a file -- there would be a secure connection between WikiLeaks and Leigh and this time WikiLeaks would know that Leigh was the one downloading the file. Nobody else could log in to that file, and nobody could snoop the HTTP traffic between WikiLeaks and Leigh. Importantly, it would have been a temporary password , as Leigh believed. Once Leigh finished downloading the file, WikiLeaks would permanently delete it, ensuring that the password was now useless. In hindsight, perhaps this would have been a better idea (but once again, Assange would have to have predicted that Leigh would be stupid enough to disclose the passphrase). It's a reasonable solution, but has a few technical flaws. Firstly, you have to assume that WikiLeaks is set up with server software that handles authenticated file downloads. Such software is readily available as open source, but takes time to set up and understand its security implications. Also, no software is perfect, and such programs are commonly found to have security flaws which let the wrong person log in. So it would have been more dangerous to trust such software. (PGP, on the other hand, isn't being used for authentication, but for encryption -- there is no software bug that would let someone without the passphrase decrypt the file, since the passphrase is mathematically required to decrypt it.) Secondly, we would have to assume that the connection to the server and Leigh's client were secure. SSL has a number of well-known vulnerabilities which make it