WikiLeaks about to hit the fan

Have they stopped publishing cables since the arrest?

I came to think of Julian Assange as a character from a Stieg Larsson thriller — a man who could figure either as hero or villain in one of the megaselling Swedish novels that mix hacker counterculture, high-level conspiracy and sex as both recreation and violation.

JPB wrote:

Have they stopped publishing cables since the arrest?

No. At least not here in Europe.

Are you referring to this morning's arrest of five hackers in the U.K.?

two days before Thanksgiving, Baquet and two colleagues were invited to a windowless room at the State Department, where they encountered an unsmiling crowd. Representatives from the White House, the State Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency, the F.B.I. and the Pentagon gathered around a conference table. Others, who never identified themselves, lined the walls. A solitary note-taker tapped away on a computer.

The meeting was off the record, but it is fair to say the mood was tense. Scott Shane, one reporter who participated in the meeting, described “an undertone of suppressed outrage and frustration.”

Subsequent meetings, which soon gave way to daily conference calls, were more businesslike. Before each discussion, our Washington bureau sent over a batch of specific cables that we intended to use in the coming days. They were circulated to regional specialists, who funneled their reactions to a small group at State, who came to our daily conversations with a list of priorities and arguments to back them up. We relayed the government’s concerns, and our own decisions regarding them, to the other news outlets.

The administration’s concerns generally fell into three categories. First was the importance of protecting individuals who had spoken candidly to American diplomats in oppressive countries. We almost always agreed on those and were grateful to the government for pointing out some we overlooked.

As 2010 wound down, The Times and its news partners held a conference call to discuss where we go from here. The initial surge of articles drawn from the secret cables was over. More would trickle out but without a fixed schedule.

Whispering at Autocrats
In one fell swoop, the candor of the cables released by WikiLeaks did more for Arab democracy than decades of backstage U.S. diplomacy.

Full article...

Secrecy in a WikiLeaks world
(By David Ignatius, Washington Post Blog, January 28, 2011)

Transparency is part of the Davos version of “political correctness.” But so is protection of intellectual property to spur innovation. The two values came into conflict Wednesday night in a discussion of issues raised by the WikiLeaks disclosure of classified information.

The near-consensus (which is as close as you get in this debating society) was that government and business must keep some secrets if they hope to encourage creativity and risk-taking. The challenge is to narrow this roster of secrets to the minimum necessary—and to operate your company or agency ethically enough that, even if WikiLeaks should somehow get its hands on the sensitive information, it wouldn’t cause a scandal.

The debate came at a Davos dinner session that was off the record, so I can’t tell you who said what. But it was the mix of top business executives, NGO leaders, professors and journalists that attend most of the sessions here. The group also included a man (not Julian Assange, I should stress) who said he had worked with WikiLeaks on the dissemination of information.

A telling point for me was that in a WikiLeaks world, it’s essential to narrow the gap between what you say in public and private, since a leaked document may reveal any differences. An American professor observed that the reason the U.S. government had not been attacked after the latest disclosures was that the cables showed State Department officials expressing privately pretty much the same views that were publicly debated in America. The problems came for the governments described in the cables—a Tunisia that was concealing official corruption, a Saudi Arabia that was privately urging an attack on Iran while it was publicly mum.

The group discussed the overuse of secrecy—and the way that wrongdoers hide behind it. One telling example involved the U.S. helicopter pilots in Iraq who were captured on a tape revealed several years ago by WiliLeaks chatting calmly as they fired at what proved to be a TV camera crew. They talked (and fired) so freely on the assumption that their actions would never be public.

But the take-away from this discussion, for me, was the contrarian point that too much openness chills debate, free-thinking and entrepreneurship. Participants cited examples where diplomats, bankers and business executives had been less frank and effective in the post-WikiLeaks world. That’s what happens when people fear their sensitive views may be disclosed: They get over-cautious.

So the Davos recipe here, as in most things, would be balance. Protect the secrets that matter, while preparing for the possibility that they could come out anyway. We live in an era when one should assume that life is “on the record,” even if some Davos discussions remain on background.

WikiLeaks cables show close US relationship with Egyptian president Secret US embassy cables sent from Cairo in the past two years reveal that the Obama administration wanted to maintain a close political and military relationship with the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, who is now facing a popular uprising.

A frank briefing note in May 2009 ahead of Mubarak's trip to Washington, leaked by WikiLeaks, reported that the Egyptian president had a dismal opinion of Obama's predecessor, George Bush.

"The Egyptians want the visit to demonstrate that Egypt remains America's 'indispensable Arab ally', and that bilateral tensions have abated. President Mubarak is the proud leader of a proud nation ...


Another cable, dated 23 February 2009, described a meeting between Gamal and the maverick US senator Joe Lieberman. Lieberman is said to have listened as the president's son expounded on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Iran's growing regional influence and how Saddam Hussein – for all his flaws – was a bulwark against Iranian ambitions.

Another cable, from March 2009, shows the US's astonishingly intimate military relationship with Egypt. Washington provides Cairo $1.3bn annually in foreign military finance (FMF) to purchase US weapons and defence equipment, and the cable said. "President Mubarak and military leaders view our military assistance programme as the cornerstone of our mil-mil relationship and consider the $1.3bn in annual FMF as 'untouchable compensation' for making and maintaining peace with Israel.

"The tangible benefits to our mil-mil relationship are clear: Egypt remains at peace with Israel, and the US military enjoys priority access to the Suez canal and Egyptian airspace." Source

Pro-WikiLeaks hacker crackdowns continue, FBI executes 40 search warrants
(Matt Hartley, Financial Times, January 28, 2011)

The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States has executed more than 40 search warrants across the country yesterday as part of an investigation into a sereis of cyber attacks last year that targeted financial institutions and Websites executed by Internet activists loyal to WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.

According to a report from Reuters, the FBI carried out the searches on Thursday, the same day police in the United Kingdom arrested five young men for their connection to the “distributed denial of service” DDoS attacks carried out last year against major credit card companies such as Visa and Mastercard as well as online firms Amazon.com Inc. and PayPal Inc.

“The arrests were related to recent ‘distributed denial of service’ (DDoS) attacks by an online group calling themselves Anonymous,” London police said in a statement.

The cyber attacks, which were carried out by Internet activists loyal to the group Anonymous, occurred in early December of last year in support of the whistle-blowing Website WikiLeaks following the release of thousands of pages of sensitive U.S. diplomatic cable and military documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. After the documents were released, several U.S. based companies — including Amazon and PayPal — severed their relationships with WikiLeaks, hindering the group’s ability to raise funds and stay online.

Anonymous, which claims to support WikiLeaks but says it is not directly affiliated with the site or Mr. Assange, executed Operation Payback against several companies, including Visa, Mastercard and others. Using freely available online software, the hackers carried out a series of DDoS attacks which work by sending an inordinate number of access requests to a given website until it is overwhelmed and shuts down, successfully disabling the main online portals of the companies without interrupting their payment processing abilities.

The FBI said there are other “unspecified investigative and enforcement actions” taking place in the Netherlands, Germany and France, according to Reuters.

The American Embassy in Cairo helped a young dissident attend a US-sponsored summit for activists in New York, while working to keep his identity secret from Egyptian state police.

On his return to Cairo in December 2008, the activist told US diplomats that an alliance of opposition groups had drawn up a plan to overthrow President Hosni Mubarak and install a democratic government in 2011.

The secret document in full

He has already been arrested by Egyptian security in connection with the demonstrations and his identity is being protected by The Daily Telegraph. Daily Telegraph

The US government has previously been a supporter of Mr Mubarak’s regime. But the leaked documents show the extent to which America was offering support to pro-democracy activists in Egypt while publicly praising Mr Mubarak as an important ally in the Middle East.

In a secret diplomatic dispatch, sent on December 30 2008, Margaret Scobey, the US Ambassador to Cairo, recorded that opposition groups had allegedly drawn up secret plans for “regime change” to take place before elections, scheduled for September this year.

The memo, which Ambassador Scobey sent to the US Secretary of State in Washington DC, was marked “confidential” and headed: “April 6 activist on his US visit and regime change in Egypt.”

It said the activist claimed “several opposition forces” had “agreed to support an unwritten plan for a transition to a parliamentary democracy, involving a weakened presidency and an empowered prime minister and parliament, before the scheduled 2011 presidential elections”. The embassy’s source said the plan was “so sensitive it cannot be written down”.

Ambassador Scobey questioned whether such an “unrealistic” plot could work, or ever even existed. However, the documents showed that the activist had been approached by US diplomats and received extensive support for his pro-democracy campaign from officials in Washington. The embassy helped the campaigner attend a “summit” for youth activists in New York, which was organised by the US State Department.