Assange’s Error

Wikileaks Releases Largest Document Dump In History, And No One In America Cares

by Frances Martel, Mediaite.com, September 3rd, 2011

If Wikileaks began as a mission to enter history for releasing the largest number of sensitive federal documents in history, it may have achieved that this week, at the cost of their own reputations and, potentially, a number of lives. The group released the entirety of its U.S. dispatch archive suspected to have been delivered to them by current military prisoner Bradley Manning – a release that was prompted by a Guardian editor publishing the password to an encrypted file holding some of the documents in his book, and threatens to put many lives across the world in danger.

The story behind the dangerous leak is a complex he-said, she-said beginning with two of Wikileaks’ most high-profile public wars: against former Julian Assange right-hand man Daniel Domscheit-Berg and the editors of The Guardian. After one of the latter, investigations editor David Leigh, published a password in his book on Assange and Wikileaks, the latter accused him of putting the files in peril, to which The Guardian responded that the location of the files rendered the password useless until someone put the files online, such that the password was “a meaningless piece of information to anyone except the person(s) who created the database.” It didn’t take long for whoever is bored enough under house arrest to spend all day on Twitter the keeper of the Wikileaks Twitter account to call The Guardian a “disgrace,” and went a bit further in an official statement:

In its statement, WikiLeaks took credit for helping to spark the Arab Spring with its publication, in partnership with the French newspaper Le Monde, of scathing cables from the U.S. ambassador to Tunisia about the now deposed Tunsian President Zine el Abidin Ben Ali and his family. It also said its quick publication of cables revealing Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman’s ties to the CIA helped scuttle the possibility he would replace deposed President Hosni Mubarak.

Now that the entire file dump is online and Wikileaks is on board with the release, that title and other colorful variations are applying more to the whole ordeal than just The Guardian, which has also now reported that Australia may arrest the already-arrested Assange over the ordeal. Over atSalon, vocal Wikileaks supporter Glenn Greenwald has declared the leak “a disaster from every angle;” Wikileaks collaborator Der Spiegel preferred to deem it a “catastrophe.” It’s not hard to see why. Both Wikileaks and The Guardian are implicated in a mess that has a high probability of costing lives, the former justifying to its opponents their reputation for being reckless and untrustworthy; the latter doing the same for its shrewdness and callousness to their same.

For all intents and purposes, a breach of this magnitude would have been A1 above the fold at almost every media outlet last year, when Assange was being considered for Time’s Person of the Year distinction and the ongoing Bradley Manning saga made it routinely into primetime. But this time around, the media seems surprisingly mum at the firestorm, at least domestically. Many will argue that the blame for this rests with the media itself for paying attention to other matters, or simply being overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of 250,000 diplomatic cables to weed through. It would be more accurate, however, to place the responsibility on the head of the operation, Assange– not just for completely losing control of his own files and organization, but for failing to adapt to the rapidly evolving American media climate in a way that would have added permanence to his importance and, thus, that of his files.

The sort of readers that have followed Wikileaks’ work closely enough to have read much of their raw material as it was released are not those to whom Assange, had he an astute media strategy, should have catered. It is the average American news consumer that could potentially drive this story, for which a barrage of raw material, no matter how jarring, is not attractive enough a bauble in mid-2011 as it was when carefully curated for them during the comparatively tranquil news world of early 2010.

“Collateral Murder,” the video depicting American troops shooting down at a group of Iraqi insurgents (and killing a Reuters photographer), was released in April 2010– a month during which the biggest news topic would become the BP Oil Spill and becoming fluent in the political topics of the time required significantly less time and effort than it would today. Those who follow politics religiously may have a hard time comprehending this, but for the average American that has their home, family, job (or lack thereof), hobbies and interests to balance, keeping up with a presidential primary that requires the memorization of dozens of names and an overwhelming number of policy choices demands a level of dedication and concentration absent from American politics since, well, the last primary season– and even that one began much sooner, and whittled down to two candidates before things got overwhelming for the mainstream.

The new market was simply far less saturated at the peak of Wikileaks’ influence than it is today, and Assange has not adapted his operation to the new, far more competitive climate. Couple the presidential race with economic woes, natural disasters, revolutions the world over, and everytransparently meaningless lovers’ spat the President and House Speaker John Boehner choose to torture Americans with, and Julian Assange starts looking more and more like the Sarah Palin of news cycle topics: he waited so long on giving Americans what he had to offer that Americans no longer have time to bother.

Free Speech Heroes

WikiLeaks denies charges it put lives in danger

By Mark Hosenball, Reuters, August 31, 2011

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – WikiLeaks is defending itself against accusations that it may have put lives at risk by dumping uncensored U.S. diplomatic cables on the Internet.

In a series of cryptic Twitter messages, WikiLeaks suggested that sloppy handling by people who formerly worked with WikiLeaks and at least one mainstream media outlet resulted in the inadvertent disclosure of unredacted versions of all 251,000 State Department cables which the whistleblowing website is believed to possess.

Meanwhile, U.S. government officials have criticized WikiLeaks itself for including in its latest public release of tens of thousands of cables some documents which identify suspected militants and U.S. Embassy contacts by name.

The latest squabble among current and former WikiLeaks insiders has become increasingly heated and arcane. But the key issue is who, if anyone, released unedited documents that could put those named at risk or complicate anti-terrorism operations.

In a message on its Twitter feed, which WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is believed to control, WikiLeaks accused an unnamed “mainstream news organization” of having “disclosed all 251k unredacted cables.” In an earlier message on Tuesday, WikiLeaks said: “There has been no WikiLeaks error. There has been a grossly negligent mainstream media error, to put it generously.”

Earlier this week, German publications and a blog published by Wired magazine claimed that a 1.73 gigabyte password-protected file containing all the uncensored cables was “reportedly circulating somewhere on the Internet.” Wired quoted the editor of German publication Der Freitag saying that his paper had found the file and “easily obtained the password to unlock it.”

Two people familiar with behind-the-scenes machinations involving Assange and his former associates said that privately, Assange was blaming the alleged website security slip-up on his former WikiLeaks collaborator, Daniel Domscheit-Berg. Assange also was accusing London’s Guardian newspaper of making public the key to the alleged password-protected file in a book on WikiLeaks published earlier this year by two of the paper’s journalists.

RELEASES ACCELERATED

Former Assange collaborators suggest that the allegation by WikiLeaks that a mainstream media outlet made public uncensored cables is an attempt to divert attention from WikiLeaks’ own release, in its most recent public dump of State Department cables, of documents from which names should have been, but were not, deleted.

Several news organizations, including Reuters, have had complete sets of the cables for months. But WikiLeaks had only made a few thousand public until last week when it sharply speeded up the release. As of Wednesday, the website said it had released nearly 143,000 cables.

In a Twitter message on Wednesday, WikiLeaks claimed that it “has not released the names of any ‘informants.'” The website suggested that all the material it was releasing was “unclassified and previously released by mainstream media.”

A former WikiLeaks activist who reviewed the deluge of newly released material said the vast proportion of it was labeled “Unclassified.” But two media sources who reviewed the material said it also contained some unredacted classified documents.

Reuters examined two such documents, posted on the WikiLeaks website, where a U.S. government source was identified; in one case the cable, classified “Secret,” contained a clear notation: “protect source.”

U.S. and Australian officials also condemned WikiLeaks for releasing a cable, classified “Secret,” which identified by name 23 people in Australia whom U.S. and Australian authorities believed should be subjected to U.S. air travel curbs due to alleged contacts with Islamic militants in Yemen.

A U.S. counter-terrorism official said the disclosure would have “real consequences for counterterrorism activities around the globe. Giving our adversaries any advantage by releasing this information is simply insane.”

Neither Assange nor his principal antagonist, Domscheit-Berg, could be immediately reached for comment.

But Stephen Aftergood, an anti-secrecy activist at the Federation of American Scientists, noted that WikiLeaks lately seemed to be surrounded by “a lot of melodrama.” He added: “When criticized, the standard WL response is to deny error, shift responsibility to someone else, and attack the critic. It does not inspire much confidence.”

(Additional reporting by Maurice Tamman and Eric Auchard; Editing by Warren Strobel and Eric Walsh)

WikiLeaks publishes tens of thousands more cables

By Mark Hosenball, Reuters / August 25, 2011

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The WikiLeaks organization said Thursday it was releasing tens of thousands of previously unpublished U.S. diplomatic cables, some of which are still classified.

“We will have released over 100,000 US embassy cables from around the world by the end of today,” said a message on WikiLeaks’ Twitter feed. The Twitter page is believed to be controlled by Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ controversial Australian-born founder and chief.

The cables which the website said it is dumping onto the public record appear to be from a cache of more than 250,000 State Department reports leaked to the group. WikiLeaks began releasing the cables in smaller batches late last year, but until now had made them public in piecemeal fashion.

Several news organizations around the world, including Reuters, have had complete sets of the cables for months. But for the most part, media outlets have only cited or published cables when publishing specific news or investigative stories based on them.

By late afternoon Thursday, the WikiLeaks website said it had published 97,115 of the 251,287 cables it possesses. It did not specify its motives for releasing such a large amount of material at once.

A person in contact with Assange’s inner circle told Reuters the rationale behind the mass release of documents was dismay among WikiLeaks activists that media organizations had lost interest in publishing stories based on the material.

The source described Assange and his associates as “frustrated” at the lack of media interest.

INFORMATION ON ASSANGE

The document release began hours after WikiLeaks revealed on Twitter that Dynadot, a California Internet registrar which had hosted WikiLeaks, had received an order, generated by federal prosecutors in Alexandria, Virginia, requiring it to produce “information on Julian Assange.”

WikiLeaks said Dynadot had complied with the order.

According to a copy of the document published by WikiLeaks, U.S. investigators want any “customer or subscriber account information” held by Dynadot since November 1 that relates to Assange, WikiLeaks or the domain name wikileaks.org.

Dynadot and the State Department did not respond to requests for comment.

It is unclear when or how WikiLeaks acquired a copy of the government order to Dynadot, which was dated January 4, 2011. A U.S. official indicated that the document, which was sealed by court order, had not been officially unsealed.

U.S. officials have indicated that prosecutors and a grand jury in Alexandria, have a long-running investigation into WikiLeaks, Assange and others associated with the website.

A few weeks earlier, the same prosecutors sent a similar request to Twitter seeking records of accounts held by Assange, WikiLeaks, and others. They include Bradley Manning, a U.S. Army private being detained for alleged unauthorized disclosures of classified information which was believed to have gone to WikiLeaks.

Last year WikiLeaks and Assange were celebrated after their release of State Department cables, tens of thousands of other secret U.S. files, and a classified video of a contested American military operation in Iraq.

Since then public interest in WikiLeaks has waned. It may have suffered from publicity related to Assange’s flight to Britain after sexual misconduct allegations were made against him in Sweden and a subsequent protracted extradition fight. Assange has also publicly fueded with former collaborators.

A person close to Assange said a British appeals court is due to rule early next month on his appeal against Sweden’s extradition request. The source was unaware of any link between the latest document dump and the anticipated court decision.

(Additional reporting by Jim Finkle; editing by Christopher Wilson)

(This story has been corrected in paragraph 16 to show Assange was subject to sexual misconduct allegations, not charges)