spoke more about the Umbrage programme, revealed in the first leaked documents.

He said that a whole section of the CIA is working on Umbrage, a system that attempts to trick people into thinking that they had been hacked by other groups or countries by collecting malware from other nation states, such as Russia.

“The technology is designed to be unaccountable,” he said.

He claimed that an anti-virus expert, who was not named, had come forward to say that he believed sophisticated malware that he had previously attributed to Iran, Russia and China, now looked like something that the CIA had developed.

“The type of attack system corresponds to a description we published of that attack system unless of course China has already got hold of these parts of the CIA arsenal and is using it to pretend to be the CIA,” said Mr Assange.

He said that the intelligence agency could potentially be causing the tech industry “billions of dollars of damage”.

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Source: BBC

The post Wikileaks is offering tech firms CIA files first appeared first on Citi 97.3 FM - Relevant Radio. Always.