Encrypted mystery file posted to Wikileaks Afghan Diary page

A mystery file with the name "Insurance" has been posted to the web page where earlier this week some 77,000 secret documents about the Afghan war were leaked. The 1.4GB file is ten times larger than all the other files on Wikileaks' Afghan War Diary page combined and is encrypted in AES256.

The file may be "insurance" against an attack on the site by the US Justice or Defence departments, noted a posting at Cryptome, a site that "welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance."

"Wonder if it includes the 15,000 Afghan files withheld, or the original raw files, or perhaps much more," the posting says.

The thinking is should anything happen to Wikileaks' founder Julian Assange or the website, the holder of the key to decrypt the insurance file could post it publically where it could be grabbed by anyone who has downloaded the file and its contents revealed.

Assange said earlier this week that Wikileaks has 15,000 more documents on the war. The possibility that those documents could be released prompted the White House to plead today with the organisation not to make any more Afghan conflict docs public. "We can do nothing but implore the person that has those classified top secret documents not to post any more," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said on NBC's "Today Show."

Meanwhile, the Taliban appears to be carefully combing the documents that have been leaked. "We will investigate through our own secret service whether the people mentioned [in the Wikileaks documents] are really spies working for the US," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told Britain's Channel 4 News. "If they are US spies, then we know how to punish them."