Mail corrects Littlejohn column

On 12 July 2011, Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn wrote about the accessing of Milly Dowler's voicemail by the News of the World. In it, he said:

For the life of me, too, I still can’t see the difference between the Screws hacking into voicemails and the Guardian lionising Julian Assange, who hacked into the security services and then published classified details which got people killed.

But if you read the column now, that paragraph now reads:

For the life of me, too, I still can’t see the difference between the Screws hacking into voicemails and the Guardian lionising Julian Assange, whose organisation publishes highly confidential leaked information from security services, publication of which puts people's lives at risk.

A clarification published on Thursday explains why it has changed:

A column on 12 July suggested that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange had hacked into the security services and published information which got people killed.

Mr Assange asks us to clarify that Wikileaks does not itself ‘hack’ but provides a secure facility for anonymous sources to deposit information online.

While the U.S. government has warned that Wikileaks disclosures put lives at risk, no such deaths have to date been reported.