The "poison pill" is basically the biggest unleash of documents. You can download a file that is on all the torrents that contains ALL the documents that they have received. But you will not be able to open that file because it is heavily encrypted, even the government supercomputers are having a hard time with it. The "pill" is basically the password to open that huge file. So if anything happens to Julian Assange, all Wikileaks needs to do is post that password and then all hell breaks loose.
The US government had this coming to them. They are ordering Paypal, Mastercard, and their server hosts to stop Wikileak's accounts. What happened to the first amendment?
Oh and all those people who say that he is a traitor/terrorist or whatever and needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent, don't realize that he's not a US citizen. You can't just go policing the world, trying to stop whoever says something bad about your government. If the government didn't have such shady business going on, there wouldn't be a need for all these leaks.