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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?"
Wikilieaks have not been playing this up, the media has. And they should. This is what is known as 'an important news story.' The fact that wikileaks is asking for donations is irrelevant. They have always asked for donations, and they don't have control over how popular a leaked document becomes.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
maybe this has something to do with it?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
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
Was this a brute force attack?
I have seen the video and I can positively confirm that it was indeed a brute force attack.
Ezekiel 23:20
They used a farm of PS3s running Linux to crack the encryption. This is why Sony, acting in behalf of the US DOD, removed the "Other OS" installation option and randomly bricked consoles through last week's firmware update, (albeit too late to prevent the video from being released). Also, as documented in FCC filings, Apple's iPad has a secret built-in front camera used to spy on the American people to find the person who leaked the data. That's why the wifi connection is so poor, most of it is saturated sending live video to DHS. Finally. Microsoft is also involved somehow. I'm not sure how, but I'm sure the OOXML file format is somehow involved.
Shameless plug for my photos on Flickr
You almost lost me. Thanks for the car analogy!
You're assuming the keys were in a form that could be easily shared. I very much doubt that military encryption works that way. Having your keys in a file on your PC my be adequate for you and me, but when Blofeld is out to steal your plans for invading Normandy, you need to make it a little harder for him to steal access.
And of course, it wasn't brute force. That approach was obsolete even back in Turing's day.
This is plus five INFORMATIVE? mypetjawa is a site dedicated to catching Muslim terrorists that it calls "Jawa" (aka, a racial slur). Their decision that the video was a hoax was because someone had an AK-47, therefore the soldiers were totally justified. Are there really 5 conservatives that couldn't RTFA linked by this AC? Jesus Christ people.
Overpaid geeks reading this: GIVE WIKILEAKS MONEY.
I know Julian Assange slightly. He used to be the sysadmin at Suburbia.net. That's where my critic of Scientology website lives. He and Mark Dorset of Suburbia have assiduously defended that site against baseless legal threats from Scientology for the past fifteen years. The guy's got balls of titanium.
The newspapers whine about "who's going to do journalism without us around?" The answer is the same as who'll do it with them around, i.e. someone else. So far it's Wikileaks.
I gave 'em GBP50 (~US$100) last pay and will again this pay. So should you.
Overpaid geeks reading this: GIVE WIKILEAKS MONEY.
Thank you.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I would question who classified the video and why.
Explicit guidance exists that you are not to classify something just because it is embarrassing. What national secret is protected by classifying this video? Security Guidance says that the use of the SECRET classification is to prevent harm to the security of the US.
I believe an investigation needs to be opened into the misuse of classification for this video.
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.
They continue to identify the zoom lens being pointed around a corner as an RPG. It was a LENS! In any case, these guys were not taking aim at US troops or the helicopters. They were just standing around. Those guys with AK-47s could be bodyguards for the reporters, for all you know.
If this attack by the Apache helicopter was pre-emptive, then it easily could have been made by ground-interception by nearby US troops. These half-dozen would have had no hope facing Bradley IFVs and their mounted and heavily armed infantry.
Personally, I may not agree with their interpretation of the issue but what makes them different (and, in my opinion, important) is that, regardless of any editorial they may add to the story, they always post all the original material they receive unedited. As long as they do that, I can view it myself and develop my own opinion. What the mainstream media and the military do is highly limit your direct access to the original evidence then tell you to "trust us" that they are giving you an honest description. As this case, and other such as the death of Pat Tillman, the military has proven that, as an organization, they are pathological liers that cannot be trusted.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
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.
Except for the guy with the AK-47 (3:43 in the video) and the guy with the RPG (3:35 in the video). The guy with the RPG ducks behind the building, and then someone (could be the same guy or maybe the cameraman -- it's hard to tell) points *something* around the corner of the building at the approaching Bradley vehicles that had just been engaged in a firefight minutes before (necessitating calling in the air support).
I'm sorry you can't see it, but the rules of engagement were followed. Two Reuters reporters decided to embed themselves with a group of people who were armed in a combat zone. Bad things happened. In retrospect, it was a sad situation. Hindsight being 20-20 and all.
In the heat of the moment, everything they did was checked and re-checked by their command chain to coincide with the rules of engagement. The audio shows they were repeatedly requesting permission up the command chain for the clear to fire. Commanders reviewed the information available against the rules of engagement, and determined they should be allowed to fire. That's why they were determined to have complied with those rules in this situation.
Just because Wikileaks can now review the video in "super-zoom" and "super-slo-mo" and determine that the pilots and gunners might have been able to discern whether the reporters were carrying cameras on straps instead of guns on straps does not make them liable for murder. It doesn't change the fact that these were people walking in a combat zone, with other people who had weapons, and were standing in a position waiting for a column of American vehicles to come into range.
Occam's razor does not say, "These were murderous thugs," Occam's Razor says, "This was a sad situation that occurred in the 'fog of war'."
Or, more succinctly, "War Sucks."
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
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
The word "indiscriminate" in the first line, and "unprovoked" in the second last sentence. Both of those express an opinion as to the *motive* of the attack. That is opinion, it is biased against the soldiers who clearly (listen to the audio) go through the correct chain of command and rules of engagement before opening fire.
Also the term "rescue" and "rescuer" bias the reader that the van that just happened to enter the area with three men who jump out immediately and attempt to put the wounded man into the van while the van is rapidly turning and moving to provide a getaway was some good Samaritan, and not at all involved despite everyone in Iraq knowing to stay away from where the Apaches are circling.
That, and naming the site, "Collateral Murder" as well.
That puts it outside the provenance of just factually "leaking" the data.
A factual release would have been, "5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting a military action in Iraq which resulted in the deaths of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff. Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and the riders in a van apparently coming to remove him from the scene. Two young children seated in the van were also seriously wounded in the attack."
The difference is subtle, but important. The factual version lets you decide whether it is indiscriminate or not -- by watching the video. The original version acts as judge and jury on the actions of the Apache crew -- a crew vindicated as meeting all the rules of engagement by a Pentagon review of their actions.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
Try watching it. People *inside* the armed forces leaked this. They feel its wrong enough to leak. People who were in Iraq an saw the video also think its pretty bad.
But shooting a Family that did nothing but stop to pick a wounded man on the side of the road, is nothing short of a war crime. And the "don't bring kids to battle" doesn't work when its the US that took the battle to Baghdad (Where, shock horror, families live with children).
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Remember, we are not seeing what the soldiers see here here. We can watch the video fifty times on slow-mo, squinting to see if that dude's carrying an RPG or a camera: the soldiers are making snap decisions on half-second glimpses. Contrariwise, the soldiers have a much wider perspective on the entire battlefront, and see things we can't. Our hindsight second-guessing is pointless.
But my point here is not to defend the soldiers or the military: it's to say that since hindsight is useless, we should try foresight. BEFORE we send troops into a country, we should understand that shit like this WILL happen. Absolute precision in warfare is impossible: conflict WILL result in innocents getting slaughtered by terrified boys with heavy weapons.
So when the option of war starts being discussed, we should not ask, "is our cause righteous? Are we prepared to sacrifice our sons' lives for it?" but rather, "Is our cause righteous enough that we can watch the mass slaughter of innocents, and still say we did the right thing?"
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.
When non-combatants are killed, it is because of a lack of discrimination between combatants and non-combatants. This is "indiscriminate." When a person is killed who posed no threat to the people doing the killing, it is "unprovoked." These are both statements of FACT, which can easily be confirmed by viewing the video. The wording is a summary, not an opinion.
Apropos of anything else, I laughed.
I seem to recall our soldiers swearing oaths on statements made to military investigators, courts martial, and so on, that nothing untoward or unprofessional happened at Abu Ghraib.
A little while later, some of those soldiers were revealed as posing in some photos that gained quite a bit of infamy...
I dispute the "clearly shown" part, but there was definitely a guy holding something about the size and shape of an AK-47. In the ~18-minute video embedded on BoingBoing, look at the guy just above the crosshair at 3:39, and the guy left of him; those are the probable AKs that I see. Comments in the video refer to these people being near US ground forces: 4:28 in the video, "he was right in front of the Brad".
Considering the released report claims the ground troops actually found these weapons at the scene, as well as the cameras which apparently contained photos of the Bradley, the narrative that the photographers were walking around with a group of people who were intending to do violence to US forces and were near US ground forces seems at least adequately supported.
If you want to know why they weren't ducking and covering, did you see the delay between the gun firing and the hits? The bullets must have been in the air a good 2 seconds. That puts the person shooting like a kilometer away! The guys on the ground probably had no idea where the shots came from. They were too busy looking at the Bradley right next to them, and thought they were perfectly shielded.
The audio track is certainly pretty ugly, and what happened to the kids in the van is tragic -- but in context it all seems pretty understandable. Once it was decided that this war would be fought, there were bound to be tragic incidents like this.
I am, at the moment, willing to believe the government line that this was a small number of civilian casualties in the heat of battle, and I'm a lot unhappier about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. If this is what it takes to get people talking about the real issues again, fine, but I don't see that this is one of those issues. This is the cost of war. Apparently there was probably an ROE violation when they shot the van -- which is sad, and the attitude of the soldiers is ugly, but this is no My Lai massacre.
No, it is an after-action summary with near perfect knowledge of the situation. You know, going into the video, that these are non-combatants embedded in a group of combatants. The pilot and gunner did not know this. Under the Rules of Engagement, when some of a group is armed, they are all combatants.
Secondly, the Reuters reporters failed to wear their officially issued retro-reflective "Press" vests, that would have identified them as non-combatants. They made this choice knowing the consequences. Thus, they intentionally, and knowingly, put themselves into a situation where they were endangering their lives. They also had failed to report to Reuters that they would be in the area, or even in the city of Bagdhad. It was only because one of the reporters was talking to a third man on his cell phone that Reuters found out where they were.
Third, recovered from the scene were one (or more) AK-47 fully automatic rifles, and two RPG7 rocket launchers with two warheads. One of the RPG rounds was actually found under the body of the cameraman.
Fourth, also recovered were the two Canon EOS cameras used by the reporters. The last images on the cameraman at the corner (the one found on the RPG round) were beautiful pictures of the lightly armored side of a Humvee about a block away from them. These are included in the investigative report. Were an RPG to have been fired from his position, those American soldiers would have died.
Again, with perfect knowledge, we know that the guy leaning around the corner is holding a camera with a long lens. To an Apache gunner, guarding the convoy below, it looks like a big tube, and the guy is standing over an RPG round (remember, it was found under him) pointing right down the street at the troops the Apache is supposed to be protecting.
That convoy had already received small arms fire (the reason for calling in the Apache air support) and was attempting to move through the area.
Now, consider what the Apache pilot knew. He has been called in to protect an armored column that has been taking fire from insurgents in the area. He (and a second Apache) spot a group of armed men, one holding an RPG (which rules out the idea of "bodyguards" floated so often in this discussion.) approaching the route of the column he's been called in to protect. These men brandish the weapons, and then gather around a blind corner on the route of the column. One of them, apparently holding a long, straight tube, leans around the corner and sights down the tube directly at the column of soldiers.
Still think that "unprovoked" applies? The mere presence of an RPG means that this is not just a bunch of guys taking pictures. So the attack is provoked.
As for "indiscriminate"? Seriously? When the guy is down and wounded, and not carrying a weapon, they do not fire. Admittedly they beg for him to "give them a reason," but they do not fire. "Indiscriminate?" I think not.
At every step of the way, they are getting cleared by commanders watching the same video feed, the commanders have the feed from two different Apaches to make those decisions (and apparently a UAV in the area as well.) We are seeing a single viewpoint. And we can slow-mo and zoom in on the video in a light-controlled office environment, with all the leisure to scroll back and forth and take closer looks. We are not in the heat, light, and adrenaline rush of a helicopter cockpit, buffeted by noise, smoke,and wind, and fearing for the lives of the men below who are counting on us to protect them.
The "FACT" can only come with perfect knowledge after the facts are known, and even then, you have to ignore most of the facts to come to that conclusion.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
The area had been quite for well over 5mins. Watch the unedited version. The entire city was an area with really loud cannon rounds all over the place all the time. The pilot even said they didn't have weapons but appeared to taking the wounded away, and "Fuck let us shoot". What rules of engagement is that? Lets not forget they lied about getting shot at in the first place.
Standing up for this will not help. Watch the full video, you even get a sense of the attitude between the ground forces and the airborne calvary unit.
Real soldiers who where there in Iraq are condemning these actions. Real pilots are too.
And lets not forget this is their *home city*. This is where they live, America made it a "war zone", where shooting unarmed people (by the pilots own admission) who are rescuing the wounded (a fellow country man) is apparently fair game for burst of 30mm cannon rounds by the American version of the rules of engagement.
If I was a middle eastern country right now, i would be very supportive of a government that was trying to get nukes. It seems to be the only way to be treated as a sovereign country.
Since when does rescuing the wounded *unarmed* get a kill on site order.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
This was not unfortunate. It was a fucking war crime without kids. The pilot even said that they are unarmed, but picking up a body/wounded more than 5mins after the first firefight (if thats what you call it). That is against every country's rules of engagement there is. The pilot is swearing about getting permission to fire on the van, that is not shooting, has no weapons, and not picking up weapons.
It was not a fucking accident.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!