Correction, 9/12/10 – In our Legal Week Daily News Alert of 7 December 2010 a report on Legal Week incorrectly stated that Mark Stephens of Finers Stephens Innocent LLP claimed that he was in possession of an encryption key providing access to unreleased material held by the Wikileaks website and that he would release it should Mr Julian Assange be returned to Sweden. We accept that the allegation is entirely untrue and we are happy to withdraw it. Furthermore, we apologise unreservedly to Mr Stephens.

Finers Stephens Innocent partner Mark Stephens, the lawyer representing WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange, has claimed that members of the "security services" are watching him and that there have been violations of attorney-client privilege, reports The Am Law Daily.

City media lawyer Stephens, who has in the past acted for a raft of high-profile clients including Salman Rushdie, told the BBC: "Because [Assange has] had these huge number of cyber attacks on WikiLeaks… of course the organisation wants to defend itself. At the moment only 261 cables have been released out of 250,000."

When asked whether further information would be used by WikiLeaks as "a kind of threat", Stephens responsed: "They need to protect themselves, and this is I think what they believe to be a thermonuclear device effectively in the electronic age." (Click here to read the transcript of the BBC interview on The Andrew Marr Show)

Assange was this morning (7 December) arrested by the Metropolitan Police Extradition Unit on behalf of the Swedish authorities. He faces charges of one count of unlawful coercion, two of sexual molestation and one of rape, and has been remanded in custody until 14 December after being refused bail.

The arrest follows the publication by WikiLeaks on Monday (6 December) of a list of facilities vital to US national security.

Jennifer Robinson, a colleague of Stephens who is assisting on the Assange case, said on Sunday (5 December) that government agents were closely monitoring the two lawyers.

Robinson also accused the US State Department of sending a letter to the legal team suggesting that WikiLeaks and its lawyers were one and the same.

"By eliding client and lawyer, that was a very inappropriate attempt to implicate me," Robinson told The Guardian. "That is really inappropriate to come from the State Department of all places; they understand very well the rules on attorney-client protocol."

The Guardian reports that Robinson and Stephens have requested a public retraction of the letter from the US State Department, but have yet to receive one. Robinson says that the letter violated the United Nation's Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers protecting lawyers from representing their clients against government threats.

The Am Law Daily is a US affiliate title of Legal Week.