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."

Comments

Fantastic, stunning deceit by The Guardian

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Fantastic, stunning deceit by The Guardian

[epine]

Wow, this is not a topic which brings out the best thinking skills.

There was a time in a galaxy near you when homosexuals were regarded as inherently criminal, due to the prominence of newspaper headlines that read "Homosexual man slays ..." compared to the shocking dearth of headlines reading "Straight man slays ..."

Some of the headlines read "Hell's Angel slays ..." but somehow our bucket brains don't make the daring inference to file this headline also under the bucket "straight man slays ..." leading to the conclusion that there are a lot of gay killers prowling the neighbourhood.

But wait, just in, the human bucket brain sometimes makes errors of judgement:
Murder charges may unfairly tarnish military's reputation

We all know about the Streisand effect, I suppose because it's the simplest effect to understand, and takes the least effort to invoke: the fact of its mention in loud conversation makes it true--can't get any less risky than that.

How about the Turing effect? Now pay attention, this one is more difficult. Take a society that is so hung up on mother nature connecting positive to negative (and not any other way) that it conducts criminal proceedings against a war hero for what I would describe as a victimless crime (as compared to drinking and driving, or failing to abide by food safety regulations). Where was Winston Tippler Churchill when Turing needed a strong character reference? There's a crime for you, in my opinion. As a result of the criminal proceeding--in which no one mentions that Turing contributed more to the war effect than any ace fighter pilot--Turing is forced to undergo therapy which causes him to grow breasts (not cruel, not unusual) and then he kills himself. Why does no one who knows anything come to his defense? Well, we've got these secrets, you see, and it's better if no one knows anything. In fact, it's policy. Makes the world a better place.

I would venture to guess this did not bring out the best side of human nature in the homosexual population who skulked around feeling paranoid, ostracized, and excluded lest they become the unwitting center of attention in a pagan ritual of social uptightness. And furthermore, the morally uptight consist entirely of law-abiding do-gooders who would never threaten pagan outcomes in acts of social extortion.

If you're inside the intelligence establishment, this is all pretty cool. By applying the right kind of pressure, your target might just self-destruct in a puddle of stress and paranoia and improbable denials. Even by that standard, I'm coming around to the opinion that Assange is an asshole. He was assisted in arriving at this place by other assholes, who will forever remain dark shadows where the secrets lurk.

Turing took the honorable way out. He was persecuted by the state, none of his friends showed up to defend him, he grew breasts, then killed himself. He never passed a single secret to Julian Assange. Just like the witch tossed into the river who drowns in a way that proves she wasn't a witch in the first place.

But what if some future Alan Turing takes the growing of breasts the wrong way and slips an embarrassing state secret or two to the likes of Julian Assange?

Two options for the intelligence establishment:
A) Admit that persecuting a war hero for a victimless deviancy was pretty fucking stupid.
B) Double down on the need for secrecy and the portrayal of anyone who favours a system of checks and balances as suffering from moral turpitude (coming right up, on the silver platter of the bell hop of dirty tricks).

These geniuses of deceit have trouble with option A. Funny that. But think about it from their side: the Soviets might try to extort Turing into cooperation by threatening to spill his deviant acts to a socie

Re:What on earth were they thinking?

[Penguinisto]

Nah... a few folks will have a good reason to be worried, but otherwise the world at large won't see the effects for a long time, if ever.

Now Wikileaks OTOH, is about to be labeled a terrorist organization and removed from the face of the Earth by any means necessary - legal or not legal. They had a shot at being left to remain in existence when they had some sort of underdog nobility to play on, but now? I suspect someone at the CIA, Interpol, and various other places around the globe are quietly whispering the same thing 'Oh, it's *on* now, bitches...'

(rightly or wrongly, I suspect that's how it's going to be played out).

Re:What are they thinking?

[Samantha Wright]

That's not it at all. The documents were already in enemy hands because the file was shared over BitTorrent. The password was already in enemy hands because the Guardian published it. All WikiLeaks is doing at this point is evening the playing field by letting those interested parties who didn't get a chance have an opportunity to dig through them. This mostly means the people without the resources to have put things together already—i.e., the informants at risk, whose names were redacted in the first place.

Re:What on earth were they thinking?

[Samantha Wright]

They were thinking something along the lines of "the Guardian already gave the bad guys our secrets, so let's make sure the people at risk have a chance to look through the cables, see if they're mentioned, and take appropriate self-defensive measures, since we don't have the resources to approach them all privately."

Guardian covering their ass

[Halo1]

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.

Re:What on earth were they thinking?

[shentino]

I think what happened is that the Guardian stabbed them in the back and gave all the governments in the world the excuse they needed to go after Wikileaks.

So now Wikileaks is deciding to go out with a bang before someone slits their throat and denies them even a whimper.

Re:What are they thinking?

[Joce640k]

There's only one cow. It was already out.

The fact that you weren't aware that it was already out is the reason why Wikileaks had to do this - make sure *everybody* knows.

Re:Buckle up folks...

[NeutronCowboy]

I know it's an AC, but I'm replying anyway because this is a widely held belief in certain circles.

When media asked Assange about the risks to human lives because of their first releases, Assange stated that he didn't care and that their deaths served his purposes well. Assange is a sociopath and repeatedly on recorded saying people deserve to die for his cause and that its a just death.

Complete bullshit. I know exactly what story you're talking about: http://wikileaks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/12/07/which_is_it_mr_assange The deaths occurred because the Kenyan people decided to riot and face death of their own accord, a decision they based on information leaked on Wikileaks. These people actively chose to fight a tyrant. They weren't executed based on information in the leak.

In short, just the fuck up. You don't have a clue.

even more damning is the guardian

[poetmatt]

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.

Re:What on earth were they thinking?

[Penguinisto]

Good luck with that... we're talking (potentially) thousands of informants globally, many of whom are not in a position (for various but legitimate reasons) to simply pack their families up and go.

If you've ever tried any sort of large logistics operation on short notice, you'd discover pretty quickly just how tough it is to get anything done on a large scale. It would take a month or so at best, and multiple months at worst. Now, try moving a global-wide network of different people, most of whom you may or may not have contact with on a regular (let alone frequent) basis. A huge percentage of these informants have no access to the Internet in order to even check on their own (see also North Korea, Pakistan, etc) Long story short, it would be frickin' impossible on short notice.

Sorry, but the fault lies with the leaker for treason, The Guardian for incompetence, with Wikileaks for being narcissistic idiots and broadcasting the potential hit list in plain daylight, and with all the idealistic useful idiots who, without thinking it through, wholeheartedly and unreservedly supported them.

Re:There is a deeper meaning here

[drolli]

No i am not. follow the full story and you get a different picture.

a) Torrenting is just a very spectacular way to insure the existence of a document. Among all possible ways it is the least preferable. The preferred on involves copying the data on 50 DVDs and sending or giving these to the partner newspapers. The decision to use torrent in this way was the wrong one, no matter if you agree with it or not, since it only left one barrier (obtaining a not-so-high entropy password) for any interested party.

b) the standard way to handle encrypted material is *not* to give pwds directly. The standard way is to hand over the key, which is protected by a passphrase, and give this passphrase separately. This was the standard procedure in the last company where i worked for something as mundane as .pk12 certificates for wlan clients, or ssh certificates.

c) mixing the functions of being secured by the torrent and transmitting it to the journalist in a cool way was completely irresponsible. It was JAs decision to transmit key material for a secret document to this person. It was his decision alone. He did *not* communicate it to others, he did not ask for permission, and as far as i understood this was one of the points which made the conflict with DDB more severe. AFAIU JA always resisted rules inside WL to which he could be bound. But believe me, rules, even informal ones are a god thing. Rules like 'who can take money' 'who has access the servers' 'which persons share the key material in a way that only a majority of them can reconstruct the key'. But this would have pushed JA from a throne of a king to the chair of a leader.

d) AFAIU the persons torrenting in a wave of unqualified paranoia were not aware that these documents are contained within the file they are torrenting since JA did not inform anybody on this. I take this point with a grain of salt, since it is DDBs interpretation, but the German Lawyer of WL only complained to DDB about htese severe claims and did not ask him for a "unterlassungserklaerung" (a legal binding document which you can use to stop somebody for making flase statements which harm you). This fact tells me DDBs story is essentially right.

Re:There is a deeper meaning here

[icebraining]

Executing anyone is always an assassination, regardless of how you try to justify it.

Re:There is a deeper meaning here

[Brannoncyll]

Killing someone is killing someone, whether 'lawfully' or not. Do you think it is right to kill someone because they embarrassed you? No? Then why should those in power be able to do so?

Re:Buckle up folks...

[NeutronCowboy]

You should look into some anger management. All that bad temper is just going to give you a heart attack.

Re:What on earth were they thinking?

[Internetuser1248]

Actually the whole archive was already available on piratebay, and we had the discussion about how bad it was to let that happen yesterday. The fact that the documents were available means that anyone who wanted to do anything unpleasant to any of the informants etc. in them was going to already. People who want that kind of information would have been the first to know. The only difference wikileaks is making by releasing it now is that the general public who dont know how to torrent can see them too.