Posts tagged Wikileaks
Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, ‘The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.’ [laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I’m afraid to say things like that.
Henry Kissinger, in a 1975 conversation at the Foreign Minister’s Office in Ankara, Turkey. WikiLeaks, Cable 0860114-1573.
Background, via Slate:
Wikileaks released a searchable database of over 1.7 million diplomatic cables from the years 1973 to 1976 today. Because so many of them — over 200,000 — are connected to former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the collection is being informally dubbed the “Kissinger Cables.” But unlike previous Wikileaks document collections, this release isn’t a whistleblower leak. Instead, it’s the result of an effort to obtain and organize public documents obtained from the National Archives and Record Administration.
So, what’s in them? The findings, so far, are more interesting than they are damning. In that light, the “Kissinger Cables,” officially called “PlusD,” seem most notable as a well-organized, historical archive of the scope, tone, and depth of U.S. diplomacy around the world.
FJP: Pesky FOIA.
Leaked Audio of Bradley Manning Statement Released by Freedom of the Press Foundation
Via the Foundation:
Today, Freedom of the Press Foundation is publishing the full, previously unreleased audio recording of Private First Class Bradley Manning’s speech to the military court in Ft. Meade about his motivations for leaking over 700,000 government documents to WikiLeaks. In addition, we have published highlights from Manning’s statement to the court.
While unofficial transcripts of this statement are available, this marks the first time the American public has heard the actual voice of Manning.
He explains to the military court in his own cadence and words how and why he gave the Apache helicopter video, Afghanistan and Iraq Wars Logs, and the State Department Diplomatic Cables to WikiLeaks. Manning explains his motives, noting how he believed the documents showed deep wrongdoing by the government and how he hoped that the release would “spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.” In conjunction with the statement, Private First Class Manning also pleaded guilty to 10 of the 22 charges against him.
A World Without Leaks
Via Margaret Sullivan, Public Editor, New York Times.
Imagine if American citizens never learned about the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Imagine not knowing about the brutal treatment of terror suspects at United States government “black sites.” Or about the drone program that is expanding under President Obama, or the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping of Americans.
This is a world without leaks.
And a world without leaks — the secret government information slipped to the press — may be the direction we’re headed in. Since 9/11, leakers and whistle-blowers have become an increasingly endangered species. Some, like the former C.I.A. official John Kiriakou, have gone to jail. Another, Pfc. Bradley Manning, is charged with “aiding the enemy” for the masses of classified information he gave to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks. He could face life in prison…
…Declan Walsh, a reporter who wrote many WikiLeaks-based stories for The Guardian before coming to The Times, calls leaks “the unfiltered lifeblood of investigative journalism.” He wrote in an e-mail from his post in Pakistan: “They may come from difficult, even compromised sources, be ridden with impurities and require careful handling to produce an accurate story. None of that reduces their importance to journalism.”…
…Whatever one’s view, one fact is clear: Leakers are being prosecuted and punished like never before. Consider that the federal Espionage Act, passed in 1917, was used only three times in its first 92 years to prosecute government officials for press leaks. But the Obama administration, in the president’s first term alone, used it six times to go after leakers. Now some of them have gone to jail.
The crackdown sends a loud message. Scott Shane, who covers national security for The Times, says that message is being heard — and heeded.
“There’s definitely a chilling effect,” he told me. “Government officials who might otherwise discuss sensitive topics will refer to these cases in rebuffing a request for background information.”
Margaret Sullivan, New York Times. The Danger of Suppressing Leaks.
How the Bradley Manning Case Endangers Journalism
Harvard Law professor Yochai Benkler begins a recent New Republic article like so:
After 1,000 days in pretrial detention, Private Bradley Manning yesterday offered a modified guilty plea for passing classified materials to WikiLeaks. But his case is far from over—not for Manning, and not for the rest of the country. To understand what is still at stake, consider an exchange that took place in a military courtroom in Maryland in January.
The judge, Col. Denise Lind, asked the prosecutors a brief but revealing question: Would you have pressed the same charges if Manning had given the documents not to WikiLeaks but directly to the New York Times?
The prosecutor’s answer was simple: “Yes Ma’am.”
This last line, the simple, “Yes, Ma’am,” is important.
It’s not that Manning leaked to WikiLeaks the government is saying. It’s that he leaked at all. More specifically, in the government’s view, the act of leaking is “aiding the enemy,” and it is those charges — a capital offense, although the prosecution says they will not seek the death penalty — that it looks like they are going to pursue.
As GigaOm’s Matthew Ingram points out:
[I]f Manning is found guilty of “aiding the enemy” for releasing classified documents to WikiLeaks, it could change the nature of both journalism and free speech forever.
Why? Because as Benkler points out, the charge for which Manning is being court-martialed could just as easily be applied to someone who leaks similar documents to virtually any media outlet, including the New York Times or the Washington Post. In other words, if the U.S. government has seen fit to go after Manning and WikiLeaks, what is to stop them from pursuing anyone who leaks documents, and any media entity that publishes them?
And, as Benkler, who’s an expert witness on the case, further explains:
[T]hat “Yes Ma’am” does something else: It makes the Manning prosecution a clear and present danger to journalism in the national security arena. The guilty plea Manning offered could subject him to twenty years in prison—more than enough to deter future whistleblowers. But the prosecutors seem bent on using this case to push a novel and aggressive interpretation of the law that would arm the government with a much bigger stick to prosecute vaguely-defined national security leaks, a big stick that could threaten not just members of the military, but civilians too…
…The prosecution case seems designed, quite simply, to terrorize future national security whistleblowers. The charges against Manning are different from those that have been brought against other whistleblowers. “Aiding the enemy” is punishable by death. And although the prosecutors in this case are not seeking the death penalty against Manning, the precedent they are seeking to establish does not depend on the penalty. It establishes the act as a capital offense, regardless of whether prosecutors in their discretion decide to seek the death penalty in any particular case.
Chilling, indeed. As Ingram sums up:
Benkler’s warning shouldn’t be taken lightly: if Manning is guilty of aiding the enemy for simply leaking documents, then anyone who communicates with a newspaper could be guilty of something similar. And if the leaker is guilty, then the publisher could be as well — and that could cause a chilling effect on the media that would change the nature of public journalism forever.
Yochai Benkler, The New Republic. The Dangerous Logic of the Bradley Manning Case.
Mathew Ingram, paidContent. If Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks are guilty, then so is the New York Times.
Can You Be Busted for Linking to Stolen Information?
Late last week Barrett Brown, a former Anonymous spokesman, was indicted over an Anonymous hack of Stratfor, a global intelligence firm. Along with thousands of internal emails that Wikileaks has been publishing, Anonymous released credit card information of both Stratfor employees and its clients.
Brown is facing multiple charges but the very first is very odd: Brown posted a hyperlink to the stolen credit card information that was, by then, publicly available online.
In a press release, the FBI writes:
According to the indictment, Brown transferred a hyperlink from an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel to an IRC channel under his control. That hyperlink provided access to data stolen from the company Stratfor Global Intelligence (Stratfor), which included more than 5,000 credit card account numbers, the card holders’ identification information and the authentication features for the credit cards, known as the Card Verification Values (CVV). By transferring and posting the hyperlink, Brown caused the data to be made available to other persons online, without the knowledge and authorization of Stratfor and the card holders.
Here’s the rub for reporters. From Gawker’s Adrian Chen:
As a journalist who covers hackers and has “transferred and posted” many links to data stolen by hackers—in order to put them in stories about the hacks—this indictment is frightening because it seems to criminalize linking. Does this mean if a hacker posts a list of stolen passwords and usernames to Pastebin, the popular document-sharing site, and I link to them in a story or tweet I could be charged with “trafficking in stolen authentication features,” as Brown has been? (I wouldn’t typically do this, but I’ve seen plenty of other bloggers and journalists who have.) Links to the credit card number list were widely shared on Twitter in the wake of the Stratfor hack—are all the people who tweeted links going to be rounded up and arrested, too?
The question here isn’t whether its ethical to link to such information but whether it’s legal. The indictment against Brown claims no, no it’s not.
Remember, over five million emails were stolen, are now on Wikileaks and are being used by news organizations to report on global intelligence operations. By the indictment’s logic, linking directly to them is a crime.
We have been worried about the direction Wikileaks is going for a while. In the recent month the focus moved away from actual leaks and the fight for freedom of information further and further while it concentrated more and more on Julian Assange. It goes without saying that we oppose any plans of extraditing Julian to the USA. He is a content provider and publisher, not a criminal.
But Wikileaks is not - or should not be - about Julian Assange alone. The idea behind Wikileaks was to provide the public with information that would otherwise being kept secret by industries and governments. Information we strongly believe the public has a right to know. But this has been pushed more and more into the background, instead we only hear about Julian Assange, like he had dinner last night with Lady Gaga. That’s great for him but not much of our interest. We are more interested in transparent governments and bringing out documents and information they want to hide from the public…
…The conclusion for us is that we cannot support anymore what Wikileaks has become - the One Man Julian Assange show. But we also want to make clear that we still support the original idea behind Wikileaks: Freedom of information and transparent governments. Sadly we realize that Wikileaks does not stand for this idea anymore.
Anonymous, Statement on Wikileaks.
Background: On Wednesday, Wikileaks began releasing 200,000 “Global Intelligence files” containing some five million emails from and to the private US intelligence firm Stratfor.
Wikileaks alleges that because of the close connection between the company and the government, “these GI Files releases will shed insight into key U.S. federal election players.” For example, the first release of almost 14,000 files are from 2011 and contain the keywords “republican”, “GOP”, “Romney”, “RNC” and “GOP”.
Further, the files were originally obtained by Anonymous-related groups.
However, when visitors went to Wikileaks to take a look at the files they were hit with a paywall. This was a Javascript overlay requesting a donation. Without making one, a user couldn’t access the documents.
And that set Anonymous off. Or, since it’s a decentralized activist group, it set off those behind @YourAnonNews who wrote to their 640,000 followers, “This, dear friends will lose you all allies you still had. @Wikileaks, please die in a fire, kthxbai.”
Cypherpunks
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is coming out with a book next month, co-authored with Jacob Applebaum, Andy Müeller and Jérémie Zimmerman.
Via OR Books:
Assange brings together a small group of cutting-edge thinkers and activists from the front line of the battle for cyber-space to discuss whether electronic communications will emancipate or enslave us. Among the topics addressed are: Do Facebook and Google constitute “the greatest surveillance machine that ever existed,” perpetually tracking our location, our contacts and our lives? Far from being victims of that surveillance, are most of us willing collaborators? Are there legitimate forms of surveillance, for instance in relation to the “Four Horsemen of the Infopocalypse” (money laundering, drugs, terrorism and pornography)? And do we have the ability, through conscious action and technological savvy, to resist this tide and secure a world where freedom is something which the Internet helps bring about?
The harassment of WikiLeaks and other Internet activists, together with attempts to introduce anti-file sharing legislation such as SOPA and ACTA, indicate that the politics of the Internet have reached a crossroads. In one direction lies a future that guarantees, in the watchwords of the cypherpunks, “privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful”; in the other lies an Internet that allows government and large corporations to discover ever more about internet users while hiding their own activities.
Why the WikiLeaks Grand Jury is So Dangerous: Members of Congress Now Want to Prosecute New York Times Journalists Too
Via the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
For more than a year now, EFF has encouraged mainstream press publications like the New York Times to aggressively defend WikiLeaks’ First Amendment right to publish classified information in the public interest and denounce the ongoing grand jury investigating WikiLeaks as a threat to press freedom.
Well, we are now seeing why that is so important: at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on July 11th, some members of Congress made it clear they also want New York Times journalists charged under the Espionage Act for their recent stories on President Obama’s ‘Kill List’ and secret US cyberattacks against Iran. During the hearing, House Republicans “pressed legal experts Wednesday on whether it was possible to prosecute reporters for publishing classified information,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
In addition, the Washingtonian’s Shane Harris reported a month ago that a “senior” Justice Department official “made it clear that reporters who talked to sources about classified information were putting themselves at risk of prosecution.”
Leaks big and small have been happening for decades—even centuries—and the most recent are comparable to several others. No journalist has ever been prosecuted under the Espionage Act and it has generally been accepted, even by Congress’s own research arm, that the publication of government secrets by the press is protected speech under the First Amendment. Yet the government is actively investigating WikiLeaks and now threatening others for just that.
The mainstream media may see little in common with Assange’s digital publication methods or his general demeanor, but what he is accused of is virtually indistinguishable from what other reporters and newspapers do every day: poke, prod, and cajole sources within the government to give up classified information that newspapers then publish to inform the public of the government’s activities.
FJP: All so true. Read on.
Facts Get In The Way of Everything
Slate has two recent articles that illustrate a growing fear of facts. The first looks at the Republican party generally and Mitt Romney specifically.
It’s tough times for facts in America. First Mitt Romney—interviewing for the position of president—declined to release his tax returns because, as he explained, the Obama team’s opposition research will “pick over it” and “distort and lie about them.” He isn’t actually claiming that his opponents will lie. He’s claiming he’s entitled to hide the truth because it could be used against him. As Jon Stewart put it, “You can’t release your returns, because if you do, the Democrats will be mean to you.” These are tax returns. Factual documents. No different than, say, a birth certificate. But the GOP’s argument that inconvenient facts can be withheld from public scrutiny simply because they can be used for mean purposes is a radical idea in a democracy. It has something of a legal pedigree as well.
Probably not coincidentally, last week Senate Republicans filibustered the DISCLOSE Act—a piece of legislation many of them once supported—again on the grounds that Democrats might someday use ugly facts against conservatives. The principal objection to the law is that nasty Democrats would like to know who big secret donors are in order to harass, boycott, and intimidate them. The law requires that unions, corporations, and nonprofit organizations report campaign-related spending over $10,000 within 24 hours, and to name donors who give more than $10,000 for political purposes. Even though eight of the nine justices considering McCain-Feingold in Citizens United believed that disclosure is integral to a functioning democracy, the idea that facts about donors are dangerous things is about the only argument Senate Republicans can muster. Last week even Justice Antonin Scalia told CNN’s Piers Morgan that “Thomas Jefferson would have said the more speech, the better. That’s what the First Amendment is all about. So long as the people know where the speech is coming from.”
That’s a ringing defense of the need for disclosure, which Scalia has always supported.
Not to be outdone, the State Department just won a case about the secrecy behind the diplomatic cables Wikileaks released in 2010 and 2011.
The government, it appears, would like to pretend that never happened even though anyone who cared has taken a look, and their contents have been reported around the world. If you want to double check that they’re out in the public, you can do so here.
Back to Slate:
It sounds like something from Catch-22. A U.S. district court judge on Monday ruled that diplomatic cables published worldwide by WikiLeaks, the New York Times, the Guardian, et al., are actually still secret. Why? Because the government says they are secret…
…The government’s logic, and the judge’s, is—and I do not think I am exaggerating or distorting their arguments here—that just because something is public doesn’t mean it isn’t also secret. In this case, the cables are secret because they contain information that could be harmful if released. Never mind that they’ve already been released by WikiLeaks. They still could be harmful if released by the government.
The ruling seems to uphold a broader U.S. government philosophy that even when everyone knows the government is doing something—conducting drone strikes in Yemen, waterboarding prisoners in Guantanamo—the government can continue to pretend that it is not doing it, and the courts will back it up.
Related: See Glenn Greenwald’s article in today’s Salon about Dianne Fienstein, California Democrat and Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and her continued calls to prosecute those disclosing sensitive government information (eg. drone wars). In it he writes about how government is defining what is a permissible leak and who permissible leakers are (spoiler alert: themselves).
“In sum,” Greenwald writes, “leaks of classified information are a heinous crime when done to embarrass or undermine those in power, but are noble and necessary when done to bolster them.”
WikiLeaks Releases 'Syria Files': 2.4 Million Emails Between Syrian Officials and Companies
Via Forbes:
The gargantuan new release, which WikiLeaks has titled the Syria Files, was announced in an event at the London Press Club Thursday morning by Sarah Harrison, a WikiLeaks staffer and sometimes-assistant to the group’s founder Julian Assange, who remains hidden in London’s Ecuadorean embassy seeking asylum to avoid extradition to Sweden to face questioning for alleged sex crimes.
WikiLeaks describes the data dump as having come from 680 different domain names and 678,000 individual email addresses, with more than a million recipients. Given that broad sweep, it’s difficult to imagine what sort of insider or external hacker might even have access to so many institutions: The most likely explanation may be a leak or outside data breach at one or several of Syria’s Internet service providers. As usual, WikiLeaks has kept its source anonymous.
In fact, the Syria Files may be so large and varied that even WikiLeaks has little idea what it has on its hands. For now, only a few dozen of the files, dated from 2006 to the present, have been publicly released and analyzed by WikiLeaks’ media partners, the Associated Press and a collection of small newspapers.
What WikiLeaks Means for the News
In April 2010, WikiLeaks released a video showing U.S. soldiers killing Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists from a helicopter. In a fragmented news world, what significance did this have as a media event?
Gabriella Coleman, Assistant Professor and Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University, discusses what WikiLeaks means in a contemporary news environment.
WikiLeaks: Top Secret Mobile Information Collection Unit
Last night’s FJP field trip brought us to the Whitney Museum in New York City to hear a talk organized by the documentarian Laura Poitras about the national security state in the United States.
The speakers were Jacob Appelbaum and William Binney.
Binney is the former technical director of the National Security Agency’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group. He retired in 2001 when the NSA started to turn its surveillance capabilities on US citizens.
Applebaum is a noted privacy rights evangelist, and is most visible as a spokesperson for the Tor Project, a software solution to protect individuals from online surveillance, and for his work with Wikileaks.
All have been targeted by the US government for their activities.
Earlier in the day, Democracy Now interviewed each about their work and the national security state. The segment with Binney is here, the segment with Applebaum is here and the segment with Poitras is here.
Bonus: James Bamford’s March cover story for Wired: The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say).
Image: A WikiLeaks truck parked outside the Whitney Museum in New York City.
Assange TV Launches with Interview of Hizballah Chief
Via Radio Free Europe:
The mystery first guest on the new television talk show hosted by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was Hizballah chief Hassan Nasrallah.
Assange said it was Nasrallah’s first interview with Western media since 2006.
“I want to know: why is he called a freedom fighter by millions and at the same time a terrorist by millions of others?” Assange said.
“This is his first interview in the West since the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war. His party, Hizballah, is a member of the Lebanese government.”
Nasrallah, who is considered a terrorist by Israel and the United States, spoke via computer link from Beirut in the interview.
The episode can be watched on the Russian-backed, English-language RT news channel.
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