Pentagon Seeking Out Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange

clustro writes "The Pentagon is desperately seeking the 'cooperation' of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, in order to stop him from releasing over 250,000 pages of confidential foreign policy documents. The documents were allegedly provided to Assange by Bradley Manning, the same solider who leaked a video showing a US Army helicopter killing unarmed civilians and international press correspondents."

Comments

Re:As they should be.

[Jafafa Hots]

Ever hear of the Pentagon Papers?
Classification is supposed to be used to protect the American people, not protect criminals in office, or protect certain classes' privileges, or protect certain corporations' contracts, or to DECEIVE the American public.

If you are privy to misuse of the law in such a way or of such abuses, it's the patriotic and moral thing to do to expose them.

We don't know (yet) what this information is, but breaking the law is sometimes justified if the law is unjust or is being used to protect uinjust actions.

The person taking such action, choosing to break a law they see as wrong faces the consequences knowingly. History will judge whether they were right or wrong.

And in general we should be uncomfortable with the idea of our government deciding that we don;t have a right to know what its doing - pretty much goes against the ideas behind the founding of this country and is abhorrent to anyone not having an authoritarian mindset.

Somehow I'm sure our country and citizens will manage to survive the release of this information that the government feels it must protect us from.

Re:As they should be.

[jdpars]

Section 3. Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. The Congress shall have power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted. Constitution > Webster

Re:We promise we won't hurt you.

[cappp]

The Wired article http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/state-department-anxious/ provides a little more detail.

The things that stood out to me:

According to the Daily Beast, Manning apparently had “special access to cables prepared by diplomats and State Department officials throughout the Middle East regarding the workings of Arab governments and their leaders.” The cables date back several years and traversed interagency computer networks that are available to the Army. They contain information about U.S. diplomatic and intelligence efforts in the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones, the diplomat said.

In chats with Lamo that Wired.com has examined, Manning said he had access to two classified networks from two separate secured laptops: SIPRnet, the Secret-level network used by the Department of Defense and the State Department, and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System which serves both agencies at the Top Secret/SCI level. The networks, he said, were both “air-gapped” from unclassified networks, but the environment at the base made it easy to smuggle data out. “I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga,’ erase the music then write a compressed split file,” he wrote. “No one suspected a thing and, odds are, they never will.” “listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history,” he added later. ”Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counterintelligence, inattentive signal analysis a perfect storm.” Regarding the State Department cables specifically, Manning told Lamo, “State dept fucked itself. Placed volumes and volumes of information in a single spot, with no security.”

Manning described personal issues that got him into trouble with his superiors and left him socially isolated. He said he had been demoted after he punched a colleague in the face during an argument, and was reassigned to a job in a supply office pending early discharge. He also told Lamo, “I’m restricted to SIPR now, because of the discharge proceedings.”

But in his chats with Lamo, Manning told the ex-hacker that all traces of evidence had been deleted from his work computers as part of the troop-withdrawal procedures that have started in Iraq. “I had two computers. One connected to SIPRnet the other to JWICS,” he wrote. “They’ve been zero-filled. Because of the pullout, evidence was destroyed by the system itself.” He also told Lamo that network security monitoring and logging was ineffective or nonexistent. “There’s god-awful accountability of IP addresses,” he wrote. “The network was upgraded, and patched up so many times, and systems would go down, logs would be lost. And when moved or upgraded, hard drives were zeroed. It’s impossible to trace much on these field networks."

Re:As they should be.

[Protoslo]

First of all, I think that people do need a video to realize that war, and in particular the Iraq war, is tragic and disturbing. It's one thing to hear that lots of civilians are mistakenly killed in the course of our military occupations, it's another thing altogether to see some of the exact circumstances in which that occurs.

Do you recall the story that broke soon after the video, regarding a house that special forces stormed on bad intel, in which various people were killed, including two women that the soldiers apparently arranged deceptively so that they could claim in their report that they were previously killed in an "honor killing?" The incident that the commanding general of SOCOM had to fork over a wad of cash and apologize for? If there had been a video of that, with black-clad soldiers going "Oh shit! I think these people were just civilians!" and then digging out their rounds from the bodies, tying them up, artfully arranging them, and discussing their cover story, how do you think that would have gone over? Instead of everyone forgetting in a few weeks, we'd still be watching the congressional hearings on CSPAN.

Regarding the guncam video, do you find the destruction of the van, and the attack on the building with missiles while apparent bystanders walk by to be equally unavoidable as the deaths of the journalists? I am a little surprised that the video didn't at least make you wonder at all about the wisdom of the RoE they were operating under. You don't have to demonize the pilots and gunners personally to find fault in the incident. The military's reports found that the crewmen did make the right call in every case, and summarily declared all 20+ men killed in the various attacks "AIF" (Anti-Iraq Forces), so you can't write everything off as a tragic mistake; it was tragic official policy.

Even if all of these things are rendered "unavoidable" by our political need for near-airtight force protection (like the dozens of unarmed civilians killed at Afghan road checkpoints), many people are not aware that they occur. If everyone knew exactly what went on in Iraq and Afghanistan, they might not support the military missions there (or future hypothetical invasions) so much; war reporting certainly had that effect during Vietnam. If no one ever gets outraged, what motivation is there to avoid these entanglements, or even to try harder to avoid civilian casualties in the conflicts we are already fighting?

I can only imagine that all the random milita members on the streets with rifles and RPGs that day didn't realize that the helicopters ~1km away were or could be targeting them. I agree that the Reuters stringers took a foolish risk, and that the initial incident is not indefensible. Maybe "AIF" ambushes are always that ridiculously nonchalant. Everything that happens afterward, though...

Also keep in mind that the only reason anyone (any American) ever cared about this incident was that it was subsequently discovered that two of the "AIF" were Reuters stringers. Imagine how many incidents there must have been where people who didn't work for a major Western news organization were creatively classified as insurgents. I'm sure that some of them weren't pointing giant telephoto lenses at the Bradley convoy down the block, and would be harder to blame for their own demises.

Re:As they should be.

[siddesu]

And Hitler was elected in democratic elections as well.

No, he wasn't, stop spreading that BS please. Hitler was appointed by Hindenburg, then engineered the Reichstag fire, then enacted draconian laws on grounds of security, used that to rig the next election, which still didn't bring him majority. He then forced Hindenburg out, forced the new Reichstag into giving him legislative powers, effectively suspended the constitution, and then proceeded on to murder his opposition in and outside of his party, and, finally, using the "emergency" legislative powers to declare himself a Furher. Or somesuch. But he was never elected at any point of his national political career by a majority.