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How Did Wikileaks Do It?
grassy_knoll writes "Related to the Wikileaks video recently released and discussed here, the NY Times reports: 'Somehow — it will not say how — WikiLeaks found the necessary computer time to decrypt a graphic video, released Monday, of a United States Army assault in Baghdad in 2007 that left 12 people dead, including two employees of the news agency Reuters. The video has been viewed more than two million times on YouTube, and has been replayed hundreds of times in television news reports.'
The article is light on details; what encryption algorithm was used? Was this a brute force attack? Did someone pass the decryption keys to Wikileaks along with the video? Something else?"
exactly.
It was in December when we learned that much of US Military video is actually not encrypted at all.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Wikileak Editor said clearly that they did it via bruteforce password guessing here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QEdAykXxoM
Presumably someone was able to grab a copy of the encrypted file, but didn't know the password?
You know what's funny about that opinion piece? It is wrong. That is NOT an RPG, those are NOT AK-47s. I can understand why someone would think so, but they are obviously not, I know a telephoto lensed camera profile when I see one. Also since when does embedding yourself with a group, as a reporter, make YOU an enemy combatant? I reported on a group of local homeless crack users in HS, does that make ME a homeless crack head? I would also like to ask, when has reporting on a CRIME committed by armed forces made you anti-American? Not to mention that you have to be attacked or protecting US Forces under attack to engage an enemy group according to the US Rules of Engagement, violating those rules IS in fact a crime under military law. Also if you listen you will hear the pilot lie, saying they were under RPG fire, he said this AFTER practically begging for permission to shoot. So, where is this RPG? Watch the video again, carefully, before you show yourself to be an even bigger idiot than they guy who posted the above article.
I hope they find out who did it, determine their motivations and the trade-offs that have resulted from their actions, and then decide whether to honor them or execute them.
Leaking a document does not necessarily translate into casualties or hardship for anyone, especially when the classification level is merely a pretext for a cover-up. Clearly the law can hide injustice or protect those of ill intent.
At the same time, simply Standing up to The Man is not sufficient justification to break the law. Like it or not, military classification does have a purpose, and if you are an outsider, some very good reasons for the classification level will not be apparent to you. Data that has nothing to do with the actual content of the video, such as the capabilities of the weapons systems, or the general operating area of the units involved can be determined from some video evidence. There is always the possibility that while you might be righting an injustice, you could at the same time be consigning other people in the field to their deaths with the very same action. The two end results are not mutually exclusive with the release of classified material.
So, if you are planning to be a "hero", consider very carefully the total result of your actions. For my part, until I know about the leaker and their position and motivations, my opinion is decidedly out on whether they have done good with this action.
On the 17 minute video posted on Youtube, during seconds 3:45-6 you can clearly see someone separate from the two journos with an RPG-7 launcher. It's not a tripod or a camera, those were carried by other people.
Well the long video I saw on wikileaks shows the infantry talking about an RPG round under a body. The helicopter pilot/gunner also claims to spot someone with an RPG at the very beginning, but the hell if I can see it.
Didn't watch the short video, they might have cut the infantry out altogether. But it's hard to claim selective editing when, you know, the uncut version is presented as well.
If those links are legit, it's probably OpenSSL with the 8 bytes of salt included. So you just have to brute force the password with the given salt. You don't even have to decrypt the whole file - do the first 16 bytes or so and look for a legit file header. I doubt they stripped the header. Send the first 16 bytes to a file identification tool or something like VLC so you don't have to even program that part.
I don't think this is revealing any secrets any idiot could have found on his own - they needed supercomputer time (or something equivalent) to brute-force it, just like everyone's reporting. I'm an idiot and I found it.
http://juliusdavies.ca/commons-ssl/pbe.html
Well, I read the report by the investigating officer. Where he identifies RPGs, also images taken after the fact verified the RPG. You can read the report from this PDF http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/images/04/06/6--2nd.brigade.combat.team.15-6.investigation.pdf
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
The camera with long lens looks like a camera with a long lens. In the panic of war, it might look like an RPG to someone who wants to see an RPG. We know that they were civilians becase we can see what the gunner saw. We can see without a shadow of doubt that the 'ambulance' driver was unarmed. We can see that the wounded photographer was unarmed. We can see the time the bullets took to get to the target, which indicate that, at Gatling gun speeds, the helicopter is about 1km away. We can hear the guy desperate to kill the wounded photographer. We can hear the gunner lying to the base about the shots being fired, about there being more than 1 or 2 armed men, about the ambulance 'picking up bodies' It's not an offence to bear arms in Iraq- all sorts of bodyguards do it. (where have I heard that before?) We can read the lies that the US forces issued the next day. It's a bit more than 'some classified information' It shows that the US forces are a) over-brutalised b) incapable of performing a police action in a busy city.
That is an incorrect way of citing. You make it sound like it was written by Jack Nicholson himself. You either cite the author (Mark Andrus) or the character (Melvin Udall) - not the actor.
After all, you wouldn't write
And if we really want to nit pick - from the trivia page on IMDB:
"Why did they not react to the presence of US military helicopters?"
Apache Helicopters fire upon their targets from literally miles away. That's why they're such fearsome weapons of shock and awe. They pop up, fire off several rounds from a long distance, and before the sound of the gunfire even reaches the intended target, the rounds have already struck. The sound follows.
For proof of the above, watch the video again. You hear the gunfire (relatively) long before the shots hit home, because the audio is being recorded from within the cockpit. Now, if you figure, it takes about 1-1.5 seconds between the sound of the shot and the actual strike, and the 30mm rounds are travelling between 5300 and 6000 feet per second. This means the Apache is 1.1 to 1.6 miles away when those rounds were fired. This is certainly a large enough distance to mask or entirely hide the sound of the rotors' rotation. The individuals had no idea the helicopters even existed.
I'm not passing judgment on the video either way. I am, however, answering your question.
First of all, they do identify the lens that goes around the corner as an RPG:
He ducks behind this building. Then a few seconds later he sees someone down on the ground with something that looks like it could be an RPG.
Could that be the Reuters photojournalist with a long lense? [sic] Maybe. But from what the pilot is seeing the man seems like a threat. In war you eliminate threats.
"Jawa Report" is biased toward the war-fighter. They have no reason to believe that the lens is an RPG -- they assume that the warfighter is correct. It is plainly not an RPG.
Second of all:
This screenshot is at 3:35. This guy is definitely carrying a weapon. In motion it looks like it might be a rifle, but from the profile angle snapped below it looks like an RPG.
A few seconds later at 3:50 he puts the weapon down. The weapon is long enough that it's comes up well beyond his waist and it certainly has the width of an RPG. Or at least from this angle it looks that way.
I think it looks like a rifle. They are biased toward the viewpoint of the war fighter -- they trust his judgment even though they have no reason to believe that that looks like an RPG at all.
I think what is more important is the following statement:
Let alone embed with the enemy. Whatever happened to the good old fashioned military pool reporter? Alas, gone out with the era of the dinosaurs and when "supporting the troops" actually meant, you know, supporting the troops.
"Jawa Report" does not believe it is healthy to question the troops as long as they're killing people that Jawa thinks are terrorists, which is any random person with a guy in Baghdad, apparently. They are about supporting whatever efforts the military determines on its own are necessary.
That's fine if that's their approach, but to suggest that these guys are journalists and that this posts offers facts about what happened is allowing them to take the wheel and drive. I think that Americans are owed the opportunity to see with our own eyes what we're doing/what we did over there.
After all, if we're doing the right thing, why hide it?
I posted the relevant frames here...
- Apache Attack Analysis
One shows an AK-47 and the other shows the RPG that was found at the scene.
The presence of an RPG at the scene was confirmed on NPR by a Washington Post reporter who was in the neighborhood.
And, where is the raw video? The timestamps are almost unreadable, it's obviously been reduced in size and re-encoded. Wikileaks put it into a boxed frame with titles and subtitles. The MP4 they provided is larger but is still blurry and obviously not the source video. Why are they not leaking that???
The raw video is here: http://collateralmurder.com/file/CollateralMurder_full.mp4.torrent
Do note that WikiLeaks spent real money to send real journalists to the actual Iraq to speak to real eyewitnesses and the very children who survived the attack. This was part of the verification process, and I do not see why this additional information gathered to provide context to the video should not also be used to voice some sort of opinion about the ongoing injustices that happen as part of wars. We civilians, removed from the locus of this conflict, tend to marginalize the innocent victims in our own personal evaluations of the war.
FWIW, I don't think that the pilots should ever be punished harshly at this point, as they likely were indeed operating within rules of engagement, as the military concluded. The root cause of the errors lies farther up the chain of command.
Also, remember that this is also about the CYA actions on the part of the military. If they had told Reuters, "Hey, our guys seriously fucked up," and perhaps paid the families of the journalists restitution (which would be the least they could do to somehow attempt to make right), and made significant changes to the rules of engagement, it wouldn't be quite as bad. But of course, this is probably not an isolated incident, and Wikileaks has footage of something in Afghanistan IIRC.
And again, they need money to operate. There is enough of a PR component in all of this that one might consider whether money potentially derived through increased exposure played a factor in this. If so, that's one hell of a calculated gamble.
If they don't wish to be targets, they should be wearing a designated fluorescent press vest, specifically issued to journalists in Iraq to prevent exactly what happened here. Because they were not wearing this identification, they became part of the group of insurgents. Insurgents in Iraq often use cameras to take pictures of their attacks for propaganda purposes.
The pictures recovered from their cameras show that they were sitting one block from a group of vehicles that were under small arms fire. The perfect place from which to launch an RPG attack. The cameraman was even found lying on top of an RPG round. All that can be found in the report and sworn statements of the soldiers who came on scene.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
I've watched the video and I'm sorry but I thought those were weapons in their hands as well. RPG and AK's in a zone that you are trying to clear out? Check. Light 'em up. The guys shooting were wrong about the weapons and that sucks. The real issue here is the verification of danger. Of course when you unleash a force to stop all other potential force, people are going end up killing each other.
Maybe. But the van? That was a guy helping an unarmed wounded man. Firing on that guy was against the law. Plain and simple. Geneva conventions and UN conventions. You can't shoot unarmed wounded people who pose no risk to you. Not to mention people that come to their aid.
You'll have that sometimes...
But as for the van: everyone on the radio is clear that the van is picking up wounded. Very seriously wounded. Permission to fire was still asked for, and still given. Why? Even if everyone involved was 100% convinced those were bad guys, why?
The Apache crew lied about the van. Just plain lied.
"Yeah Bushmaster we have a van that's approaching and picking up the bodies" - lie. The van hadn't yet even stopped. No one had picked up anything whatsoever when this was radioed into the man making the firing decisions.
"...possibly picking up bodies and weapons..." - lie. They never got within 15 feet of where the alleged weapons were blown to smithereens by the 30 mil fire.
So the permission to engage was based on a falsehood. The Apache team depicted the van as belonging to the same group of individuals, and as attempting to some how hide what had happened, or something.
Further it seems that Bushmaster Seven was assuming they would disable the truck. They did a hell of a lot more than that. They actively pursued every moving person with rounds, trying to kill as many as possible.
This clearly did not meet with the minimum necessary force guideline within the Rules of Engagement, and it seems that Bushmaster Seven was checking to see if they had successfully disabled the truck.
There clearly should have been punishment attached to this event.
Did you even watch the video?
Did you? I saw nothing that made the group that was attacked look like anything but civilians. Tell me at what point in the video you saw an RPG, and I'll see if I can spot it.
here http://sadpanda.us/images/116326-7WCUVOZ.gif
It begs the question: Why the frak are we is that place anyways?
Over 10 years ago, it was apparent that Saddam Hussein had to be removed from power. However, doing so by force would lead to a whole mess of issues (many of which we're dealing with now). So Saddam was left in power but the deck was stacked against him maintaining power. Unfortunately, Saddam is an amazingly resilient and ruthless leader - surviving internal attempts to unseat him. Furthermore, the US was uncomfortable with supporting the Shia element due to possible ties with Iran. And the Kurds were rather happy in their own virtually autonomous state. And so the problem continued without resolution. During that time there were elections, changes in power, and political scandals that continued to delay external action.
Terrorism was a nice little excuse to re-visit the problem. But by then, I have to wonder if any plans that had been made back in the "new world order" days were current enough to invoke. It sure didn't look like it post-invasion.
Maximum effective range of RPG: ~1000m
Distance to humvee that Apache was providing air support for: ~100m
These are pictures (the last ones on the "roll") from the reporter's camera:
2nd BCT Investigation (Go to page 41 of 43)
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
"The site is not shy about its intent to shape media coverage, and Mr. Assange (the founder) said he considered himself both a journalist and an advocate; should he be forced to choose one, he would choose advocate.
First of all, you hear the soldiers on the ground talk about finding a live RPG shell, along with AK-47s at the site. Second, the helicopter was not 1km away, there were two copters, which explains why the sound of firing doesn't always match up with the flashes on the ground from the bullets. Thirdly, it was not an ambulance, it was basically a taxi. Who he was helping is up for debate. And finally, most importantly, the US military had been under fire early that day; the helicopter was providing support to the ground troops
Ummm... the Helecoper crew or the people on the ground were not in any actual danger, they were well outside the range of any Russian made shoulder launched missile.
What did they have to lose by not verifying the target.
Many apologists are whitewashing this with the "right decision at the time" BS when it was clearly not the right decision either in hindsight or at the time. The crew had to real impetus to act, in fact the audio indicated that the crew simply wanted to kill something.
In either case, shooting the people taking away the wounded is illegal under both international laws and US rules of engagement. There is no possible way to spin that into "the right decision at the time".
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.