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WikiLeaks Publishes Cable Archive In Full
We recently discussed news that WikiLeaks had complained of a password leak which threatened the encryption of unredacted documents contained in the Cablegate archive. Now, reader solanum writes with this update:
"According to the Guardian, 'WikiLeaks has published its full archive of 251,000 secret US diplomatic cables, without redactions, potentially exposing thousands of individuals named in the documents to detention, harm or putting their lives in danger. The move has been strongly condemned by the five previous media partners – the Guardian, New York Times, El Pais, Der Spiegel and Le Monde – who have worked with WikiLeaks publishing carefully selected and redacted documents.' In the same article The Guardian gives further explanation of the controversy reported earlier, suggesting that Assange went against standard protocol in providing the master password to the newspaper."
Oh. My. God.
standard protocol to publish a source's password?
...this could be interesting.
Wasn't this the article WL claimed was an attempt to cover the fact that the Guardian released the password to cables.csv?
...seems to me a contradiction in terms. Like, "Commanding" "Escapes".
A leak is not a flow - a leak is a nascent torrent.
The guardian password thing was a mistake. A big mistake.
The solution however is NOT to go all in and betray the trust of the sources. This sort of thing is just what you'd need to kill Wikileaks forever.
If it was due to a mistake, an accident or hacking, we might move on, but this is big stuff.
The release of the whole batch means that any negotiation to avoid the worst criminal penalties for Assange and others has failed. These people know they are going to be seeing little but the cinderblock walls of a detention facility for many years. They're giving up.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
The Guardian essentially pretends now that Wikileaks have taken this decision and by doing so have placed a lot of people at risk.
This deceit is evident several places in the article. That is the deceitful picture they are trying to paint.
The truth is that all of the cables were already accessible to anyone who wanted that access worldwide, including intelligence agencies.
You can argue about "blame": was the blame on Assange who apparently reused a password, on the Wikileaks people who spread that file around as a form of "insurance", or on the person from The Guardian who wrote what the password was in his book?
But you can't argue that Wikileaks now has sole responsibility for placing people at risk. That responsibility is down to all the aforementioned participants.
The exact division of blame can be argued about, but a picture that Wikileaks now places someone at risk that wasn't placed at risk earlier through joint efforts is monumentally deceitful.
en tee
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
How fascist of you.
Ok, Wikileaks follows the rules, redacts names and other information. And the US government goes after them. Did the government expect anything less?
Never try to play hard ball unless you ware willing to get hit with a bat.
As his sexual escapades fade from the public's attention, he needs something new to keep his name on everyone's mind. It would appear that he has found a way to do just that.
This may not make him very popular with a lot of people, though. I would say that if a close relative were to be dragged out into the street and killed because of his covert association with the US or other government I might be inspired to do Mr. Assange some real damage. So how many chances has he now exposed for some pissed-off relative to decide to make him pay?
While discrediting him might have had a role in the sex charges against him, losing credibility is a small thing compared to losing his life. Many of the countries where covert operations have been going on do not bother much with legal niceities - a spy for the US would just be killed out of hand with a cheering crowd standing by. The relations of such a person aren't going to be constrained by the legal system anywhere either.
For perspective on this, I suggest the movie "Next of Kin" for an example of how a less legalistic culture deals with transgressors against their family.
WikiFloods?
According to the article, the full set of cables was released in a encrypted form in December 2010, and The Guardian released the password in a book in February 2011. I guess from that point of view, the cat was already out of the bag.
I guess to anyone who's directly interested in endangering the sources and/or identified parties put two and two together back then, so this may be of little impact from that aspect. Perhaps WikiLeaks was trying to give the impression that they're still in control before everyone else figures out the connection anyway?
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
Stop playing Calimero, it doesn't become you.
So by your example I shouldn't have protection of anonymity for informing the police of a local drug dealer... even though I'd have reasonable fear of reprisals for doing so....
Huh?
Again, i know you americans are going to go berserk when you hear this, but any one who enrolls in an effort that is for unjust invasion and occupation of foreign countries, kidnap and torture of individuals, repression, suppression and so on are responsible with what they have helped.
and no - 'good intentions' while joining does not matter - you should quit acting a dastardly act when you discover it is a dastardly act. and again no, there is no distinction in between those who actually perpetuate the tortures and the random clerk shipping items out of a warehouse for the organization - the clerk is STILL aiding that organization with its effort. if people working on this level were more conscious and chose not to work for these organizations, then the bastards doing the dastardly acts would not be able to do them.
political views, threat assessments, security and so on does not matter in this regard : torture is torture, occupation is occupation.
it is also ironic that you people are ok with people like us working in private sector to be responsible for all their choices of their employment, for the better or for the worse, and go talking about the 'free market' and the 'realities of life' when something shitty happens to any particular segment of the workforce, but, SOMEHOW, start to see things in a different way when someone working for a torture organization gets into danger because of who they work for.
Read radical news here
Usually when people go from having controversial views or methods, to having controversial views or methods and don't mind having innocent people die along the way, they go from the label of "activist" to "terrorist".
In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
I have your ID, your post, and the date and time... So what did you say about being anonymous???
... expect to get burned. What will be fascinating to me is to see if the editors who were complicit in working with Assange won't also suffer criminal penalties. Probably they'll get away unscathed, but their efforts were not helpful.
since the interests of the U.S. are stealing, mass murdering and maiming for wealth and power, what's the problem?
Wikileaks made the encrypted archive available long ago so shouldn't the headline here point out the newer and more interesting bit - that the Guardian released the key after signing an agreement not to?
First the Guardian published the master password for the cables.csv file, which made all those names of informants and what not publicly available. Now that Wikileaks is also making the same information available that the Guardian first made public to everyone, the Guardian is trying to paint this disclosure of information as an irresponsible move by Wikileaks.
The only thing you can blame Wikileaks for, afaik, is to make that same information available via a search interface (besides the fact that they gave the real password to the Guardian). But it's not like people who had really bad intentions for uses of that information couldn't set something like that up themselves (and probably already did), which I assume is what motivated them to do this.
Donate free food here
While this seems quite dastardly of Wikileaks to do, let's be realistic - Many if not all of the entities we are concerned about obtaining the unredacted information do indeed have access to these 'sophisticated technical skills' the Guardian is speaking about. Wikileaks may be putting the information in the hands of more people, but you can't imply that by having the password in the open that it wasn't already in the hands of the wrong people.
If anything, Wikileaks making the data available allows more people to prepare for the impact of having the unredacted information in the "wrong hands"
NWO false flag operation. How else do you think that Wikileaks got the information in the first place. They are nothing more than a NOW propaganda mill. The majority of this info is all fake.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
What are the odds on Assange living long enough to publish documents detailing the plan to take him out?
Everybody knows when 5 people know a secret (such as the whereabouts of encrypted documents), soon it will be 10, then 100. You don't publish a password to them.
Who exactly at Wikileaks Authorized this? Cause it sounds like either the guys running it gave up and are going scorched earth since they think they are screwed anyways but it also reminds me of them old stories were cops would infiltrate a peaceful protest and then make the few moles act up so they can aggressively take down the protest they would have been legally unable to do otherwise.
I would want to know authorized this and his connections outside of Wikileaks.
And even the title of the Slashdot post is spinning. Everyone knew Wikileaks published this file, it was insurance if anything should happen to Julian. That Wikileaks re-used a known password for this file is bad security practices [tm], and that Guardian published the password is beyond belief.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
and taking anyone near it down the abyss with it.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
You seem to be confused. You are directing your anger at the american people in response to decisions made by the american government.
If you think the government and "the people" are one and the same, then you haven't been paying attention to the past 2000 years of history. It is precisely the fact that they are NOT the same which defines government -- it is the one organization holding the unique "right" to employ physical force as a business model. "The people" are the rest of us who do NOT hold that right.
That is the only true objective definition of government. Everything else is subjective. Opinion, not fact.
How can a government and "the people" possibly be one and the same, as long as that special right to employ coercion against the people exists? Human nature tells us that coercion is the mode of human interaction that *violates* human rights. Logically, one who employs coercion against you -- in other words, working against your interest -- can't possibly be working for your interest at the same time.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but ultimately the US is looking out for the interests of the US. Countries doing what they think is best for their country, even if it is sneaky, treacherous, or deceitful has been around for a long time. In the end the world is still dog eat dog.
The question people in the US should be asking is if the actions that things like wikileaks exposes is really good for them as citizens of US? If another country gets screwed over a bit (or even a lot) to benefit in the end people living in the US then the citizens shouldn't care. If their results end up hurting people in the US then they should get angry.
Anyway, welcome to the real world, where everything is not touchy-feely happiness, but hard, cold politics and diplomacy, just like it has been for the last 4000 years.
In the article a former WL states that Assange was lazy and just re-used an old password that was the same as the one shared with the Guardian.
If so then two things:
a) Guardian was stupid to publish a password
b) Assange was really careless for re-using a password, considering the spotlight on WL
Anyways, WL had a reasonable set-up with the five media outlets that should have used and that would have provided some sort of support. That's gone now.
Yeah, I do think it's pretty mindless to release all the info raw. Let's hope that there are no victims of circumstance.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Note that the link, is from the Guardian, from the same guy who deliberately published the document in the first place.
Guardian is after wikileaks, bigtime. It's incredibly damning of them.
I totally reject your flippant attitude toward evil doing by the USA, or notion that we should excuse it because that's historically normal. We claim to stand for justice, freedom and human rights, and that is what should guide our actions. If our interests, and we ourselves, get harmed *because* we do evil, then GOOD. we deserve it, and should take that harm which we reap from sowing evil as warning to change our ways to what we know is right.
You have the attitude of every tyrant's lackey and every large corporation which profits on human misery's minion. It is wrong
MuthaFuckas ~SEE Ya I wouldn't want to BE Ya
Its at least apparent or at least should be apparent, the level of intelligence, this enemy..
We can now stop with all covert operations and start with clean slate.
Isn't anyone else troubled by the hubris and amorality of Assange et al, holding the encrypted, unredacted file as a weapon over the heads of all the people whose lives are in danger if he himself is threatened? Sure, he embarrasses the US some more, but what about the people IN the files?
The fact that Wikileaks' incompetence, coupled with the Guardian's, led to the "accidental" disclosure is almost irrelevant because the information would eventually have leaked anyway. Five newsrooms and a bunch of hacktivists are not exactly a recipe for information security. It's consequences-be-damned hubris, pure and simple. What kills me is the relative irrelevance of the data. Well done, Julian! You've already cost people their livelihoods. Lives are next.
And you think every other country in the world will play by the same rules? Sorry that is not the case.
The problem is that's the goal of governments much more insidious than the US, and this can give them a leg up.
It's fine now to bash on the US, (yes, we're all about "mass murder".. you nutbag) but nothing's perfect, and when China or Iran are the primary superpower in the world, you really think things will be better?
Are the people ordering secret infiltrations and propping up dictators. Maybe if the US and their allies had an ounce of moral conscience we'd have a much safer and more pleasant world.
Democracy is not about secrets. Fuck 'em if they think it is in the national interest. That still is not, no fucking way, about democracy. It is the thinking process of kings and feudal lords.
Does it endanger our nation or its operatives? Maybe. How endangering is it to have tyranny? Better we have an open society than a society of spies and propaganda.
We're going to be hated either way. Our crime is being powerful, the excuse is that we're dicks about it.
You shouldn't snitch on people whose only "crime" is participating in a free market.
Snitches get stitches for talking like bitches.
In big boy politics NEITHER side cares about a few dead guys. Anyone not getting this needs to grow up.
Jihadists kill their enemies, anti-Jihadists kill their enemies, and anti-anti-Jihadists HELP Jihadists kill anti-Jihadists.
There is no "neutral way to participate".
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
If dealers like that didn't prey on the young and get them hooked, my cousin would still be alive today.
So yeah, I snitch.
Everything goes somewhere, and I go everywhere.
There is no news. There is only the truth of the signal. What I see. And, there's the puppet theater the Parliament jesters foist on the somnambulant public.
Anyone who knows shit about dealing with information knows that journalists are extremely tech unsavy and not giving them their own archive and hand holding when it comes to passwords, crypto, etc.
GPG/PGP aren't hard to use. If that was going to stymie a journalist from participating, then good, they weren't smart enough to be in this particular club. After all, if they're that dumb they might just go and publish their own password... oh, wait.
P.S. - 'time limited password' on a static file? Either Assange is an idiot or the journalist is just making stuff up to try to cover his ass. I don't suspect the former.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You know, where I come from we grab a beer and a bag of chips and get comfortable. Buckling up isn't comfortable. Looks silly too.
If their results end up hurting people in the US then they should get angry.
"Should"? I think the individual "should" decide that for themselves. I'm not really angry either way.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Should we organize and post a redaction guide, so that the documents are already redacted by the time they get to wikileaks or any other publisher?
As is oft stated here, information wants to be free.
If you are a leaker, you have to assume that ANYTHING you send to someone electronically will be published to the entire population of the planet. That is, after all, why you want to leak something - to make it public.
What this episode has shown is that potential leakers CANNOT trust any organization to do redacting, they must do that before hand if the feel it is needed. It's not like you could trust them anyway, as you never know who really backs any organization you might be sending data to and thus could forward all details to someone, but this just makes it painfully clear.
My position was always that any organization managing leaks must publish everything. Otherwise, they can editorially omit details to say whatever they like.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
OK, I sort of agree, but seriously how the hell is Iran going to end up a superpower?
Did anyone seriously think that the complete unredacted cables wouldn't end up getting loose once this dance started way back in November 2010?
(If so, maybe you think all the campaign promises you'll hear in the 2012 election are highly reliable.)
You can blame or hail anyone you like for this. But when something like this gets this much coverage and publicity, it's an excellent bet that full info will be leaked by someone.
They were thinking ... that The Guardian had already published the password to the "insurance" file in a book so they might as well let everybody have access, not just the bad guys.
My understanding is that the Guardian did not publish the password to the insurance file, that it published the password to a temporary file that Assange said would only exist for a few hours. The password was interesting in that it provides some insight into Assange's thinking. Assange giving the password to the Guardian was also insightful, demonstrating great contempt for journalists (can you remember this missing word). What the Guardian did not know, and what Assange is greatly negligent and responsible for is the recycling/reuse of the password for other files and/or the failure to delete the temporary file. This is terribly amateurish handling of extremely critical data.
standard protocol to publish a source's password?
Actually it was kind of interesting. The password itself provides some insight into Assange's thinking and the interaction between the journalist and Assange was insightful in that Assange demonstrates great contempt (can you remember this missing word).
... was the blame on Assange who apparently reused a password ...
Essentially the blame is on Assange. The Guardian had no knowledge that Assange was reusing passwords, they were told by Assange this was a password for a temporary file that will be deleted in a few hours. The Guardian shares blame to the extent that they assumed Assange was competent at data security.
Looking at the patterns of his behavior over the last couple of years...
Is Assange a textbook psychopath? There doesn't seem to be a shadow of guilt over anything.
Your argument is we must steal because other governments steal, we must murder because other govermsent do, we should disregard human rights because other governments do? there is no way we can be prosperous unless we do those things?
It was a password to a temporary archive which they were told would only be up for a limited time, and that only they and Assange had access to. If Assange was dumb enough to let other people get a hold of the same archive that's his fault, not The Guardian's. The Guardian's view of this is interesting, too - they've been discussing working together since the password became known, and Assange has only just turned.
He has his own agenda.
You care about someone hypothetically hating us for doing the right things, but right now we're currently doing evil. that's silly. What is happening is that our wealth is being drained by doing bad things. We support evil regimes and enslavers even if it means destroying entire domestic industries, we loot and war for power and profit, we give massive loans to failing large business models even while the core of our economy is small and medium business who get nothing, etc. etc.
In big boy politics NEITHER side cares about a few dead guys. Anyone not getting this needs to grow up.
Jihadists kill their enemies, anti-Jihadists kill their enemies, and anti-anti-Jihadists HELP Jihadists kill anti-Jihadists.
There is no "neutral way to participate".
Tell my wife I said "Hello.".
It looks like the whole wikileaks, and all related like openleaks, issue (to whom ever it is an issue) is solving itself. It is really rather unfortunate to see this play out in such a childish way. The general idea, to provide a save haven for whistleblowers is really something valuable, but it does not look like the current platforms are the hands of capable and responsible people. So something valuable is really getting lost here since any future attempt at a similar institution will have it that much harder to become credible. Lots of ego play at work here, which is very unfortunate. It seems like the greater goal has gotten out of sight.
Nobody forces you to get a security clearance and the process of getting one is intense. You don't get one by accident. Believe me, as a former holder of a TS/SCI clearance, the rules and the consequences of breaking them are crystal clear from the get go. BTW, an SCI (aka codeword) clearance gives you access to raw data that could indicate the source of the information. Leaking that is considered particularly heinous within the intelligence community, as it can endanger human and other sources.
So, you chose to jump through all the hoops to get your clearance, you agreed to keep national secrets, then you changed your mind somewhere along the line. Now you are blabbing and deserve to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Life without the possibility of parole sounds good. Say hi to Bubba for me.
If you went in with the intention of spying, I have even less sympathy.
Excepting in recent years its been changed via active judiciaries, bypassing the amendment process. There's a reason it's HARD to pass an amendment. Meanwhile we've allowed men in black robes to effectively alter our founding documents based on how they feel.
This is the way the system was designed. Those "men in black robes" have the power and the mandate to interpret the law, including the Constitution.
I won't sit here and act like they don't ever screw up. Indeed, a lot of times they do. Sometimes the system needs correction. Plessy v. Ferguson, anyone? But when such is the case, the solution isn't to sit around whining about "active judiciaries," that's just stupid. If judiciaries weren't active, they wouldn't be upholding their Constitutional duty. The solution is to use the checks and balances system to rectify the situation, to put people in office with similar ideals to yours so that you will get judges who are aligned with what you think our society needs. Brown v. Board of Education, anyone?
I can't tell you how frustrating it is to see people whining about "activist judges." That's just a cop-out codeword for, "they didn't rule how I wanted them to."
01. Assange re-used WikiLeaks's master password.
02. This password was then placed in the Guardian's book on the embassy cables.
03. A WikiLeaks activist put the encrypted files on BitTorrent.
04. A disillusioned WikiLeaks activist told German magazine Freitag about the password.
05. WikiLeaks posted detailed tweets giving clues about where the password could be found.
06. These files were posted on Cryptome.
You're a nut. Why do you keep posting comments asking people why they won't reveal their real name, address, and phone number?
why do you cower in my shadow behind a chosen japanese dance style based pseudonym, feeb?
you're completely pathetic.
It appears that for security against an attack possibly destroying the whole lot of the cables, or all WikkiLeaks archives, copies of the cables, if not the whole archives were made and distributed to be stored around the Web.
If the unredacted cables, protected by the earlier password, were distributed to several storage sites then, and were then re-copied by receivers for additional security, 'just in case', the extra copies, all protected by the same master-password then, would continue to be accessible using that password even after the password for the original archive, and the known copies (those distributed by WikiLeaks, itself) was changed. The extra copies, if not destroyed or updated to the new passworrd, would remain in Web-Land, still accessible using the original password.
In this case it would make no difference if Assange changed the password. Once that original password was released through The Guardian error the remaining archive copies still keyed to the released password would remain accessible through the old password.
The error causing the release would, in this case, be failue to anticipate that the ready copyability computers and web provide makes changes of passwords on files that have been let loose, or have escaped from single-owner custody, into cloned copies futile.
Finally, we know who the traitors who sell their country to the US are. Now we can round them up and fire and sue them, or even lower ourselves to the US level and execute them.
for these silly wikileaks people. all their fault that after 10 years there is no specific definition of victory, our main allies are corrupt, election stealing drug lords, and the unfunded pakistani school system allows millions of poverty stricken children to enter more brainwashing madrassas every year.
the rules are not 'clear from the get go'. Thomas Drake was recently prosecuted under the Espionage act for having in his posession a document clearly marked UNCLASSIFIED.
read the case, read the government arguments.
then read about all the high officials and heads of governments who have leaked or mishandled information in the past - including President Reagan's head of DCI Bill Casey who was a scatterbrain and mishandled documents all the time, then there was the leak of the DEA operation in the 80s that lead to the death of Barry Seal, then there was Nixon wanting to leak the Pentagon Papers in order to make Johnson look bad, then the last one is Obama's leaking of information about the assassination of Bin Ladin, then there was Bush's people leaking info about Plame.
leaking is how Congress and the Executive communicate with the media. you shut down leaking, especially in todays overclassification culture, where menus for picnics are marked 'For Official Use Only', and what you are doing is shutting down the flow of information in a democracy, which leads to an ignorant voting public.
On the other hand, this full list of cables is invaluable for historians, both US historians and historians of the concerned countries. Knowing how the US government interacted with their governments is very important for the public to know. So this full disclosure is overall a good thing. However, those cables would have been declassified -- redacted -- in relatively short terms (10 years was typical for most of them), and for historians, 10 years isn't all that much to wait. But knowing in near real-time what lead up to the Arab Spring is still quite intriguing.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Ooh! Ooh! Do me next!
Your brain is not a computer.
You forgot to call him a "feeb."
Your brain is not a computer.
When I first read this summary I thought that The Guardian had access to all the information, but is trying to blame wikileaks for publishing the information. Good thing some smart people saw through this but the headline will probably get noticed the most that wikileaks published "251,000 secret US diplomatic cables". Sometimes when something doesn't make sense upon parsing, it is a good idea to look beyond the headline to see what is really being said. i.e. "The Dow Jones was up 50 points today" making it seam like the US economy is really recovering when in fact it was down more on previous days. or "The Canadian economy created 100,000 more jobs" when in fact the jobs were in the service sector or part time or even in the State's case when jobs created are not reported with jobs lost. BTW Where in the heck is all the news stories regarding homelessness of families when the insurance companies foreclosed on homes? Oh yeah, that falls in with the coverage of the US politics "Do you like thin or thick crust pizza?"
Society use your Sciences
The guardian password thing was a mistake. A big mistake. It is a great loss of a student.
I'm glad you take responsibility for the things your nation is doing. Too many of us are pointing at the other guy. Can we send you and GWB to Iraq as a peace offering? "Sorry, mkay?"
I feel that if we as a nation break a law we claim to hold sacred we should either pay up or get rid of the hypocritical law. If we want to go to war on faked evidence we should start allowing murder defendants back home an automatic self-defense defense if they'll provide a doctored photo of the victim with a weapon.
Because that way we'd have some fucking credibility, and when the next thug stood up we'd have real allies instead of lackeys. This way we're stroking a white cat and clutching our doomsday weapons, watching our fancily uniformed soldiers kicking down doors looking for the hero, and never noticing that the camera isn't giving us the favorable angles anymore.
Because he's posted his real name, address, and phone number multiple times and nothing bad has happened to him yet.