Slashdot Mirror
US Intelligence Planned To Destroy WikiLeaks
An anonymous reader writes "This document is a classified (SECRET/NOFORN), 32-page US counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks (PDF). 'The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the US government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out.' It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize the organization. Since WikiLeaks uses 'trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers or whistleblowers,' the report recommends 'The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site.' [As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks' source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective.] As an odd justification for the plan, the report claims that 'Several foreign countries including China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe have denounced or blocked access to the Wikileaks.org website.' The report provides further justification by enumerating embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks — US equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable US violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay."
Wouldn't an easier plan to destroy the credibility of wikileaks be to overflow it with bogus leaks and fake whistleblowers, flooding them with misinformation?
Sounds like a great idea. If China, North Korea and Russia have already showed a good example I think the US should definitely follow their example.
When a government serves its own purposes it cannot serve its citizens.
The war that began in the 60s has finally come to an end, and it looks like all the players switched sides. These 200 odd years were certainly a nice time.
The "If you have nothing to hide..." argument, while fallacious when applied to individuals, actually works for government.
"If you have nothing to hide..."
...Then you're doing it wrong...
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
"As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks' source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective" Or much more likely never implemented. There are hundreds of people paid to come up with ideas for fixing solutions in just about every govt org. By design these ideas are suppose to be a free thinking as possible while staying within the guidelines of the problem. In this case someone came up with an idea to deal with the leak problem by destroying the org that posted the leaks. This could have been a very potent fix, but also brought out the possibility of blow-back (public outcry, legal action, extra exposure of data, etc) as well as just pushing the problem off to another newer site that is even harder to deal with (Like shutting down Napster or Kazaa). It seems to me there is a good chance that they choose not to directly attack WikiLeaks and instead worked on keeping data from getting out to begin with (Can't get the data that's out back, so just keep them from getting more).
Primarily because the only way for a government to work is if it is accountable to its electors - and they only way to hold an organization accountable is to make it transparent. I'm not accountable to my neighbor for what I'm doing in my office, but my representatives are sure as hell accountable to me for what they're doing in their offices.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I don't think anyone could argue that there isn't a need for secrecy in some things. To be sure, there is information that, if revealed, could do great harm to national security. The problem is that self-serving individuals and groups will often try to hide their own misconduct under the guise of national security. Once you've put that cork in the bottle, it becomes extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to uncork it. In effect, these people undermine the notion of national security.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Sorry to criticise people who are clearly on our side. The Wikileaks folk are great, and the job they were doing was great, and it will be great again when they start back up...
...but it was not a good idea for them to take all the leaked documents offline without notice in order to show their value so that people will donate. It was last year, probably December, and everything's still offline :-(
For one example, they published the only (at the time) big ACTA leak. (There's since been a bigger one, hosted elsewhere) Everyone was pointing to them, and they took their copy offline. To my amazement, no one had a back up, so us anti-ACTA campaigners simply lost the only leaked draft.
At the implementation level, it was a bad idea to simply cause all pages to give error 404. A page of "We need donations, we'll be back up when we get them" would have been better.
Lesson: take backups of important docs, even ones published by groups of good people.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
This information is marked SECRET and NOFORN (i.e. not for export or foreign eyes); simply accessing it without a security clearance may be committing a crime against national security.
Whether or not the US government will end up with a log of IP addresses that have downloaded it is a judgment for the reader.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
The First Amendment does not apply to classified information, and for good reason. The government does not classify documents simply to hide information from the general populace; it truly is a matter of life or death in many circumstances.
Abusing one's security clearance can result in severe penalties.
I, for one, cannot read the document, as I no longer hold a clearance, and am legally obligated not to read or download it.
Far more likely that it was never implemented.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
One would note that most of the time, the things that governments fight so hard to keep secret are things that aren't so much of national security interest but rather things that are embarrassing or things they're keeping secret not because of the enemy but because their own citizens might be upset if they knew. Wikileaks has shown many useful things, from drafts of ACTA, to the spying on citizens in violation of any numbers of laws, hypocritical actions by governments all over the world, and clear violations of treaties. In fact, very little of what Wikileaks posts is "top secret national security information" from almost any country - they're often things that governments want to suppress because they don't want to face reprisal from their own citizens for undertaking them, or are trying to hide actions they undertake that they know are otherwise illegal - not because they're afraid some other country is going to use that information against them.
Consider this - decades ago the US Supreme Court affirmed the State Secrets Doctrine, allowing the government to argue that trying a court case would reveal national secrets (and that the case must therefore be dropped without a hearing), because the government argued that revealing information about what was I think a plane crash would hurt national security. Decades later, when the files were unclassified, it turns out that there were no real secrets involved, certainly none that would have been revealed in a trial - the government was simply trying to hide the fact that there was government negligence involved. They wanted to avoid embarrassing themselves, not protecting secrets. Remember that next time the US Government invokes the doctrine (which they do with ever-increasing frequency).
Would you prefer that the torture at Guantanamo had been kept secret?
So I read the pdf which appeared to me as a risk assessment of Wikileaks.org. It basically concluded that Wikileaks is or can be used as a threat to US military. But it said almost nothing about "destroying" Wikileaks.
Remember, you don't have to destroy a threat right now. Use it or lose it.
And /. editors should learn from the US military on how to choose a good title for news items. Duh.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
And the problem with the above policy is that the government will regularly abuse its power to keep secrets.
Instead, it will spy on its own citizens, crush freedoms, trample the constitution, and generally run amok big-brother-style, all in the name of "protecting the country", when what it really is protecting is itself and its powers -- power for the purpose of power.
As far as I am concerned, this government lost its rights to keep secrets. They cannot be trusted to keep secrets. They cannot be trusted, period. When the government has lost its respect for its people, how can the people be expected to respect the government?
CAPTCHA == Founders
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
This leak feels like the ones Apple's secret police use. Since it's particularly inflammatory, I wonder if they only gave specific people access to it to track down who was doing the leaking...
Computer Science is all about trying to find the right wrench to bang in the right screw. -T.Cumbo?
All the stuff wikileaks has leaked has been in the category of avoiding embarrassment rather than anything that was truly a sensitive matter of national security.
For example, a detailed report on the exact weaknesses of various pieces of military equipment, identities of our spies, details of planned troop movements are all things I would consider important to national security.
Covering up the fact that we're torturing people because it would make a lot of people upset to learn that is not a matter of national security.
Wikileaks has performed an invaluable service for the years its been in operation.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
You are, of course, assuming that the decision making inside government is done with the interest of some greater good in mind.
Unfortunately, as it is done by humans, it is very often done with personal interests in mind. Many of the documents leaked on Wikileaks are testament to that. The only reason they were kept secret was that they'd embarass someone, with "embarass" in the widest sense including "prove criminal war crimes".
Whistleblowers are an (unofficial) part of the checks & balances system. Every time they blow the whistle on something that should not have been kept secret, should have been revealed, and the fact that it was covered up shocks the public as much or more than the actual content, the system is set right again a little bit.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Everything has "changed" under Obama!
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The elections are not pretend. They are real elections. The government need not fear real elections as it has already brainwashed the voters into voting for the establishment every time.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Newsflash: torture doesn't prevent and hasn't prevented any terrorist attacks since 9/11.
Moreover, torture only weakens image of USA in the world, probably provoking MORE attacks.
These can often be quite ineffective. First of all, one has to know there is actual misconduct before one can ask for any details. Then, in even the more liberal countries, there is a rather vast array of legal defenses those parties can use to keep their misdeeds secret, and pathetically few for the general public to pry open the lock and peer inside.
Whistle blowers have long played the crucial role of revealing, even in sparse details, misconduct by officials. To be sure, there are leaks whose sole purpose is to malign or destroy, but in a government and in general in a society that aspires to some level of openness you have to take the good with the bad.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Can you think of an example of a secret that we couldn't be TOLD we were being kept from? One which would be a good thing. Military operations for example could be kept secret but we'd be know that it is being kept secret and can accept that. Which prisoners are on transfer busses sure... but again we are aware that it is being kept secret.
The article listed some things that the US gove would have preffered to kept secret and not have been leaked to wikileaks:
"US equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable US violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay."
The first one we could have easily been told they were keeping secret and either accepted it or have them tell us. The rest are offensive that they should be hidden from the public at all.
The problem is that the abuses seem to be outnumbering the legitimate cases. It's not some people, it's entire agencies abusing secrecy as a matter of unwritten policy.
That is. of course, against the law. Too bad the law enforcement agencies are amongst the worst offenders.
They are demanding a budget significantly larger than Wikipedia's was just a few years ago... for a site that gets 1/1000th of the traffic. They could never hope to fight the legal battles directly with any amount of money, the only solution for materials with serious legal force behind them will be freenet.
Meanwhile, Cryptome trucks on as they have since damn near the beginning of the internet. They'll send you a DVD set of their content for _free_ if you ask.
Like here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/oct/03/world.guantanamo
Or a nice writeup here: http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/01/kiriakou_retracts_claims_on_wa.php
Or here: http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/04/about_that_library_tower_plot.php
Etc.
There's really not a single shred of evidence that torture helped to prevent a single attack.
Of course, it might be classified, but I'm certain that neocons would have cried on every corner about their success if they had a single case to tell us about.
Governments DO keep secrets for the hell of it. Time and time again information is withheld, for years or decades. Then when every asshat involved with the project retires, it's declassified. What do we find? Absolutely nothing that would have jeopardized national security.
You'd have to be naive to trust the government to decide what to withhold. Remember, any power that can be abused will be abused. Chances are it will be abused more often than not. Who's a bigger threat? Our own government, with the largest military budget in the world, that operates in unaccountable secrecy, which has repeatedly and reliably abused every power afforded it? Or a third world country half way across the globe?
Sunshine is the best disinfectant. Corruption at home is a bigger danger than "evildoers" abroad. And you know what? Taking care of the former can help take care of the latter.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You are the one rallying for torture. You are the one who wants the principles governing civilized nations thrown overboard. It is your plan to shit on the Human Rights Declaration and the Geneva Convention. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. It is your job to deliver it.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Only on slashdot would a statement so legally invalid as this be considered "informative."
What torture? Fucking pansy. Smash a testicle with a hammer and when the victim regains consciousness tell him what he needs to do to keep the other one. OH NOES! WE DIDN'T GET A PRAYER RUG IN THE PATTERN WE DEMANDED. Guantanamo exists because our soldiers were prevented from correctly disposing of the enemy in the field.
Guantanamo exists because we lacked the backbone to follow the standards that we claim to uphold.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Newsflash: torture doesn't prevent and hasn't prevented any terrorist attacks since 9/11.
Moreover, torture only weakens image of USA in the world, probably provoking MORE attacks
Even if it did, that is not a justification for the use of torture. In fact, we(The United States) has explicitly stated that there is no justification for torture under any circumstances. Even the mythical 'ticking bomb' of television and movie fame is not a justification.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
1. You don't get to make that determination yourself
Everyone has to make that determination themselves. In the end, you are only accountable to your own conscience.
People leak to WikiLeaks because they believe (mostly accurately) that there will be no consequences
I'd like to think that people leak to WikiLeaks because they believe there will be consequences. I don't think they do it for the hell of it, they want information to get out there and effect change.
There are well-known and established processes that govern classification.
And when those processes amount to nothing more than a rubber-stamp, what then?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
A more realistic statement is that people will tell everything they know to prevent $BAD_THING from happening, and once they run out of the truth, they will start making things up.
And how will you know the difference? You won't. If you're intelligence gathering is so bad you have to rely on torture, you don't belong in the intelligence business.
Well, there are classified documents and unclassified documents. I can work with either. You can't.
I'm a military contractor, and the work on a daily basis is on unclassified documents. That makes it easy to work with. I can email the documents, throw them on an FTP server to transfer back east, or have a working copy on my hard drive plus a backup (or 50) on the server. Realistically, nobody's going to care if someone find out that hey, we use this type of wire, or that, ooh, that cable runs from this box to that box. There aren't any of those fabled "weak points" that would destroy the thing in one shot. You want to talk about bulletproof design? The military takes that literally.
If you had a valid FOI request, odds are you could get your hands on the plans for the thing. They'd be more interesting than useful, and you'd get a hell of a lot of jiffy marker on them, but you could get them. It might be faster to go to school, get an Engineering degree, and get a job for a military contractor yourself, but you could probably get them.
Some procedures for using the items, or what's inside the mysterious black boxes, or certain protocols, are outside what you are allowed to know. It took me a year to get my security clearance. That doesn't mean I can read any given document with that level -- I also have to have a "need to know". Classified documents require work on a seperate machine, not on the corporate network, and usually require work in pairs. There's a special room that we use to work on the classified documents. Lockboxes, keyed entry, no copies, ugh. File transfer is via ... let's just say it's not electronic because you can't make copies without filling out lots of forms in lotsplicate. It's just easier on everyone if we work with unclassified all the time. (Sometimes, it's just not possible.) That's why I'm not going to read this leak. It'll mean a fucking huge PITA pile of paperwork if I get a classfied document, even a publicly available one, on this machine.
I may read it at home, though. ;)
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Meh, give me twenty minutes, some saran wrap, a board that inclines, and a jug of water. I'll have you begging me to say that waterboading is torture.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Mmm, yeah - I agree with your logic. But - there are a lot of secrets that SHOULDN'T be so secret.
Work your way through all the hype leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Oil never figures into the "official" line of reasoning. All the same, the flow of oil became a priority once the war started. Defending the oilfields became a matter of urgency. Getting oil workers to actually pump oil from the ground was "Job 1!"
I'm a veteran, and I've not one bad word to say about my little brothers who served in Iraq - but I will say that they were used by the administration. And, THAT should be made public knowledge. The "American interests" that were protected in Iraq were actually CORPORATE interests.
Oh yeah - what was the lineup of companies that eventually benefitted from the Iraqi oil wells? BP leads the list? British Petroleum? Operation Ajax was done for BP's sole benefit all those years ago. Man, oh man - those bigwigs at BP sure have a lot of stroke in Washington!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
While technically correct, it is largely misleading to make that claim. The justice department report (http://documents.propublica.org/justice-department-report-on-waterboarding-memos#p=1) clearly covers how the waterboarding used to torture prisoners and the waterboarding used to train special ops to resist torture vary. In case you don't feel like digging through the 289 pages though I will highlight the major differences.
The training method uses a small amount of water applied to a cloth over the prone soldiers face for around 20 seconds. The torture method uses extremely large quantities of saline (because when the used water the amount they swallowed started killing them by extreme electrolyte imbalances) poured over a inclined prisoners cloth covered face for 40 seconds. Now if you can't see how being oxygen deprived for 20 seconds and oxygen deprived and have the sensation of drowning for 40 seconds differ, lets move on.
The training method was NEVER applied more than twice and typically only once. The 'approved' torture method allowed for 6 'pours' of 40 seconds each during a 2-hour session where the prisoner remained strapped to a gurney with his head down. But the good news is that they were only allowed to do this twice per day, except for the extra 4 minutes of supplemental drowning they could add in if they needed. The guidelines allowed them to shackle the prisoner to the roof for up to seven days before waterboarding them, causing extreme discomfort and keeping them awake the entire time, but of course Club Gitmo's spoiled little jihadi's got hand-fed and diapered while they were chained up. Between waterboarding sessions they could look forward to enjoyable pasttimes like being placed in stress positions, being stuffed into a small box, being thrown against the wall, or having hypothermia induced by being doused with ice water.
There are also adorable guidelines on having medics standing by so that prisoners could be pushed close to death without quite going over, and to resuscitate them if those naughty terrorists have the audacity to die on them. Information on keeping them on a liquid diet so that it was less dangerous when they would breath in their own vomit. It reads remarkably similar to a guide on human experimentation that you would expect from the Nazi's.
Remember as well that this was just the 'approved' method. If all those recordings hadn't gotten 'accidentally' destroyed we might know what actually happened and whether it went beyond approved methods. Regardless I can't concieve of how anyone could consider what was done to be 'not torture'.