WikiLeaks about to hit the fan

"I think Canberra may have to do something about it," he (Geoffry Robertson QC) told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

"It's got a duty to help Australians in peril in foreign courts.

"As far as Julian Assange is concerned, Sweden doesn't have bail, doesn't have money bail for foreigners, so he's likely to be held in custody."

Mr Robertson said that his client was unlikely to be given a fair trial in Sweden.

"He's going to be tried in secret, and this is outrageous by our standards and by any standards," he said.

..... More serious for Assange was the looming prospect of a return to Sweden. Though the English-speaking world had lost interest in the details of the accusations against him, furious debate had continued in the country where Assange would be questioned and possibly charged. Much of this was due to the argument Assange's legal team had mounted against extradition - that Sweden's politically appointed judges, in-camera sex crime trials and freewheeling prosecutors were at variance with EU standards, and neither process nor eventual trial was fair.

That line of argument hasn't gone down well in Sweden, where many people are getting tetchy about the country's reputation as an authoritarian madhouse.

Yet by mid-year, the case was increasingly in question. Anna Ardin, one of the complainants, had added an accusation of physical sexual coercion, though she had earlier told a newspaper that Assange was ''not violent''. Tweets indicating a continued relationship with Assange vanished from the record, and were retrieved by bloggers; a leaked police file had a witness recalling one complainant saying she had been railroaded into making an accusation by the police and others.

When the leaked police report went into wider circulation, it did not take long for people to notice that the name of the initial investigating officer, Irmeli Krans, was familiar from somewhere else. In fact she was one of the links listed on the blogroll of Anna Ardin, the first complainant and organiser of Assange's visit to Sweden in August last year. That was unusual, though of itself not impossible - Stockholm is, in many ways, a small town. But the links rapidly proved beyond coincidence, many of them unearthed by Sweden's libertarian Flashback mega-blog.

Krans and Ardin were not merely connected online, they were both members of the Social Democratic Party and had run together as candidates for the city council elections some months before. Connected through gay and lesbian networks in the party, Krans had visited Club Febber, the fetish nightclub that Ardin set up on Gotland, a residential island off the Swedish coast.

Ardin had also commented on Krans's blog a year earlier, on a post about racism and sexism, criticising ''women who claim they're not oppressed and therefore think it's OK to trash feminists''. Responding to the post, Krans noted: ''Usually I only get negative posts on this blog … but this post puts its finger on the matter, and speaks for itself.''

''Thanks for the props,'' Ardin replied. ''The cultural elite often think it is OK to be a little racist and sexist.''

Were such connections sufficient for Krans to recuse herself from the case? There is no record that she raised the matter. Instead, immediately after Ardin and the other complainant, Sofia Wilen, walked into a central Stockholm police station on August 20 last year, Krans conducted an interview with Wilen. Contrary to police guidelines, the interview was neither taped nor transcribed. A half-hour into the interview, police had already consulted the prosecutor's office, and a rape investigation was opened.

Krans was almost immediately removed from the case, but a leaked email reveals she subsequently queried whether rape charges had been laid. Two days later she attempted to access the interview file on the police computer but was refused access. A leaked email exchange between Krans and her superior indicates that she was attempting to revise the summary of Wilen's statement, because she had taken it down incompletely at the time.

By the most generous assessment, the initial handling of the case was a mess. An internal police inquiry would later find that Krans's conduct had not affected the case - even though Krans, a potential witness in any future trial, had subsequently broadcast an extraordinary stream of anti-Assange commentary on her Facebook page and over Twitter, complaining that the official accusation of ''minor rape'' was insufficient, and cheering on Claes Borgstrom, the complainants' lawyer.

Her Facebook account shows Harald Ullman, a member of the Stockholm police board, logged on to express his disbelief at her conduct. Krans's involvement in the interview with Wilen has certainly complicated its status as evidence - all the more so, since Wilen never verified it as a true record with her signature.

Yet there were also problems with the allegations against Assange by Anna Ardin herself. During her interview, conducted by phone - also against police guidelines on sex crime cases - the day after Wilen's interview, Ardin had given an account of her encounter with Assange, from which two misdemeanour ''annoyance'' charges were made. That day, the senior prosecutor quashed the rape investigation commenced the day before during Wilen's interview.

Two days later, Claes Borgstrom had become both women's lawyer, and appealed the decision not to prosecute. Two days after that, on August 25, Ardin handed over to police a condom that she claimed had been the one used during her encounter with Assange 10 days earlier. As with everything in this case, the forensic report on this item eventually leaked. For a condom allegedly used in a sex act, it had little to give up, the lab report telling the investigation that no DNA had been recovered from it in an initial series of tests, though they did not rule out the possibility that some might be found. The police had also requested one other test, to see if the rip at the top of the condom was a tear or a blade cut.

The delay in securing a potentially vital piece of evidence remained unexplained, as did the process by which Ardin's accusation changed from a misdemeanour crime of annoyance to a felony, sexual coercion. The question as to why Ardin would have kept a torn condom for a week when she had no initial intention of going to the police also remained unanswered.

The repeated attacks on Swedish life and propriety by Assange's legal team have made it unlikely he would get a sympathetic hearing in that country. But the London media pack has also turned on him en masse as well. His protests at Canongate's publication of an early draft of his book were taken as the ultimate irony. Writer on writer piled on to damn the organisation and the man.....

Is This the WikiEnd?
(David Carr, The New York Times, November 5, 2011)

It appears all the more likely that Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, will be extradited to Sweden to be questioned on allegations of sexual misconduct from two women. A British court’s ruling last Wednesday that he could be extradited, which Mr. Assange may appeal, puts his personal freedom in doubt.

But many others were wondering if it was one more indication that the WikiLeaks movement, which changed the face of journalism and the entire informational ecosystem, could be in doubt as well. Although stateless and seemingly beyond the reach of the law and its enemies, WikiLeaks was, from the beginning, subject to a number of internal frailties and external vulnerabilities. The fact that WikiLeaks came to be embodied in a single individual, especially one as mercurial as Mr. Assange, was chief among them. Internal battles led to the departure of a number of key programmers. Large, corporate enablers of online payments, including PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, Western Union and Bank of America, declined to process donations, all but cutting off the organization from its funding base.

Two weeks ago, Mr. Assange announced that WikiLeaks was going to take a break from hell-raising and devote itself full time to fund-raising because the financial blockade had eliminated 95 percent of the site’s revenues. He said at a press conference that the organization was fighting for survival.

“If WikiLeaks does not find a way to remove this blockade we will simply not be able to continue by the turn of the new year,” Mr. Assange said.

Advocates of information transparency point out that even if WikiLeaks founders, the idea it represents — a transnational mechanism to disseminate information beyond the reach of any government, corporation or organization — will live on. In fact, Anonymous, a collective of hackers, announced last week that unless a kidnapped member of their collective were released, it would reveal the names of various Mexican government officials, police officers and journalists who had cooperated with the cartel known as Los Zetas.

But the primary threat to the future of WikiLeaks and other like-minded organization has less to do with hacker zeal or organizational specifics than it does with information dynamics. It is as basic as supply and demand: There has never been a shortage of willing recipients of classified or private information that has significant news value, but leakers with both the motivation and access are far more rare. A great deal of leaking takes place on a retail basis, as any city hall reporter will tell you. But giant data dumps don’t happen often because many factors have to align: an aggrieved party; access to a large, consequential stash of documents that are of public importance; and a gap in security big enough to allow the lifting of such documents.

Let’s concede that WikiLeaks, whatever its excesses, represented a genuinely new paradigm for transparency and accountability. It became a fundamentally different and powerful whistle, one that could be blown anonymously — or not, as it turned out — to very remarkable effect. Whistle-blowers in possession of valuable and perhaps incriminating corporate and government information now had a global dead drop on the Web. Traditional news organizations watched, first out of curiosity and then with competitive avidity, as WikiLeaks began to reveal classified government information that in some instances brought the lie to the official story.

But while WikiLeaks reduced the friction in leaking secret documents, it did not reduce the peril to those who might choose to do so. Part of the promise of WikiLeaks was that it would eliminate digital fingerprints. While those efforts seemed to work, military prosecutors were nonetheless able to tag Pfc. Bradley E. Manning as a suspect using traditional investigative measures. Private Manning, who is accused of leaking many of the more important WikiLeaks documents, is being held in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., accused of “aiding the enemy.” His presence there is a stark reminder that despite campaign promises about openness and transparency in governing, the Obama administration has a very hard-line approach when it comes to state secrets, one that has not only affirmed the Bush administration’s approach, but has done so with renewed focus. Just 17 months into his administration, President Obama had already prosecuted more alleged leakers than any of his predecessors.

All of this is a reminder that when it comes to leaking, it is not whistles that are in short supply, but whistleblowers. WikiLeaks represented a major technological advance in the art and mechanism of the leak, and it eliminated the need to spend many secret hours at the copy machine, as Daniel Ellsberg did with the Pentagon Papers. But easing the modality of transmission does not obviate the legal and social strictures against making the private public.

After WikiLeaks began revealing confidential documents, news organizations including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal set up their own versions of digital dead drops, but no significant stories have emerged from those efforts. The technological muscle required to maintain a robust site, as evidenced by WikiLeaks’s on-and-off again operational status, is significant and hard to come by.

And Mr. Assange, who came on the global stage in spectral fashion, seeming to ride on a digital carpet above the laws of various jurisdictions, has proved extremely vulnerable. He became the face of a new kind of asymmetric informational warfare, and his high profile, along with what may have been some poor personal choices, have brought him back to earth with a thud.

Last December, Mr. Assange was arrested in Britain on a Swedish warrant, little more than a week after WikiLeaks published some of the 250,000 leaked State Department cables. He was in jail for nine days — he has not been charged in Sweden — and released on $300,000 bond after Vaughan Smith, the founder of the Frontline Club in London, agreed to house him at his country estate. He has been living there under house arrest and reporting daily to the local police station.

AT the invitation of Mr. Smith and with the assent of Mr. Assange, I had lunch at the estate in September. Mr. Assange had little interest in being interviewed — the publication that week of an autobiography he had authorized and then disavowed might have left him a bit gun-shy — but he made it clear that he felt that the extradition to Sweden could be just the beginning of a perilous road that would eventually lead to his extradition to the United States, where he could confront espionage charges. Beyond feeling personally hunted, Mr. Assange says he believes that a coalition of state and corporate forces is determined to silence WikiLeaks.

Such efforts may be succeeding. For the time being, Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks are preoccupied by a number of legal battles, and the funding and technological assets of the organization may have to be used to defend WikiLeaks rather than prosecute a war on government secrecy.

The idea of WikiLeaks and perhaps the organization itself will live on. But the notion that state secrets across the globe had been cracked open like a piñata once and for all, and that secrets will be regularly plopping into public view, seems remote.

Still, over the much longer haul, new chapters in the info wars, along with new and better technologies, will emerge. We are likely to be in a lull, not at an end, After all, the one thing the world is not short on is secrets.

DARPA’s Plan to Trap the Next WikiLeaker: Decoy Documents
(By Dawn Lim, Wired.com, November 4, 2011)

WikiLeakers may have to think twice before clicking on that “classified” document. It could be the digital smoking gun that points back at them.

Darpa-funded researchers are building a program for “generating and distributing believable misinformation.” The ultimate goal is to plant auto-generated, bogus documents in classified networks and program them to track down intruders’ movements, a military research abstract reveals.

“We want to flood adversaries with information that’s bogus, but looks real,” says Salvatore Stolfo, the Columbia University computer science professor leading the project. “This will confound and misdirect them.” (You can make your own fake doc on the research lab’s website, too.)

The program aims to scare off uninvited riff-raff as well as minimize insider threats, one of the greatest vulnerabilities in military networks. Fake “classified” documents, when touched, will take a snapshot of the IP address of the intruder and the time it was opened, alerting a systems administrator of the breach.

With that trail of digital breadcrumbs, agencies can track down prying eyes more easily. It’s not only a way to stop the new “systemic threat” demonstrated by “the recent disclosure of sensitive and classified government documents through WikiLeaks,” as a summary of the project notes. The deeper goal is to make hackers and whistleblowers jittery about whether the data they’ve stumbled on is actually real.

With Congress demanding the Defense Department work on eliminating insider threats, feds have been in overdrive trying to prevent another document-dump at the scale of WikiLeaks, even going to the extremes of threatening to prosecute airmen who let their families read the site.

This decoy-detecting project is funded as part of Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales, a program to design ways of sniffing out “malicious” insider threat behavior. It’s not the only Pentagon program aimed at weeding out disloyal troops. Led by Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, former hacker-rockstar of the freewheeling Boston’s L0pht collective, Darpa is dreaming ways to detect signs of subversion or infiltration as part of a program called Cyber Insider Threat.

Under this plan, the decoy docs would undermine hackers’ trust in the integrity of data, make them question whether releasing it in the public domain would be worth it, and force WikiLeakers to do more work verifying their authenticity.

“If we implant lots of decoys in a system, the adversary has to expend own resources to determine what’s real and what’s not,” Stolfo tells Danger Room.

If a bogus document is actually released online, it would shatter the credibility of the whistleblowing website that published it, said Stolfo. So even after an attacker has hacked through firewalls, tricked intrusion detection technology and gained unfettered access into a system, he’ll hesitate before making away with the goods.

Columbia University has a pending patent application on the decoy-creating technology. Stolfo co-founded Allure Security Technology in 2009 to make products based on that technology.

“I don’t know who has the patent for the concept of deception, though,” he joked. “It possibly dates back to the time of Adam and Eve. Now we’re trying to automate the process.”

Anonymous talks to the public on Reddit
(Jon Martindale, Thinq.co.uk, November 9, 2011)

Online 'hacktivist' group Anonymous has started an open dicussion about itself on Reddit, seeking to dispel a few myths and about the WikiLeaks-supporting 'hive mind' and its activities.

And once you've waded through some of the almost inevitable misinformation thrown in the mix as well, there do seem to be some legitmate responses to questions from interested users.

The announcement for the open conversation was made by the AnonymousIRC Twitter account - which, it was later revealed, is run by more than one person, boasting: "It's impossible to shut down the Twitter by arresting a single person."

Some later asked about how the group finances itself. Anons claimed that they didn't need much money to carry out their activities, stating: "We run on a very low budget, but 20 bucks is enough to take on the filthy leaders, fortunately ".

When asked about Anonymous's involvement in the Occupy Wall Street movement, respondents were quick to explain that there was not a lot their online group could do to help, but that they were certainly allied with the group's aims - though they finished by admitting: "To be honest, we do not know how this will turn out."

One of the more interesting queries from Reddit users was about the hacking skills of the group. When asked how the skillset of the average Anon compared with government-sponsored hackers, AnonymousIRC responded:

"We don't think they compare at all.

"Usually, most of the times, you will not find any high-profile hacking skills within Anonymous. For a reason: It's not needed. Anonymous, basically, is a very loose bunch of random Internet people. Few of them are hackers.

"But poke them hard enough and they might show you some wizard stuff (hbgary). But this is done by very few people. The masses just cheer and become inspired. To do better stuff.

"It's why we'll win."

There was also some discussion on dealings between some alleged members of Anonymous and a Mexican drug cartel - as well as plans for future actions against organised crime. Little detail was discussed, but Anons stressed that one thing was of primary importance: staying safe.

"Stepping up against governments is one thing. Some people even choose to do so with their real identity. But this is fought in public and governments and their executive are still under public scrutiny. Cartels are not. And they do not give a s%&^. They will shoot you on the street, in daylight, without any remorse.

"We salute anyone who stands up against these b&^$*"£! but we advise to stay clear of this unless you know exactly what you are doing."

Twitter Ordered to Yield Data in WikiLeaks Case
(SOMINI SENGUPTA, The New York Times, October 11, 2011)

A federal judge on Thursday ruled that Twitter, the popular microblogging platform, must reveal information about three of its account holders who are under investigation for their possible links to the WikiLeaks whistle-blower site.

The case has become a flash point for online privacy and speech, in part because the Justice Department sought the information without a search warrant last year. Instead, on the basis of a 1994 law called the Stored Communications Act, the government demanded that Twitter provide the Internet protocol addresses of three of its users, among other things. An Internet protocol address identifies and gives the location of a computer used to log onto the Internet.

The three people came to the Justice Department’s attention because it believed they were associated with WikiLeaks.

Twitter informed the three people — Jacob Appelbaum, an American computer security expert, along with Rop Gonggrijp, a Dutch citizen, and Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of Iceland’s Parliament — of the government’s demand for information earlier this year.

The petitioners argued in federal court that their Internet protocol addresses should be considered private information and that the demand for information was too broad and unrelated to WikiLeaks. They also argued that the order suppressed their right to free speech.

The court disagreed. Judge Liam O’Grady, from the United States District Court in Alexandria, Va., wrote in his opinion that “the information sought was clearly material to establishing key facts related to an ongoing investigation and would have assisted a grand jury in conducting an inquiry into the particular matters under investigation.”

The judge said that because Twitter users “voluntarily” turned over the Internet protocol addresses when they signed up for an account, they relinquished an expectation of privacy.

“Petitioners knew or should have known that their I.P. information was subject to examination by Twitter, so they had a lessened expectation of privacy in that information, particularly in light of their apparent consent to the Twitter terms of service and privacy policy,” Judge O’Grady wrote.

The court also dismissed a petition to unseal the Justice Department’s explanation for why it sought the account information.

Neither the Justice Department nor Twitter company officials responded to e-mail and telephone requests for comment.

The petitioners themselves spoke up on Twitter. “I would do it again,” Ms. Jonsdottir posted.

“Today is one of those ‘losing faith in the justice system’ kind of days,” Mr. Appelbaum wrote on Twitter.

Lawyers for one of the petitioners said they were still reviewing the judge’s order and could not yet say what the next steps were.

.....The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been representing Jonsdottir along with the American Civil Liberties Union, said it was "gravely worried" by the ruling.

"When you use the internet, you entrust your online conversations, thoughts, experiences, locations, photos and more to dozens of companies who host or transfer your data," EFF legal director Cindy Cohn said in a statement.

"In light of that technological reality, we are gravely worried by the court's conclusion that records about you that are collected by internet services like Twitter, Facebook, Skype and Google are fair game for warrantless searches by the government."

Jonsdottir, in remarks released by EFF, said that "with this decision, the court is telling all users of online tools hosted in the US that the US government will have secret access to their data.

"I am very disappointed in today's ruling because it is a huge backward step for the United States' legacy of freedom of expression and the right to privacy," she said.

US court verdict 'huge blow' to privacy, says fomer WikiLeaks aide
* Dominic Rushe
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 November 2011 18.03 GMT

Decision made to open Twitter account of Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir, who is taking the case to the Council of Europe


Birgitta Jonsdottir
A US court ruled Icelandic member of parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir must release details of her Twitter account. Photograph: Halldor Kolbeins/AFP/Getty Images

Icelandic MP and former WikiLeaks volunteer Birgitta Jonsdottir has slammed the decision by US courts to open her Twitter account to the US authorities and is taking her case to the Council of Europe.

On Thursday a US judge ruled Twitter must release the details of her account and those of two other Twitter users linked to WikiLeaks. Jonsdottir learned in January that her Twitter account was under scrutiny from the Justice Department because of her involvement last year with WikiLeaks' release of a video showing a US military helicopter shooting two Reuters reporters in Iraq. She believes the US authorities want to use her information to try and build a case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

"This is a huge blow for everybody that uses social media," said Jonsdottir. "We have to have the same civil rights online as we have offline. Imagine if the US authorities wanted to do a house search at my home, go through my private papers. There would be a hell of a fight. It's absolutely unacceptable."

She said she would press for the Council of Europe to act on the case, which she believes sets a worrying precedent for private citizens and politicians across the world.

Last month the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which represents MPs from 157 countries, unanimously adopted a resolution condemning the move by the Justice Department. The IPU said the move threatened free speech and suggested it could violate Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which upholds the right of everyone to freedom of opinion and expression.

"Members of parliament are elected by people to represent them in parliament. In their daily work they legislate and they hold the governments to account. They are unable to perform these duties if they cannot receive and exchange information freely without fear of intimidation," wrote the IPU.

Jonsdottir's account was targeted alongside Seattle-based WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum and Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp. The order also sought records relating to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and alleged WikiLeaks source private Bradley Manning.

This is the second court victory for the US authorities in a case that has alarmed privacy and free speech advocates; in part because the inquiries' targets might never have known they were being investigated had Twitter not challenged the subpoenas.

The Justice Department also sought the information without a search warrant. US authorities used a 1994 law called the stored communications act to demand that Twitter provide the internet protocol addresses of users, a move that would give the location of the computer they used to log onto the internet. They also asked for bank account details, user names, screen names or other identities, mailing and other addresses.

The petitioners argued that the order suppressed their right to free speech and that their internet protocol addresses should be considered private information. They also argued the demand for information was too broad and unrelated to WikiLeaks.

Judge Liam O'Grady disagreed. In his opinion, "the information sought was clearly material to establishing key facts related to an ongoing investigation and would have assisted a grand jury in conducting an inquiry into the particular matters under investigation."

The Twitter users "voluntarily" turned over the internet protocol addresses when they signed up for an account and relinquished an expectation of privacy, he ruled.

"Petitioners knew or should have known that their IP information was subject to examination by Twitter, so they had a lessened expectation of privacy in that information, particularly in light of their apparent consent to the Twitter terms of service and privacy policy," Judge O'Grady wrote. He also dismissed a petition to unseal the Justice Department's explanation for why it sought the account information.

The fight comes amid widening concerns about online privacy. Facebook is expected to revamp its privacy rules after widespread criticism. Twitter too has become an increasing concern for privacy advocates.

"I want everybody to be fully aware of the rights we apparently forfeit every time we sign one of these user agreements that no one reads," said Jonsdottir.

You do not have privacy rights from a government investigation if you place information they are interested in on such open systems that are base and operate under US law.

A number of those online social media organizations are now working on tightening up their privacy rules as a result.

No, I didn't know that, Bill.
But I'm much more comfortable discussing matters directly related to Wikileaks & would prefer not to comment about issues which I know very little about.