At first glance, ‘Cablegate’ – the mass leaking of US embassy cables to five of the world’s newspapers, including the Guardian here in the UK – might seem a bit of a disappointment to the conspiracy theorist, laying bare the unsurprising duplicity (and bitchiness, one might add) of diplomacy but revealing nothing of grand-scale world-domination plots or evil puppet-masters behind the operations of international diplomacy. The US government's heavy-handed response, however, has provided plenty of grist to the conspiracy mill, while the escalating war between secrecy and transparency must have implications for conspiracy theory’s future.

So far, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have been broadly supported by conspiracy theorists – support that the arrest of Assange and apparent pressure on WikiLeaks from the US government is likely to encourage.