WikiLeaks about to hit the fan

What do I need to comment on?

you so thoroughly cut and paste into every thread

I've not defended any of the US actions

I've agreed that exposed crimes deserve investigation and even prosecution.

The rage and the WikiLeaks fever
(Femi Fani-Kayode, TrueColour Magazine, Opinion Essay, September 12, 2011)

The fever that is raging in Nigeria today is "wikileaks". Yet as entertaining as these secret communications are the truth is that if you believe everything that you read in Julian Assange's "leaks" then you will believe anything. I say this based on my own personal experiences. So far I have been fingered twice by them and in both cases I can assure you that the stories were fabrications. They simply never happened.

The first story (which was published in an internet magazine called "Nigerians Abroad" with WikiLeaks as it's source) claimed that I had lunch with my father and traditional ruler his Royal Majesty the Ooni of Ife, his son Prince Tokunboh Sijuwade and the then American Ambassador to Nigeria Mr. John Campbell in the Ooni's home in Lagos and that at that lunch we collectively "begged" the Americans to support President Olusegun Obasanjo's bid for a third term in office. Yet the truth is that this NEVER happened. The four of us NEVER had lunch together in Lagos or anywhere else at any point in time and we never had any other sort of meeting throughout the four years that I was in government, let alone discuss "third term".

If there was ever any meeting between the Ooni of Ife, Tokunboh Sijuwade and John Campbell I was certainly not there but I assure you that even if such a meeting between the three of them ever took place the Ooni of Ife, being one of the most revered and respected traditional rulers in Nigeria, would never "beg" anyone for anything, least of all the Ambassador of a foreign nation. If anyone doubts my assertion that the four of us never met I challenge them to ask the Ooni himself or Tokunbo Sijuwade. The second story was that I had a Virgin Nigeria airport manager beaten up by 6 state security officers when I was Minister of Aviation because he would not delay a flight for a Presidential aide.

They also said that I had the Virgin Airlines V1P lounge at Murtala Mohammed International Airport ransacked by "basebat wielding" security men because I wanted the lounge closed down. Again these events NEVER happened. As a matter of fact I was the one that approved the VIP lounge for Virgin at the international wing of the airport when I was Minister of Aviation and they continued to function there smoothly for over a year after I left office. Yet even though this was all bunkum this ridiculous story was recently published in a hitherto respected medium like Rupert Murdoch's Times of London which quoted wikileaks as their source of information.

I have of course briefed my UK lawyers and I intend to sue the Times who did not deem it fit to ask for my side of the story before going to press and publishing this falsehood. They will now be compelled by a British court of law to prove that these events actually took place. Again if anyone doubts my assertion that neither of these two incidents with Virgin EVER took place when I was Minister of Aviation they should reach Sir Richard Branson, the Chairman of Virgin or John Adebanjo, his representative in Nigeria, and ask them. They should also get the name of the Virgin Airline manager that was allegedly "beaten up" and tortured by state security operatives on my orders, get the names and description of the officers that did the beating, tell us exactly what location, what time, what day, what month and what year this event took place and finally get the assaulted and tortured manager himself and the former Managing Director of Virgin Nigeria to give a press conference and tell us exactly what happened. The problem is that Nigerians always like to assume the worst about their leaders but when it comes to allegations that appear in WikiLeaks we have to be very careful and far more circumspect.

This is because simply because an event was reported to have happened by a low ranking American embassy official, the Consul-General or the Ambassador himself does not always mean that it is true. They are human beings as well and not angels and sometimes they embellish stories, fabricate lies, exaggerate events, sensationalise discussions or just base their reports on fake stories and idle gossip that they have been fed by their desperate, ever-ready and ever-eager to please local informants. We should stop being so gullible when we are fed these sensational reports and we should learn to be far more discerning than we are. Not everything that American diplomats and spies file and write in their secret reports to Washington is true. I know this from my own personal experience and the libellous falsehood that they wrote about me.

Yes, but you're forgetting a detail. The release came because WLs lost control of the cables because a writer at the Guardian (presumably) let the password out along with the location of all the files.

(Reuters) - WikiLeaks's ability to receive new leaks has been crippled after a disaffected programer unplugged a component which guaranteed anonymity to would-be leakers, activists and journalists who have worked with the site say.

Details of the breakdown are contained in a book by estranged Assange collaborator Daniel Domscheit-Berg which is due to be published on Friday, a source familiar with the contents of the book told Reuters.

Neither WikiLeaks's embattled Australian founder, Julian Assange, nor members of his entourage responded to an e-mailed request from Reuters for comment but a WikiLeaks spokesman confirmed the website's submission system was being overhauled.

Domscheit-Berg also took a backlog of leaks sent to the WikiLeaks website with him when he left, the source familiar with the contents of "Inside WikiLeaks: My Time With Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website," said.

WikiLeaks spinoff OpenLeaks may be long delayed from its initial plans for launch early this year. But the whistleblower project is far from dead. In fact, the volunteers behind the site would like, very literally, to see you try and kill it.

At the Chaos Communications Camp hacker conference in Finowfurt, Germany Wednesday, former WikiLeaks spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg launched four days of public testing of OpenLeaks.org, in partnership with four European newspapers and one non-profit group that have signed on as the initial round of outlets who will use the site’s tools to receive documents that sources wish to anonymously send them.

Top German Hacker Slams OpenLeaks Founder

Chaos Computer Club spokesman Müller-Maguhn questioned Daniel Domscheit-Berg's integrity in a SPIEGEL interview.

Former WikiLeaks deputy Daniel Domscheit-Berg has been expelled from Germany's top hacker group, the Chaos Computer Club. In an interview, the group's spokesman Andy Müller-Maguhn told SPIEGEL how he lost faith in Domscheit-Berg and his new whistleblowing project OpenLeaks.

"When Domscheit-Berg left WikiLeaks amid conflict there, he also took the archive and unpublished submissions with him. He said that he had no plans to use the material for himself or OpenLeaks. But now I have my doubts about that. I have put lots of patience and discussion into this. Still, flimsy excuses have led to unbelievabe delays in the handover of the archive. I can no longer believe in his willingness to hand over the unpublished material either."

SPIEGEL: Perhaps he can't surrender the material because he doesn't have it. Last week he told the weekly magazine Der Freitag: "I took no documents from WikiLeaks with me."

Müller-Maguhn: "That is exactly the reason for me to suspend my mediation efforts. He told me last Thursday evening that he had to look at each document before handing them over. It doesn't match up. I have never personally seen the documents. But Assange told me that there are about 3,000 submissions, some of them with several hundred documents."

Blaming Assange alone would be wrong. The entire organization has serious infighting. Wikileaks itself is falling apart.

Apparently, the cause of the breach was more tangled than suggested by either the Wikileaks statement or by The Guardian's response.

Blaming Assange alone would be wrong. The entire organization has serious infighting. Wikileaks itself is falling apart.

Yes, David Leigh, the brother of the Guardian editor (who presumably wrote that Guardian editorial I posted here & which caused such outrage from Guardian readers) revealed the password in his book on Wikileaks.

Well Olga, that doesn't cast a very flattering light on Openleaks. Tangential to my point, but I agree it's significant.

Zimbabwe Threatens To Shut Down Newspapers Over WikiLeaks
(The Christian Science Monitor, September 13, 2011)

The Zimbabwe government is threatening to shut down “private and foreign” news media organizations that it says are “abusing their journalistic privileges by denouncing the country and its leadership.”

The threat comes just days after the release of new US diplomatic cables by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks revealed widening rifts within the country’s dominant party, ZANU-PF.

The warning was delivered by Media, Information, and Publicity Minister Webster Shamu, who alleged in the state-controlled media Tuesday that private and foreign press were denigrating the country's leadership, including President Robert Mugabe and his family.

"We are not against criticism,” Mr. Shamu said, but “they are forcing us to take measures and they must stand warned."

"Of late, these media houses and pirate radio stations have intensified their vitriolic attacks and the use of hate language on the person of His Excellency, the President and the party in a well calculated move aimed at influencing the results of the forthcoming elections,” Shamu said. “In other words, the execution of the regime change agenda has been intensified.”

Shamu’s remarks come after a number of independent newspapers in Zimbabwe published stories about the latest release of confidential US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks. In the leaked cables, US diplomats in the US embassy in Harare reported on conversations with several members of President Mugabe’s inner circle, including Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe governor Gideon Gono and Professor Jonathan Moyo, a senior if somewhat independent member of the politburo of the ZANU-PF.

The fiery response by Shamu could be an indication of how seriously ZANU-PF leaders take the cables and their potential to disrupt the fragile coalition government in Zimbabwe, which includes members of Mugabe’s ZANU-PF as well as top members of the two main opposition parties, both of them factions of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Zimbabwe is expected to hold national elections sometime next year, and thus, any talk of disunity within the ZANU-PF, rumors of Mugabe’s ill health, or signs of sparring within the ZANU-PF to succeed Mugabe if he died or stepped down would almost certainly be unwelcome.

Using rhetoric often deployed against ZANU-PF’s political rivals, the MDC, Shamu blamed the latest leaks on the West, and defended his government’s rights to shut down news organizations in the name of Zimbabwe’s national security.

"The hypocrisy of the West, particularly Britain and America, in regard to press freedom should be exposed,” Shamu said. “These two countries have got some of the most Draconian media laws on earth, which severely restrict media freedom under the guise of protecting their national security."

"We have opened up to the BBC, we have licensed newspapers, and some have closed on their own, something that we had warned them that we need to be vibrant based on the performance of the economy,” Shamu said. “We can not allow the denigration of the highest office in the land."

In addition to the threats of Shamu, some news organizations are facing the possibility of lawsuits for defamation.

Jonathan Moyo has already filed suit against the Harare-based Daily News for $100,000 over two articles published by the paper based on WikiLeaks reports.

The two stories reported in detail about cables in which Moyo allegedly advised the US government to send “positive signals” to the ZANU-PF in order to encourage ZANU-PF members to abandon Mugabe ahead of 2008 elections. According to the cables, Moyo told US Ambassador Christopher Dell that Mugabe feared being hung. Now Moyo says the articles about the WikiLeaks cables are "unlawful, scandalous, contrived, fabricated, false, absurd, and highly defamatory."

When the Wikileaks cables were first leaked, Zimbabwe's attorney general threatened to file charges against those of Mugabe's inner circle who met with the US Embassy. No such threats were heard today, when the US Amb. Charles Ray, the US envoy in Harare, confirmed on Facebook that he had met with Mugabe to wish him "a good trip to New York" for the upcoming UN General Assembly meeting.

"He (Mugabe) was mentally alert and engaging,” Ambassador Ray wrote in his Facebook feed. "Like I said, it was a pleasant chat. Nothing on wikileaks. No wikileaks, no rants.”

While Zimbabwe has opened up to independent media during the past two years of coalition government, the Zimbabwe information minister could signal a return to the dark days of pre-2009, where newspapers were shut down under the banner of the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA). Even now, many press organizations maintain their headquarters in neighboring or Western countries, edited and written by exiled Zimbabwean journalists.

The Zimbabwe government has had strained relations with foreign press and governments. It banned many foreign broadcasting stations from Zimbabwe, including the BBC , CNN, Sky News, CBC, Australian Broadcasting Corporation , ABC, and Fox News but overturned the bar in 2009.

During the March 2008 elections, which many foreign election observers said were deeply flawed, Zimbabwean police arrested a number of foreign journalists, including the New York Times’ Barry Bearak, and the Times of London’s Jonathan Clayton.

Zimbabwe Threatens To Shut Down Newspapers Over WikiLeaks

Ethiopian journalist ID'd in WikiLeaks cable flees country
(Press Release, Committee to Protect Journalists, September 14, 2011)

U.S. diplomatic cables disclosed last month by WikiLeaks cited an Ethiopian journalist by name and referred to his unnamed government source, forcing the journalist to flee the country after police interrogated him over the source's identity, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. It is the first instance CPJ has confirmed in which a citation in one of the cables has caused direct repercussions for a journalist.

On September 5 and 6, officials from Ethiopia's Government Communication Affairs Office (GCAO) summoned journalist Argaw Ashine to their offices in the capital, Addis Ababa, with his press accreditation, Ashine told CPJ on Tuesday. He was summoned because he had been cited in an October 26, 2009, cable from the U.S. embassy in Ethiopia regarding purported GCAO plans in 2009 to silence the now-defunct Addis Neger, then the country's leading independent newspaper, local journalists said.

On September 8, Ashine was summoned again, this time by police, who interrogated him and gave him 24 hours to either reveal the identity of his source at the GCAO office or face unspecified consequences, the journalist told CPJ. Ashine fled Ethiopia over the weekend. He has requested that his current location not be disclosed for safety reasons.

"The threat we sought to avert through redactions of initial WikiLeaks cables has now become real. A citation in one of these cables can easily provide repressive governments with the perfect opportunity to persecute or punish journalists and activists," said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. "WikiLeaks must take responsibility for its actions and do whatever it can to reduce the risk to journalists named in its cables. It must put in place systems to ensure that such disclosures do not reoccur."

What drives Guardianistas so crazy about matters Assange?
Guy Rundle writes:

So you thought the WikiLeaks saga couldn't get any stranger, more convoluted or more ridiculous in juxtaposing stories of world import with petty absurdity? Think again. In what must surely be the last part of the final act of The Guardian's tortured relationship with the organisation, chief reporter David Leigh has been mounting a desperate rearguard action against charges that he bears major responsibility for the availability of 250,000 unredacted diplomatic cables -- and, it would seem, losing. There was also a sideshow featuring investigative journalist Nick Davies, your correspondent and an errant glass of wine.

As always, these aren't the major stories -- they're the ones coming out of the total cable dump, which is now providing a seventh wave of major news stories (credited and otherwise), since the Afghan logs were released last year. But WikiLeaks becomes the story, not only because of legitimate questions about the ethics of whistleblowing, but because it's an easier story to tell -- a simple narrative, limited number of characters, and it fits into an easier story (idealism gone awry) than messy stuff about states, wars, secrets, etc.

M'colleague Keane covered the first part of this latest twist in the tale, but a quick recap -- nearly two weeks ago WikiLeaks released all 250,000 cables in an unredacted form from the "Cablegate" archive, claiming that an interview given by former WikiLeaks member Daniel Domscheit-Berg had alerted people to the presence on the net of complete copies of the file, WikiLeaks also noted that the files could be opened by a password published in February this year, by Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding in their insider book on Cablegate. WikiLeaks said that it had known of this security breach for months, but had kept silent about it -- now that it was revealed, access to the cables needed to be as widespread as possible.

WikiLeaks's five former mainstream media partners condemned the move, and David Leigh jumped in on Twitter, noting:

Leigh's defence was useful because it put the different approaches of WikiLeaks and the left-liberal mainstream media in sharp relief. After all, the whole WikiLeaks argument has always been that conspiracies exist via an imbalance of levels of knowledge and connection between the inside and outside of the conspiracy. With Domscheit-Berg's revelations, and the extant password, attentive insider networks -- journos, activists, and of course, security services -- could access the files.

Far better, their argument ran, to let everyone have access, and equalise information levels. Leigh's tweet appears to suggest that the worst thing that could happen would be that "the public" would get hold of them. No! Not ... the public!

That's not completely fair -- Leigh and others allege that WikiLeaks's release is unnecessary, designed to embarrass Domscheit-Berg, and that Assange had always intended to release the unredacted cables in any case. They maintain that the fault lies with Assange for leaving the files online, using the same password, and not informing them of the release.

But last week, that argument came under attack, when The Economist broke ranks, and made the simple point against Leigh:

"Mr Assange's file management looks sloppy, but Mr Leigh's blunder seems bigger. Since digital data is easily copied, safeguarding passwords is more important than secreting files."

Leigh responded to this, and a couple of early commenters, on the comments string almost immediately:

david leigh wrote:
Sep 8th 2011 5:49 GMT

It's easy to be anonymous, act knowing, and defame me. But your facts are wrong. The only person who published the raw US cables was Assange. No other website did. He did so because of a spat with rival Daniel Domscheit-Berg, not because of the Guardian book. He was even trying to persuade the Guardian editor to work again with him a couple of weeks ago, far from complaining of any imaginary password "blunder". We have a tape of that meeting. Nothing in our book enabled the cables to be published and five news organisations, ours included, have condemned Assange's reckless move. Whoever you are, you might check with me next time you want to throw around such uninformed remarks.

Following this, numerous commentators sought to correct Leigh, especially regarding his claim that the book did not allow the cables to be "published". Since they were only "published" when decrypted using Leigh's password, this was clearly in error -- and one commenter even provided a log of users searching for, finding and decrypting the cable.

Three days later, Leigh threw in the towel:

david leigh wrote:
Sep 10th 2011 8:13 GMT

Just to clear up a couple of factual points.

Yes, I understand the archive with z.gpg somewhere in it was posted by Assange or his friends in an obscure location around 7 December 2010...

… Obviously, I wish now I hadn't published the full password in the book. It would have been easy to alter, and that would have avoided all these false allegations. But I was too trusting of what Assange told me.

Strange days indeed, but they got stranger for this correspondent that Wednesday, when attending the launch of Heather Brooke's new book The Revolution Will Be Digitised. I was there by chance, having run into Heather -- well-known as the journo who instigated the UK parliamentary expenses scandal -- in the street on her way to the launch, a block from my flat.

Personally, I will attend the opening of a jar, but this one may not have been a good idea ...

WikiLeaks Goes on eBay to Raise Cash
(By J. DAVID GOODMAN, The New York Times, September 16, 2011)

The opening bid for a steely portrait of Julian Assange — “one of only four photos of Julian in the world” that he signed on his 40th birthday in July, according to the accompanying text — was set at more than $900. It is among 10 pieces of memorabilia and services being auctioned online by WikiLeaks, the group that he founded.

The group announced Friday that it had begun the first of what it said would be four auctions on eBay to raise money, selling memorabilia tied to Mr. Assange and the disclosure by WikiLeaks of leaked American diplomatic cables late last year.

The auction is the latest effort to raise revenue for the group, which has seen many of its avenues of fund-raising dry up after a trove of the diplomatic cables was published, embarrassing governments around the world. The celebrity-driven auction adds more to the group’s reputation as a platform for its founder than to its preferred image as an international champion of transparency and justice.

Aside from the portrait, the items include a package of prison-issue coffee from Mr. Assange’s time in a London jail in December; a “CableGate computer” used “to prepare the cables for media partners and releases”; a gourmet meal prepared by Sarah Saunders, a chef and a friend of Mr. Assange’s; and a diplomatic cable from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to the United Nations, signed and fingerprinted by Mr. Assange.

In its announcement, WikiLeaks provided a London number for potential bidders to call to verify the authenticity of the items, which range from a minimum bid of $315 for the coffee to the “buy it now” price of more than $500,000, for the computer.

The signed cable (buy it now for $33,000) is inscribed: “Ellingham 10 July 2011. While under house arrest awaiting extradition. ‘Courage is contagious.’ ”

Mr. Assange is confined to the 650-acre Ellingham Hall estate in eastern England while he fights extradition to Sweden on accusations of sexual misconduct with two women there, charges that he has vigorously denied and that his supporters contend are politically motivated. A London court in July deferred its decision on whether to extradite Mr. Assange, and a new hearing date has not been set.

The auction follows the accidental release of unredacted versions of all 251,287 diplomatic cables. Earlier versions of the cables published by WikiLeaks and news organizations, including The New York Times, edited out the names of human rights activists and other sources who had spoken to American officials in confidence. The release appears to have occurred as the group splintered into factions this year.