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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
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.
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.
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.
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.