WikiLeaks about to hit the fan

Unredacted Wikileaks Cables Found Online? Probably, Depressingly
(Paul Carr, TechCrunch.com, August 28, 2011)

“Leck bei Wikileaks“. The headline in German-language news weekly, Der Freitag, described the irony with Teutonic efficiency: “Leak at Wikileaks“.

In the story, published on Friday, editor Steffen Kraft claims to have found online a “password protected csv file” containing a 1.73GB cache of entirely unredacted diplomatic cables, originating from Wikileaks. According to Kraft, the password for the file is also easy to locate.

The same day, Wikileaks dumped a large number of cables online and asked its followers to help sift through them. Copies of the files have been in the possession of news organizations like the Guardian, the New York Times and Reuters for months, but this is the first time the documents had been made available to the public. The release came, says chief leaker Julian Assange, because the media has lost interest in the diplomatic revelations as yet unreported. (A cynic might infer that Assange — who remains under house arrest in the UK pending extradition on sexual assault charges — is worried that the media has lost interest in him too.)

But the document found by Der Freitag are not the official Wikileaks files, which have been partly redacted to remove the names of vulnerable sources. Rather it contained thousands of unredacted pages, with ‘named or otherwise identifiable “informers” and “suspected intelligence agents,” from Israel, Jordan, Iran and Afghanistan.’

It’s important to emphasize that Der Freitag hasn’t published hard proof that the unredacted file even exists. But according to Kraft, the found documents include many that have previously been published in censored form. And, to be clear, Der Freitag is not just some rogue German paper: they have a syndication deal with the Guardian (an erst-while Wikileaks partner) making it highly unlikely they’d invent the story out of whole cloth. (Update: Der Spiegel has confirmed the existence of the file.)

So, if the unreadacted files have found their way available online, what are we to make of it? Kraft makes a clear implication that the files might have been leaked by Assanage’s arch-nemesis (and former colleague), Daniel Domscheit-Berg of OpenLeaks. Earlier this week he claimed to have destroyed thousands of unpublished documents before leaving Wikileaks and he’s made no secret of his hatred of his old pal (I’ve written previously about his scummy anti-Assange memoir). Certainly, along with staffers at the Guardian, the New York Times and any of Wikileaks’ growing number of current and former mainstream media partners, Domscheit-Berg is a possible suspect.

In truth, it almost doesn’t matter who is responsible: the eventual release of the unredacted cables was inevitable. The message of Wikileaks — and the amoral cult of leaking for lulz that came in its wake — has always been one of callous contempt for the human cost of “free information”. From Assange’s well-publicised remarks to Guardian reporters that “if [informants] get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.”, to LulSec and Anonymous’ willingness to publish the personal details of anyone even tangentially associated with their ‘enemies’, what we see time and time again from mass-leakers is a sociopath’s disregard for individuals, combined with a Hollywood serial killer’s hunger for attention. Sooner of later — for attention, to make some misguided political point, for the lulz — someone was bound to obtain and leak the raw documents.

As public attention shifted from Wikileaks to Libya or Hurricane Irene or Lady Gaga appearing in the Simpsons, so the leakers must resort to riskier and riskier behavior to get back in the headlines. And so it will be depressingly unsurprising if either side of the Wikileaks-Openleaks skirmish turns out to have gladly sacrificed the odd Afghan tribesman or Iranian civil servant in order to score a cheap point over their rival.

Der Freitag’s headline notwithstanding, there is an even more chilling irony in all of this; and to see it, you have to turn back to the beginning of the Wikileaks story. In 2010 Julian Assange invited the Guardian’s David Leigh to his hotel room to watch a video of an American helicopter allegedly mowing down a Reuter’s journalist. The name of the file was ‘Collateral Murder’, and the public’s outrage at seeing American troops’ apparent disregard for innocent life made Wikileaks — and Assange — a household name. If Der Freitag’s report is accurate, the words “Wikileaks” and “Collateral Murder” might be about to make a reappearance in the headlines. Only this time it won’t be the American military with blood on their hands, but the leakers themselves.

More headaches for US with new WikiLeaks releases
(By MATTHEW LEE, Associated Press, 08.30.11)

The accelerated public disclosure of tens of thousands of previously unreleased State Department cables by the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy organization has raised new concerns about the exposure of confidential U.S. embassy sources and is proving a source of fresh diplomatic setbacks and embarrassment for the Obama administration, current and former American officials said Tuesday.

The Associated Press reviewed more than 2,000 of the cables recently released by Wikileaks. They contained the identities of at least nine sources who had sought protection and whose names the cable authors had asked to protect.

Officials said the disclosure in the past week of more than 125,000 sensitive documents by WikiLeaks, far more than it had earlier published, further endangered informants and jeopardized U.S. foreign policy goals. The officials would not comment on the authenticity of the leaked documents but said the rate and method of the new releases, including about 50,000 in one day alone, presented new complications.

"The United States strongly condemns any illegal disclosure of classified information," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said. "In addition to damaging our diplomatic efforts, it puts individuals' security at risk, threatens our national security and undermines our effort to work with countries to solve shared problems. We remain concerned about these illegal disclosures and about concerns and risks to individuals.

"We continue to carefully monitor what becomes public and to take steps to mitigate the damage to national security and to assist those who may be harmed by these illegal disclosures to the extent that we can," she told reporters.

Neither Nuland nor other current officials would comment on specific information contained in the compromised documents or speculate as to whether any harm caused by the new releases would exceed that caused by the first series of leaks, which began last November and sent the administration into a damage- control frenzy.

Wikileaks crashes under cyberattack

* From: AP
* August 31, 2011 10:20AM/the Australian



THE Wikileaks website, which contains thousands of US embassy cables, has crashed in an apparent cyberattack.

The anti-secrecy organisation said in a Twitter message today that Wikileaks.org "is presently under attack."

Efforts to view the Wikileaks site and view links to cables were unsuccessful.

The apparent cyberattack comes as the accelerated public disclosure of tens of thousands of previously unreleased State Department cables by the WikiLeaks organization has raised new concerns about the exposure of confidential U.S. embassy sources. That has created a fresh source of diplomatic setbacks and embarrassment for the Obama administration, current and former American officials said Tuesday.

MORE TO COME

The apparent cyberattack comes after current and former American officials said the recently released cables - and concerns over the protection of sources - are creating a fresh source of diplomatic setbacks and embarrassment for the Obama administration.

The Associated Press reviewed more than 2,000 of the cables recently released by WikiLeaks. They contained the identities of more than 90 sources who had sought protection and whose names the cable authors had asked to protect.

Officials said the disclosure in the past week of more than 125,000 sensitive documents by WikiLeaks, far more than it had earlier published, further endangered informants and jeopardized U.S. foreign policy goals. The officials would not comment on the authenticity of the leaked documents but said the rate and method of the new releases, including about 50,000 in one day alone, presented new complications.

"The United States strongly condemns any illegal disclosure of classified information," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said. "In addition to damaging our diplomatic efforts, it puts individuals' security at risk, threatens our national security and undermines our effort to work with countries to solve shared problems. We remain concerned about these illegal disclosures and about concerns and risks to individuals.

"We continue to carefully monitor what becomes public and to take steps to mitigate the damage to national security and to assist those who may be harmed by these illegal disclosures to the extent that we can," she told reporters.

Neither Nuland nor other current officials would comment on specific information contained in the compromised documents or speculate as to whether any harm caused by the new releases would exceed that caused by the first series of leaks, which began in November and sent the administration into a damage-control frenzy. ....<cont>

WikiLeaks back online
(TimesLive.com, August 31, 2011)

The group reported on Twitter that its wikileaks.org website was again up and running.

US Internet company everyDNS.net had removed the central address in December, arguing that the WikiLeaks website was coming under massive attacks after it began releasing the cables, many of which revealed sensitive US opinions on foreign leaders.

The move unleashed a wave of sympathy for WikiLeaks, which soon found a new home at a Swiss address, wikileaks.ch. Additionally, more than 1,000 backers made space for the group on their web servers.

US company Dynadot is now the new registrar for wikileaks.org. It is not the first time it has supported the address. This time, it was registered by a California-based Internet user.

And so it will be depressingly unsurprising if either side of the Wikileaks-Openleaks skirmish turns out to have gladly sacrificed the odd Afghan tribesman or Iranian civil servant in order to score a cheap point over their rival.

Officials said the disclosure in the past week of more than 125,000 sensitive documents by WikiLeaks, far more than it had earlier published, ... jeopardized U.S. foreign policy goals.

threatens our national security and undermines our effort to work with countries to solve shared problems.

Wikileaks never bothered me until they started releasing secret diplomatic cables. I believe it is a bad thing to have diplomacy disrupted.

Unredacted US embassy cables available online after WikiLeaks breach
(James Ball, The Guardian, 1 September 2011)

A security breach has led to the WikiLeaks archive of 251,000 secret US diplomatic cables being made available online, without redaction to protect sources.

WikiLeaks has been releasing the cables over nine months by partnering with mainstream media organisations.

Selected cables have been published without sensitive information that could lead to the identification of informants or other at-risk individuals. The US government warned last year that such a release could lead to US informants, human rights activists and others being placed at risk of harm or detention.

A Twitter user has now published a link to the full, unredacted database of embassy cables. The Twitter user is believed to have found the information after acting on hints published in several media outlets and on the WikiLeaks Twitter feed, all of which cited a member of rival whistleblowing website OpenLeaks as the original source of the tipoffs.

The Guardian, New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais were the first five news organisations to publish stories based on the documents, allegedly leaked by US soldier Bradley Manning, in December 2010.

WikiLeaks published a statement blaming the documents' release on the Guardian's book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, by investigations editor David Leigh and Luke Harding, published in February 2011.

A statement released on WikiLeaks' official Twitter feed alleged: "A Guardian journalist has, in a previously undetected act of gross negligence or malice, and in violation of a signed security agreement with the Guardian's editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, disclosed top secret decryption passwords to the entire, unredacted, WikiLeaks Cablegate archive. We have already spoken to the state department and commenced pre-litigation action. We will issue a formal statement in due course." The Guardian denies WikiLeaks' allegations.

The embassy cables were shared with the Guardian through a secure server online for a period of hours, after which the server was taken offline and all files removed, as was previously agreed by both parties. Such practice is considered a basic security precaution when handling files of such sensitivity.

However, unknown to anyone at the Guardian, the same file with the same password was republished at a later stage on BitTorrent, a network typically used to distribute films and music. This file's contents were never publicised, nor was it linked online to WikiLeaks in any way.

The Guardian denied any charges of complicity in the release of the unredacted US embassy cables: "It's nonsense to suggest the Guardian's WikiLeaks book has compromised security in any way. Our book about WikiLeaks was published last February. It contained a password, but no details of the location of the files, and we were told it was a temporary password which would expire and be deleted in a matter of hours.

"It was a meaningless piece of information to anyone except the person(s) who created the database. No concerns were expressed when the book was published and if anyone at WikiLeaks had thought this compromised security they have had seven months to remove the files. That they didn't do so clearly shows the problem was not caused by the Guardian's book."

WikiLeaks suffers major breach, prompting accusations and a theory on what went wrong
(By Jason Ukman, The Washington Post, September 1, 2011)

The full, unredacted versions of more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables are floating around online after the security of a WikiLeaks database was compromised.

Thousands of the cables had previously been published, but many of those cables had been carefully redacted to protect the names of individuals who consulted with American diplomats and who could, U.S. officials said, be put at risk in their home countries if their involvement with the Americans became known.

In a lengthy message posted online late Wednesday, WikiLeaks accused the Guardian of causing the leak, saying that one of the newspaper’s investigative reporters “negligently disclosed” a decryption password in a book about the group and its founder, Julian Assange.

The Guardian, in a statement, dismissed the allegations, pointing out that the book was published last February.

“It contained a password, but no details of the location of the files, and we were told it was a temporary password which would expire and be deleted in a matter of hours,” the paper said in a statement.

The truth, according to a long, detailed account in the German daily Der Spiegel on Thursday morning, might lie somewhere in between WikiLeaks’ account and the Guardian’s.

Der Spiegel was also among the first news organizations to acquire the cables last year, and as a result, claims to know exactly how “a series of mistakes made by several different people” add up to “a catastrophe.”

According to the account, those people include not only Assange and Guardian reporter David Leigh, but also the head of a breakaway faction of WikiLeaks, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who took a dataset off a WikiLeaks server that, unknown to him, included the cables.

Assange should have removed the dataset from the server, Der Spiegel suggests, but apparently failed to do so.

From there, the tale gets even more tangled after WikiLeaks disseminated a compressed version of the dataset using a file-sharing program known as BitTorrent. Says Der Spiegel:

BitTorrent is decentralized. Data which ends up on several other computers via the site can essentially no longer be recalled. As a result, WikiLeaks supporters had in their possession the entire dataset that Domscheit-Berg took off the WikiLeaks server, including the hidden data file. Presumably thousands of WikiLeaks sympathizers -- and, one supposes, numerous secret service agents -- now had copies of all previous WikiLeaks publications on their hard drives.

At that point, it was only a matter of time before a user realized that the dataset included the cables.

And while the data remained encrypted, they could be decrypted with the password.

That password could be found in the Guardian’s book.

Leigh, the Guardian reporter, asserted that he did nothing wrong.

“What we published ... in our book was obsolete and harmless,” he told the Associated Press in an e-mail. “We did not disclose the URL where the file was located, and in any event, Assange had told us it would no longer exist.”

In its statement, WikiLeaks claims Leigh’s decision was a violation of an agreement with the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger.

In its Twitter feed, the group asked supporters whether it should release all the cables itself at this point, making it easier for them to be found.

US says not cooperating with WikiLeaks
(MATTHEW LEE, The Associated Press, September 1, 2011)

The U.S. State Department said Thursday that WikiLeaks did inform it of the impending release of hundreds of thousands of sensitive diplomatic cables but stressed that it was in no way cooperating with the anti-secrecy group whose actions it said threatened national security and the safety of confidential informants.

Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said the group had told the department it intended to continue to release classified documents over the strenuous objections of the United States.

"We have made clear our views and concerns about illegally disclosed classified information and the continuing risk to individuals and national security that such releases cause," Nuland told reporters accompanying Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to an international conference on Libya in Paris.

"Wikileaks has, however, ignored our requests not to release or disseminate any U.S. documents it may possess and has continued its well-established pattern of irresponsible, reckless, and frankly dangerous actions," she said. "We are not cooperating with them."

WikiLeaks said Thursday that its massive archive of unredacted U.S. State Department cables had been exposed in a security breach which it blamed on its one-time partner, Britain's Guardian newspaper. It said it had warned the State Department about the breach.

"Wikileaks has, however, ignored our requests not to release or disseminate any U.S. documents it may possess and has continued its well-established pattern of irresponsible, reckless, and frankly dangerous actions," she said. "We are not cooperating with them.

We've got our own way more well-established pattern of irresponsible, reckless, and dangerous actions to be concerned about. It's tough trying to decide which country to plunder, which people to kill, figuring new methods of torture doesn't just happen like that you know."