Wikileaks

[shruggy63]

Wikileaks seems to be really under fire (pun intended) at the time of writing! Log on now if you can. This is conspiracy to suppress information in action.

http://wikileaks.org/

 

[WhistlingJack]

I feel it may be useful to maintain this thread as a depository for stories about Wikileaks, rather than them being scattered randomly across the boards, so here goes: -

UK air traffic control goes after Wikileaks

Good luck with that

By John Oates

Posted in Government, 9th December 2009 15:23 GMT

The National Aviation and Transport Services (NATS) is threatening legal action against Wikileaks because the website has published a recording of the crashing of BA flight 038, call sign Speedbird 38, which came down just short of the Heathrow runway in 2008.

Earlier this month Wikileaks published an audio recording of air traffic controllers seeing, and reacting to, the crash and images of the control system. The Boeing 777 hit the ground just on the threshold of the runway at Heathrow. There were injuries, but no deaths.

NATS is claiming absolute copyright over the recording.

Richard Churchill-Coleman, general counsel and company secretary for NATS wrote to Wikileaks claiming copyright but also justifying the move. He said the tape was part of an ongoing investigation and that the confidentiality of evidence in such an inquiry was vital.

Churchill-Coleman said this atmosphere of confidentiality allowed air traffic controllers and pilots to give evidence freely without fearing the consequences. This atmosphere makes it easier for lessons to be learned and therefore air safety improved.

He added that the recording: "adds little to the public good apart from satisfying the public's general curiosity".

Wikileaks does not often obey such takedown notices and is unlikely to do so in this case.

®

 

[WhistlingJack]

Congressmen steam over Wikileaks TSA breach

I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll achieve very little

By Chris Williams

Posted in Government, 11th December 2009 14:24 GMT

Three US Congressmen, outraged that parts of US government airport security manuals were inadvertently published and then posted on Wikileaks and Cryptome, are demanding to know what legal weapons are available against whistleblowing websites.

Republicans Peter King, Charles Dent and Gus Bilirakis wrote to the Department of Homeland Security this week with a series of questions about the bodged publication of a Transport Security Administration (TSA) document.

The manual revealed standard screening procedures at airports. Sensitive portions had been redacted before it was published, but a simple cut-and-paste operation beat the attempted blackout.

The results, which discussed limitations of screening equipment and procedures, were posted on Cryptome and Wikileaks.

In a letter the Congressmen asked: "How has the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration addressed the repeated reposting of this security manual to other websites and what legal action, if any, can be taken to compel its removal?"

The answer of course, as experience shows, is none.

Repeated legal huffing and puffing at Wikileaks by offshore banks, air traffic controllers, calculator makers and Scientologists has met with no success. Or at least no success that has had any effect, thanks to the site's global network of mirror servers.

Cryptome meanwhile specialises in national-security-related documents, and is long-versed in the celebrated strategy adopted by the respondent in Arkell v Pressdram.

But perhaps aware that takedown has proved impossible, the Republican trio also ask if DHS believes "criminal penalties necessary or desirable to ensure such information is not reposted in the future?"

The Congressmen's other questions are about TSA redaction procedures, how the blunder came about and what officials will do to avoid a repeat. Five individuals were suspended this week, pending an investigation.

®

 

[WhistlingJack]

Iceland to be 'journalism haven'

By Chris Vallance, Reporter, BBC News

Iceland could become a "journalism haven" if a proposal put forward by some Icelandic MPs aided by whistle-blowing website Wikileaks succeeds.

The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), calls on the country's government to adopt laws protecting journalists and their sources.

It will be filed with the Althingi - Iceland's parliament - on 16 February.

If the proposal succeeds it will require the Icelandic government to consider introducing legislation.

Julian Assange, Wikileaks' editor, told BBC News that the idea was to "try and reform Iceland's media law to be a very attractive jurisdiction for investigative journalists".

He has been in Iceland for a number of weeks and is advising MPs on the IMMI.

The hope is that journalist-friendly laws will encourage media businesses to move to Iceland.

"If it then has these additional media and publishing law protections then it is likely to encourage the international press and internet start-ups to locate their services here," Mr Assange said.

He believes the political mood in Iceland is receptive to the need for change.

"The Icelandic press has itself suffered from libel tourism, so there does seem to be the political will to push this through."

Wikileaks is a non-profit website that has established a reputation for publishing leaked material.

In October 2009, it posted a list of names and addresses of people said to belong to the British National Party (BNP).

Other high-profile documents hosted on the site include a copy of the Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta, a document that detailed restrictions placed on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

It recently had to suspend operations because of a lack of funding.

The IMMI aims to pull together good practice from around the world and incorporate it into a single body of law.

"We've found good laws in different countries but no country that has all of these laws put together," said Mr Assange.

The proposal has been informed by Wikileaks' experience in fighting legal threats to publication.

"In my role as Wikileaks editor, I've been involved in fighting off many legal attacks," Mr Assange said in an e-mail.

"To do that, and keep our sources safe, we have had to spread assets, encrypt everything, and move telecommunications and people around the world to activate protective laws in different national jurisdictions.

"We've become good at it, and never lost a case, or a source, but we can't expect everyone to go through the extraordinary efforts that we do."

Measures in the IMMI include legal protection for sources and whistleblowers and the protection of communications between sources and journalists.

The proposals also include steps to end so-called "libel tourism", the practice of pursuing libel actions in the most favourable legal jurisdiction irrespective of where the parties are based.

But legal threats are faced not just by journalists, but by publishers, internet hosts and other "intermediaries", Wikileaks said. As a result, the proposals include plans to clarify the protection for "mere conduits".

Wikileaks has been working with a small group of Icelandic legislators on the issue.

One of the proposal's supporters, Birgitta Jonsdottir of The Movement, a political party with 3 MPs in the Icelandic parliament, told the BBC that she was confident the measure would become law.

"From what I have experienced from discussions with MPs from all the different parties, there is incredible good will," she said.

But the troubles of the financial sector may lead some Icelanders to be sceptical of efforts to transform their country and Ms Jonsdottir is aware of the need not to make exaggerated claims,

"We don't want to be the Vikings of transparency in the way the bankers presented themselves," she said.

But Ms Jonsdottir believes that making a strong statement in favour of freedom of expression could be a way for Iceland to create a positive new identity.

"There are still very many Icelanders who feel ashamed. I think it is part of the self-recovery we have to go through," she said.

At a meeting with a small group of Icelandic MPs about the IMMI, to which the BBC had exclusive access, Mr Assange stressed how Iceland's image would benefit from becoming a champion of free speech.

For example, one of the proposals calls for the creation of The Icelandic Prize for Freedom of Expression which "promotes Iceland and the values represented in this proposal".

Whether arguments like that are persuasive enough to convince a majority of Iceland's legislators remains to be seen. Mr Assange says that at present around 14 MPs are known to support the proposal.

There is also interest in the IMMI among some members of the Icelandic government.

The Icelandic Minister for Education Culture and Sports Katrin Jakobsdottir told the BBC that she thought that "the general idea was good" and said that she thought that it "might get positive support".

But she stressed that it was very early days and that the changes would involve many ministries.

She said that elements of the proposal coincided with changes to media law currently being considered by her department.

But not everyone is convinced of the need for an Icelandic "journalism haven".

Andrew Scott Senior, lecturer in law at the London School of Economics and a critic of the need for extensive libel reform in the UK, said that caution was needed.

"The provisions allowing defendants to counter-sue 'libel tourists' in their home courts could transform the humble Icelander into a legal superman, virtually untouchable abroad for comment written - and uploaded - at home," he said.

"Its debatable whether such laws are ever appropriate."

His view is not shared by Mr Assange.

"We have received approximately 100 legal threats in the past 18 months so we are keen to see legislation that protects the press and quality reporting", he said.

At present Wikileaks operates in a number of different jurisdictions to "take advantage of good laws," he said.

"It seems the Icelandic proposal is going to pull all those laws together and put them in one place."

Story from BBC NEWS:

Published: 2010/02/12 08:32:05 GMT

© BBC MMX

 

[WhistlingJack]

WikiLeaks posts video from Iraq

WikiLeaks has posted a video on its website which it claims shows the killing of civilians by the US military in Baghdad in 2007.

The website's organisers say they were given the footage, which they say comes from cameras on US Apache helicopters.

They say they decrypted it, but would not reveal who gave it to them.

The WikiLeaks site campaigns for freedom of information and posts leaked documents online. So far there has been no official Pentagon response.

However, Reuters and the Associated Press have quoted unnamed US military officials as confirming the video was genuine.

The video, released on Monday, is of high quality and appears to be authentic, the BBC's Adam Brookes in Washington says.

It is accompanied by a recording of the pilots' radio transmissions and those of US troops on the ground.

The video shows a street in Baghdad and a group of about eight people, whom the helicopter pilots identify as armed insurgents.

The transmissions says of one of the individuals: "He's got an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade]. I'm going to fire."

After a voice on the transmission urges the pilot to "light 'em all up", the individuals on the street are shot by the gunship's cannon.

A few minutes later a van drives to the scene, and its occupants appear to start picking up a wounded person.

It, too, is fired upon. Altogether, around 12 people die.

The transmission continues: "Looks like we've got some slight movement from the van that was engaged. Looks like a kid."

US soldiers on the ground establish there are two child casualties and agree to take them to a hospital, according to the transmission.

"Well it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle," says a voice.

Two journalists working for Reuters were killed on the day the incident took place in July 2007.

A spokeswoman for the news agency said they were not sure if the individuals in the footage included those two Reuters journalists.

WikiLeaks has published a statement from Reuters news editor-in-chief David Schlesinger saying that the video was "graphic evidence of the dangers involved in war journalism and the tragedies that can result".

At the time, the US military said the helicopters were engaged in combat operations against a hostile force.

WikiLeaks said the video demonstrated that civilians had died in the incident, and that the US military's rules of engagement were flawed.

The website's organisers complained recently of coming under surveillance by the US government, and of harassment by other governments, ostensibly for their role in posting leaked documents on sensitive subjects.

Story from BBC NEWS:

Published: 2010/04/06 02:30:55 GMT

© BBC MMX

 

[WhistlingJack]

Wikileaks: More background material on Iraq massacre leak

Xeni Jardin at 8:25 PM Monday, Apr 5, 2010

Update, 9pm PT: The US military has issued a statement on the massacre investigation (6.52MB PDF).

An update on that video released earlier today by Wikileaks, which shows US occupying forces shooting and killing civilians—including two Reuters journalists—in Baghdad. Wikileaks has released additional photographs and video that provide more background. These include interviews with survivors of the attack: a widow and her two children and one of the last two photos taken by war photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen before he was shot by American airmen during the 2007 incident.

NYT item here. "Lots of people are avoiding talking about the murderous attack on the van and the wounded; and strawmanning camera/RPG confusion as the issue," Wikileaks tweets. The materials released just now address this issue.

BoingBoing

 

[WhistlingJack]

US 'tracing' Iraq killings video

The US military says it is trying to retrieve the original video tapes of a controversial helicopter attack on a group of people in Iraq in 2007.

Footage of the attack was published on the internet by the website WikiLeaks.

Two of those killed were Reuters news agency employees whose cameras were mistaken for weapons, the US says.

The Pentagon has not questioned the video's authenticity but says it cannot make a complete verification until the original tapes have been located.

"We're attempting to retrieve the video from the unit who did the investigation," US Central Command spokesman Capt Jack Hanzlik was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency.

"We had no reason to hold the video [at Central Command] nor did the higher headquarters in Iraq," he added.

Helicopter crew can be heard celebrating on the video after firing at and killing alleged Iraqi insurgents, whom they refer to as "dead bastards".

A US military investigation into the attack concluded that correct rules of engagement were followed, despite the mistaken identification.

A spokesman for President Obama described the incident as "extremely tragic".

Story from BBC NEWS:

Published: 2010/04/07 10:21:19 GMT

© BBC MMX

 

[WhistlingJack]

How Wikileaks shone light on world's darkest secrets

How does a website run by just five full-time staff generate so many scoops? Archie Bland investigates

Thursday, 8 April 2010

When the Ministry of Defence first came across Wikileaks, staffers were stunned. "There are thousands of things on here, I literally mean thousands," one of them wrote in an internal email in November 2008. "Everything I clicked on to do with MoD was restricted... it is huge." The website, an online clearing house for documents whose authors would generally prefer them to stay in the private domain, has since been banned from the MoD's internal computers, but it did no good: eventually, that email ended up on Wikileaks. And when a US Army counter-intelligence officer recommended that whistleblowers who leaked to the site be fired, that report ended up on Wikileaks too.

The authorities were right to be worried. If any further proof were needed of the website's extraordinary record in holding the authorities to account, it came this week, in the release of shocking video footage of a gung-ho US helicopter attack in Iraq that killed 12 people, including two unarmed employees of the Reuters news agency.

The US government had resisted Freedom of Information requests from Reuters for years. But when an anonymous whistleblower passed the video on to Wikileaks, all that quickly became futile. An edited version of the tape had received almost 4 million hits on YouTube by last night, and it led news bulletins around the world.

"This might be the story that makes Wikileaks blow up," said Sree Sreenivasan, a digital media professor at New York's Columbia Journalism School. "It's not some huge document with lots of fine print – you can just watch it and you get what it's about immediately. It's a whole new world of how stories get out."

And yet despite Wikileaks' commitment to the freedom of information, there is something curiously shadowy about the organisation itself. Founded, as the group's spokesman Daniel Schmitt (whose surname is a pseudonym) put it, with the intention of becoming "the intelligence agency of the people", the site's operators and volunteers – five full-timers, and another 1,000 on call – are almost all anonymous. Ironically, the only way the group's donors are publicly known is through a leak on Wikileaks itself. The organisation's most prominent figure is Julian Assange, an Australian hacker and journalist who co-founded the site back in 2006. While Assange and his cohorts' intentions are plainly laudable – to "allow whistleblowers and journalists who have been censored to get material out to the public", as he told the BBC earlier this year – some ask who watches the watchmen. "People have to be very careful dealing with this information," says Professor Sreenivasan. "It's part of the culture now, it's out there, but you still need context, you still need analysis, you still need background."

Against all of that criticism, Wikileaks can set a record that carries, as Abu Dhabi's The National put it, "more scoops in its short life than The Washington Post has in the past 30 years". By earning its place as the natural destination for anyone with sensitive information to leak who does not know and trust a particular journalist – so far, despite numerous court actions, not a single source has been outed – Wikileaks has built up a remarkable record.

Yes, it has published an early draft of the script for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Wesley Snipes' tax returns; but it has also published the "Climategate" emails, an internal Trafigura report on toxic dumping in Ivory Coast, and the standard operating procedures for Guantanamo Bay.

Whatever the gaps in its procedures, there is little doubt that the website is at the forefront of a new information era in which the powerful, corrupt and murderous will have to feel a little more nervous about their behaviour. "There are reasons I do it that have to do with wanting to reform civilisation," Assange said in an interview with salon.com last month. "Of course, there's a personal psychology to it, that I enjoy crushing bastards. I like a good challenge."

Full disclosure: What we wouldn't know without Wikileaks

Trafigura's super-injunction

When commodities giant Trafigura used a super-injunction to suppress the release of an internal report on toxic dumping in the Ivory Coast in newspapers, it quickly appeared on Wikileaks instead. Accepting that the release made suppression futile, Trafigura lifted the injunction.

The CRU's 'Climategate' leak

Emails leaked on the site showed that scientists at the UK's Climate Research Unit, including director Phil Jones, withheld information from sceptics

The BNP membership list

After the site published the BNP's secret membership list in November 2008, newspapers found teachers, priests and police officers among them. Another list was leaked last year. The police has since barred officers from membership.

Sarah Palin's emails

Mrs Palin's Yahoo email account, which was used to bypass US public information laws, was hacked and leaked during the presidential campaign. The hacker left traces of his actions, and could face five years in prison.

Copyright 2010 Independent Print Limited

 

[WhistlingJack]

Australian Wikileak founder's passport confiscated

TOM ARUP

May 17, 2010

Julian Assange, the Australian founder of the whistleblower website Wikileaks, says he had his passport taken away from him at Melbourne Airport and was later told by customs officials that it was about to be cancelled.

Last year Wikileaks published a confidential Australian blacklist of websites to be banned under the government's proposed internet filter.

The Age has been told that Assange's passport is classified ''normal'' on the immigration database, meaning the Wikileaks director can travel freely on it.

Assange told The Age his passport was taken from him by customs officials at Melbourne Airport when he entered the country last week after he was told ''it was looking worn''.

When the passport was returned to him after about 15 minutes, he says he was told by authorities that it was going to be or was cancelled.

Passports are routinely taken from travellers for short periods by immigration officials if they are damaged.

Wikileaks has risen to prominence for posting leaked footage of US forces laughing at the dead bodies of 12 people they had just killed in Iraq in 2007.

It was in the Australian spotlight last year after publishing a confidential blacklist of websites that forms the basis of the government's proposed internet filter.

The list as published by Wikileaks then blocked links to YouTube clips, sites on euthanasia, fringe religions, and traditional pornography - as well as the websites of a tour operator and a dentist.

The government says the intention is to block extreme sites depicting such things as child pornography, bestiality and rape.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority has also asked the Australian Federal Police to investigate the leaking and publishing of the Australian internet blacklist.

But a spokeswoman for the AFP said yesterday the federal police had dropped the case earlier this year because it was ''not in our jurisdiction''.

Assange said half an hour after his passport was returned to him, he was approached by an Australian Federal Police officer who searched one of his bags and asked him about his criminal record relating to computer hacking offences in 1991.

Assange's allegations about his passport were first made on SBS current affairs program Dateline, which aired a story on the Wikileaks founder.

Copyright © 2010 Fairfax Media

 

[WhistlingJack]

Julian Assange profiled in New Yorker

Mark Frauenfelder at 9:23 AM Monday, May 31, 2010

Julian Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks.org, a Web site that “collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish[es] them.” He is profiled by Raffi Khatchadourian in the June 7, 2010 issue of The New Yorker.

Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay, and the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account. The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put it to me, “I’m living in airports these days.” He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries.

BoingBoing

 

[ramonmercado]

While media attention has been heaped upon Wiki-Leaks, one person has been largely forgotten: Bradley Manning. Private Bradley Manning has been accused of previously supplying information to Wikileaks and is under suspicion of providing the documents which have been released. Bradley is now held in isolation from the outside world, in military detention in Quantico Military Base. Bradley faces, for his alleged actions, up to 52 years imprisonment. Here are two articles regarding Bradley. Full texts at link

The Significance Of The ‘Support Bradley Manning’ Campaign
By Katharine Dawn

Noting how when there’s “one man in chains, none are free”, a friend comments: “Bradley represents the truth-sayer in us all – if we leave him there, we abandon our own inner calling for truth”.
http://www.countercurrents.org/dawn290710.htm

Legal Fund Established To Fight Imprisonment of Accused WikiLeaks Whistleblower
By Bradley Manning Support Network

Bradley Manning Support Network is accepting online donations for the legal defense of Private First Class Bradley Manning. The Network, a grassroots initiative formed to defend and support accused whistleblower Pfc. Bradley Manning, has partnered with Courage to Resist, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting military objectors.
http://www.countercurrents.org/bmsn290710.htm
Related Link: http://www.bradleymanning.org/

 

[WhistlingJack]

Wikileaks denies Tor hacker eavesdropping gave site its start

Perish the thought

By John Leyden

Posted in Enterprise Security, 2nd June 2010 14:08 GMT

Updated WikiLeaks has denied that eavesdropping on Chinese hackers played a key part in the early days of the whistle-blowing site.

Wired reports [1] that early WikiLeaks documents were siphoned off from Chinese hackers' activities via a node on the Tor anonymiser network, as an extensive interview [2] with WikiLeaks' founder Julian Paul Assange by the New Yorker explains in greater depth.

One of the WikiLeaks activists owned a server that was being used as a node for the Tor network. Millions of secret transmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that hackers from China were using the network to gather foreign governments’ information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction has ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site’s foundation, and Assange was able to say, “We have received over one million documents from thirteen countries.”

Only a very small number of the documents obtained were ever published. However, the first publication on WikiLeaks back in December 2006 was culled from just this Tor-harvested traffic, Wired reports. This tranche of documents referred to a “secret decision,” supposedly made by Somali rebel leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, to hire criminals as hit men in the assassination of government officials.

The documents were published in an attempt to verify their authenticity, alongside a commentary by Assange noting they might just as easily be a clever smear as the edicts of an Islamic militant with possible links to Al-Queda.

All this smoke and dagger intrigue received short shrift from WikiLeaks in an anonymous and sketchy denial, posted [3] on the site's official Twitter feed late on Tuesday.

Wired has a beatup on WL&Tor,with no new info,spinning "our" 2006 investigation into Chinese spying. Don't be fooled

The Register has asked WikiLeaks to explain what role, if any, Tor traffic snooping might have played in the foundation of the site.

Assange responded to our inquiries by saying the New Yorker and Wired had each presented a misleading picture, without shedding much light on WikiLeaks use of Tor exit node interception.

The imputation is incorrect. The facts concern a 2006 investigation into Chinese espionage one of our contacts were involved in. Somewhere between none and handful of those documents were ever released on WikiLeaks. Non-government targets of the Chinese espionage, such as Tibetan associations were informed (by us).

Traffic passing through the Tor (The Onion Router) anonymizing network is encrypted until it reaches the point when it leaves the network, where it is decrypted and forwarded to its final destination. Traffic leaving at a particular exit node can always be monitored, a point which Tor has always emphasised. This monitoring may be a criminal offence, depending on where it takes place, and is certainly ethically questionable.

Anyone using Tor should use SSH, SSL, or a VPN connection to encrypt traffic because Tor is only good for anonymity - certainly not end-to-end encryption. Users have no control over which exit nodes will be used, still less on the path traffic takes through the network, which is random by design.

The potential to extract sensitive data by eavesdropping on traffic flowing out of a Tor exit node is well known in security circles.

For example, in September 2007, Swedish security consultant Dan Egerstad ran a packet sniffer on five Tor exit nodes under his control, recovering the login credentials of about 1,000 email addresses, including at least 100 accounts belonging to foreign embassies in the process. One likely theory is that Egerstad had stumbled onto the surveillance of hacked accounts by unknown intelligence agencies, who were using Tor to disguise their identity. Egerstad was hauled in for questioning by the Swedish authorities over this exercise but never charged.

Egerstad was part of a team that also found TOR exit-nodes that only forwarded traffic association with ports used for unencrypted email protocols and IM traffic. ®

Additional reporting by Chris Williams.

®

 

[WhistlingJack]

While media attention has been heaped upon Wiki-Leaks, one person has been largely forgotten: Bradley Manning. Private Bradley Manning has been accused of previously supplying information to Wikileaks and is under suspicion of providing the documents which have been released. Bradley is now held in isolation from the outside world, in military detention in Quantico Military Base. Bradley faces, for his alleged actions, up to 52 years imprisonment.

Indeed.

U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe

By Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter

June 6, 2010 | 9:31 pm

Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.

SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he’s being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged.

Manning was turned in late last month by a former computer hacker with whom he spoke online. In the course of their chats, Manning took credit for leaking a headline-making video of a helicopter attack that Wikileaks posted online in April. The video showed a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.

He said he also leaked three other items to Wikileaks: a separate video showing the notorious 2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan that Wikileaks has previously acknowledged is in its possession; a classified Army document evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat, which the site posted in March; and a previously unreported breach consisting of 260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables that Manning described as exposing “almost criminal political back dealings.”

“Hillary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,” Manning wrote.

Wired.com could not confirm whether Wikileaks received the supposed 260,000 classified embassy dispatches. To date, a single classified diplomatic cable has appeared on the site: Released last February, it describes a U.S. embassy meeting with the government of Iceland. E-mail and a voicemail message left for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on Sunday were not answered by the time this article was published.

The State Department said it was not aware of the arrest or the allegedly leaked cables. The FBI was not prepared to comment when asked about Manning.

Army spokesman Gary Tallman was unaware of the investigation but said, “If you have a security clearance and wittingly or unwittingly provide classified info to anyone who doesn’t have security clearance or a need to know, you have violated security regulations and potentially the law.”

Manning’s arrest comes as Wikileaks has ratcheted up pressure against various governments over the years with embarrassing documents acquired through a global whistleblower network that is seemingly impervious to threats from adversaries. Its operations are hosted on servers in several countries, and it uses high-level encryption for its document-submission process, providing secure anonymity for its sources and a safe haven from legal repercussions for itself. Since its launch in 2006, it has never outed a source through its own actions, either voluntarily or involuntarily.

Manning came to the attention of the FBI and Army investigators after he contacted former hacker Adrian Lamo late last month over instant messenger and e-mail. Lamo had just been the subject of a Wired.com article. Very quickly in his exchange with the ex-hacker, Manning claimed to be the Wikileaks video leaker.

“If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?” Manning asked.

From the chat logs provided by Lamo, and examined by Wired.com, it appears Manning sensed a kindred spirit in the ex-hacker. He discussed personal issues that got him into trouble with his superiors and left him socially isolated, and said he had been demoted and was headed for an early discharge from the Army.

When Manning told Lamo that he leaked a quarter-million classified embassy cables, Lamo contacted the Army, and then met with Army CID investigators and the FBI at a Starbucks near his house in Carmichael, California, where he passed the agents a copy of the chat logs. At their second meeting with Lamo on May 27, FBI agents from the Oakland Field Office told the hacker that Manning had been arrested the day before in Iraq by Army CID investigators.

Lamo has contributed funds to Wikileaks in the past, and says he agonized over the decision to expose Manning — he says he’s frequently contacted by hackers who want to talk about their adventures, and he has never considered reporting anyone before. The supposed diplomatic cable leak, however, made him believe Manning’s actions were genuinely dangerous to U.S. national security.

“I wouldn’t have done this if lives weren’t in danger,” says Lamo, who discussed the details with Wired.com following Manning’s arrest. “He was in a war zone and basically trying to vacuum up as much classified information as he could, and just throwing it up into the air.”

Manning told Lamo that he enlisted in the Army in 2007 and held a Top Secret/SCI clearance, details confirmed by his friends and family members. He claimed to have been rummaging through classified military and government networks for more than a year and said that the networks contained “incredible things, awful things … that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC.”

He first contacted Wikileaks’ Julian Assange sometime around late November last year, he claimed, after Wikileaks posted 500,000 pager messages covering a 24-hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. ”I immediately recognized that they were from an NSA database, and I felt comfortable enough to come forward,” he wrote to Lamo. He said his role with Wikileaks was “a source, not quite a volunteer.”

Manning had already been sifting through the classified networks for months when he discovered the Iraq video in late 2009, he said. The video, later released by Wikileaks under the title “Collateral Murder,” shows a 2007 Army helicopter attack on a group of men, some of whom were armed, that the soldiers believed were insurgents. The attack killed two Reuters employees and an unarmed Baghdad man who stumbled on the scene afterward and tried to rescue one of the wounded by pulling him into his van. The man’s two children were in the van and suffered serious injuries in the hail of gunfire.

“At first glance it was just a bunch of guys getting shot up by a helicopter,” Manning wrote of the video. “No big deal … about two dozen more where that came from, right? But something struck me as odd with the van thing, and also the fact it was being stored in a JAG officer’s directory. So I looked into it.”

In January, while on leave in the United States, Manning visited a close friend in Boston and confessed he’d gotten his hands on unspecified sensitive information, and was weighing leaking it, according to the friend. “He wanted to do the right thing,” says 20-year-old Tyler Watkins. “That was something I think he was struggling with.”

Manning passed the video to Wikileaks in February, he told Lamo. After April 5 when the video was released and made headlines Manning contacted Watkins from Iraq asking him about the reaction in the United States.

“He would message me, Are people talking about it?… Are the media saying anything?” Watkins said. “That was one of his major concerns, that once he had done this, was it really going to make a difference?… He didn’t want to do this just to cause a stir…. He wanted people held accountable and wanted to see this didn’t happen again.”

Watkins doesn’t know what else Manning might have sent to Wikileaks. But in his chats with Lamo, Manning took credit for a number of other disclosures.

The second video he claimed to have leaked shows a May 2009 air strike near Garani village in Afghanistan that the local government says killed nearly 100 civilians, most of them children. The Pentagon released a report about the incident last year, but backed down from a plan to show video of the attack to reporters.

As described by Manning in his chats with Lamo, his purported leaking was made possible by lax security online and off.

Manning 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 counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis … a perfect storm.”

Manning told Lamo that the Garani video was left accessible in a directory on a U.S. Central Command server, centcom.smil.mil, by officers who investigated the incident. The video, he said, was an encrypted AES-256 ZIP file.

Manning’s aunt, with whom he lived in the United States, had heard nothing about his arrest when first contacted by Wired.com last week; Debra Van Alstyne said she last saw Manning during his leave in January and they had discussed his plans to enroll in college when his four-year stint in the Army was set to end in October 2011. She described him as smart and seemingly untroubled, with a natural talent for computers and a keen interest in global politics.

She said she became worried about her nephew recently after he disappeared from contact. Then Manning finally called Van Alstyne collect on Saturday. He told her that he was okay, but that he couldn’t discuss what was going on, Van Alstyne said. He then gave her his Facebook password and asked her to post a message on his behalf.

The message reads: “Some of you may have heard that I have been arrested for disclosure of classified information to unauthorized persons. See CollateralMurder.com.”

An Army defense attorney then phoned Van Alstyne on Sunday and said Manning is being held in protective custody in Kuwait. “He hasn’t seen the case file, but he does understand that it does have to do with that Collateral Murder video,” Van Alstyne said.

Manning’s father said Sunday that he’s shocked by his son’s arrest.

“I was in the military for five years,” said Brian Manning, of Oklahoma. “I had a Secret clearance, and I never divulged any information in 30 years since I got out about what I did. And Brad has always been very, very tight at adhering to the rules. Even talking to him after boot camp and stuff, he kept everything so close that he didn’t open up to anything.”

His son, he added, is “a good kid. Never been in trouble. Never been on
drugs, alcohol, nothing.”

Lamo says he felt he had no choice but to turn in Manning, but that he’s now concerned about the soldier’s status and well-being. The FBI hasn’t told Lamo what charges Manning may face, if any.

The agents did tell Lamo that he may be asked to testify against Manning. The Bureau was particularly interested in information that Manning gave Lamo about an apparently-sensitive military cybersecurity matter, Lamo said.

That seemed to be the least interesting information to Manning, however. What seemed to excite him most in his chats was his supposed leaking of the embassy cables. He anticipated returning to the states after his early discharge, and watching from the sidelines as his action bared the secret history of U.S. diplomacy around the world.

“Everywhere there’s a U.S. post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed,” Manning wrote. “It’s open diplomacy. World-wide anarchy in CSV format. It’s Climategate with a global scope, and breathtaking depth. It’s beautiful, and horrifying.”

Update: The Defense Department issued a statement Monday morning confirming Manning’s arrest and his detention in Kuwait for allegedly leaking classified information.

“United States Division-Center is currently conducting a joint investigation” says the statement, which notes that Manning is deployed with 2nd Brigade 10th Mountain Division in Baghdad. “The results of the investigation will be released upon completion of the investigation.”

Wired.com © 2010

 

[WhistlingJack]

7 June 2010 Last updated at 13:46

Hacker explains why he reported 'Wikileaks source'

By Jonathan Fildes Technology reporter, BBC News

Hackers often pride themselves on their anti-authoritarian and counter culture stance.

So news that former high-profile hacker Adrian Lamo had turned over an Army intelligence analyst to authorities was met with derision by some.

"A lot of people have labelled me a snitch," Mr Lamo told BBC News. "I guess I deserve that on this one but not as a generality."

"This was a very hard decision for me."

Mr Lamo is a former hacker, who exposed security flaws at the New York Times, Yahoo and Microsoft. After a brief stint hiding from the FBI, Mr Lamo was imprisoned and fined. He now works as a journalist and security analyst.

Mr Lamo says that he was responsible for reporting Specialist (SPC) Brad Manning to the military authorities after the analyst boasted to him that he had handed over thousands of classified documents and classified military video to whistle-blower site Wikileaks.

One video posted to the site shows a US Apache helicopter killing up to 12 people - including two Reuters journalists - during an attack in Baghdad in 2007. Two children were also seriously injured in the attack. Some of the men were armed.

Mr Manning, 22, reportedly acquired the video during the course of his work at a US Military field base FOB Hammer, on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Mr Lamo said that he did not suspect anything unusual when Mr Manning contacted him over instant messenger and e-mail.

"I'm contacted on a daily basis by all kinds of people who confess to all kinds of federal crimes," he said.

"I have never once turned them in, even when the FBI offered me a deal."

However, after Mr Manning confessed to distributing the documents, Mr Lamo said that his stance changed and he "felt the need to contact investigators".

"At the moment he gave me the information, it was basically a suicide pact."

"I was worried for my family - that if I were obstructing justice that they could be caught up in any investigation," he said.

"I wanted to do this one by the book, by the numbers. I didn't want any more FBI agents knocking at the door."

Mr Lamo also said that he had decided to report Mr Manning for reasons of national security.

Instead of going straight to the authorities, Mr Lamo disclosed the information to "a friend" who had worked as an agent in the Army counter intelligence unit.

"He put me in touch with some of his former colleagues who he felt could handle the issue in a low key way," he said.

Four agents - from different federal and military agencies - turned up at his house to read the conversation logs - from his e-mail and instant messenger conversations with Mr Manning - "one by one", he added.

"I gave them conversation logs that implicated Special Agent Manning.

"They were particularly interested in a code word for a major operation."

Mr Lamo also described how Mr Manning had supposedly obtained the documents.

"He described the process of operational security in detail," said Mr Lamo.

"What he described was a culture of insecurity with poor attention to information.

"The field base didn't have significant security."

He said that Mr Manning would download the documents from a room that needed a unique security code to access it. However, security on the base had slipped, he said.

"He said you'd knock on the door and they'd let you in."

Mr Lamo said that Mr Manning would take a CD labelled Lady Gaga into the room which he would load into a computer.

"Basically he sat down and started burning data to the CD whilst pretending to be bopping along."

Mr Manning would then upload the documents to Wikileaks servers, which are held in various countries around the world and anonymise the source.

Wikileaks has not confirmed Mr Manning as the source of the video and has said it never collects personal information on sources. It said that it has not been sent 260,000 classified US embassy cables that Mr Manning reportedly leaked to the site.

Wikileaks also questions Mr Lamo's credibility.

However, the US military has confirmed that Mr Manning has been detained on suspicion of leaking classified documents and video. He is being held "in pre-trial confinement" in Kuwait.

"I want to be proud of it but I can't bring myself to be. I keep thinking about what it was like being 22, alone and not knowing about my future," said Mr Lamo.

"Knowing that I did that to somebody - it hurts. I feel like I should be talking to a priest."

He said he had been placed in a situation where "an impossible decision had to be made".

"I hope that Manning gets the same chance as I did - the same chance to take his punishment as I did and start a new life as I did."

"I like to think I prevented him from getting into more serious trouble."

BBC © MMX

 

[WhistlingJack]

State Department Anxious About Possible Leak of Cables to Wikileaks

By Kim Zetter and Kevin Poulsen

June 8, 2010 | 8:39 pm

The State Department and personnel at U.S. embassies around the world are reportedly waiting anxiously to find out if an Army intelligence analyst was telling the truth when he boasted that he had supplied 260,000 classified State Department diplomatic cables to the whistleblower site Wikileaks.

If Wikileaks has the secret documents and publishes them, the leak could not only expose damaging information about U.S. foreign policy and national security issues, but also expose embarrassing information about backroom diplomatic deals and U.S. attitudes toward foreign leaders — such as the opinions of U.S. ambassadors about the honesty, integrity, and strength and longevity of those leaders.

The concerns are reported in a story published at the Daily Beast that appears to confirm that alleged leaker Bradley Manning had access to the kinds of cables he recently discussed with a former hacker who turned him in to authorities.

As previously reported, Manning told ex-hacker Adrian Lamo that he had recently given 260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables to Wikileaks, and said the documents exposed “almost-criminal political back dealings.”

“Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,” Manning told Lamo in an online chat session.

“If he really had access to these cables, we’ve got a terrible situation on our hands,” an anonymous American diplomat told the Daily Beast. “We’re still trying to figure out what he had access to. A lot of my colleagues overseas are sweating this out, given what those cables may contain.”

He said the cables could damage diplomatic efforts of the U.S. and its allies, and that the State Department and law enforcement agencies have been trying to determine whether, and how, to approach Wikileaks about not publishing the cables if it has them.

SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was an Army intelligence analyst stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad. He was put under pre-trial confinement in Kuwait nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. The Defense Department said in a statement this week that Manning has not been formally charged, but is being investigated for allegedly leaking classified information.

A U.S. military official told Wired.com that “everybody’s scattering in a thousand different directions, digging deep [for this investigation]. We don’t just do that for every story that pops up.”

He added that the public revelations about Manning’s alleged activities this week “alerted a lot of people that didn’t even know about this at the highest level.”

Manning was turned in late last month by Lamo, with whom he spoke online. In the course of their chats, Manning took credit for leaking the State Department cables to Wikileaks, as well as a headline-making video of a helicopter attack in Iraq that Wikileaks posted online April 5, another video showing the notorious 2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan that Wikileaks has previously acknowledged is in its possession, and a classified Army document evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat.

Manning told Lamo he sent the Iraq video to Wikileaks in February. He doesn’t say when he allegedly transmitted the cables.

Wikileaks has not responded to calls and e-mails from Wired.com. A message published on the organization’s Twitter account Monday said that allegations “that we have been sent 260,000 classified U.S, embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect.”

The site has, however, posted one diplomatic cable that Manning mentions in his chat with Lamo. It was published by Wikileaks last February and describes a U.S. embassy meeting with the government of Iceland.

The State Department has suggested to the Daily Beast that even if Manning didn’t give thousands of cables to Wikileaks, he may still have downloaded a huge library of them and stored them for later transmission.

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 inter-agency 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.

Manning enlisted in the Army in 2007 and was deployed with the 2nd Brigade 10th Mountain Division in Baghdad last November. Prior to this, he had been stationed at Fort Drum in New York, where his division is headquartered.

Manning was a 35F intelligence analyst with a Top Secret/SCI security clearance.

According to the Army’s web site, analysts in this position “use information derived from all intelligence disciplines to determine changes in enemy capabilities, vulnerabilities and probable courses of action.”

Duties include receiving and processing incoming intelligence reports and messages and maintaining intelligence records and files.

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 labelled 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 counter-intelligence, 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.”

Army spokesman Lt. Col. Eric Bloom in Baghdad confirmed that in early May, Manning was demoted to private first class and was reassigned job duties. He did not know the reason behind the demotion but said Manning was not being discharged early and that his deployment in Iraq was supposed to last a year.

Bloom said the demotion was conducted under Article 15 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice in a non-judicial proceeding, and that Manning maintained his security clearance after the demotion. He did not know what access Manning would have had to classified networks following his job reassignment.

A State Department source told the Daily Beast that Pentagon investigators have been searching through Manning’s e-mail accounts and computer hard drives for evidence of the data he claims to have downloaded and transmitted to Wikileaks.

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 non-existent.

“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.”

Wired.com © 2010

 

[WhistlingJack]

8 June 2010 Last updated at 17:41

Wikileaks site unfazed by arrest of US army 'source'

By Jonathan Fildes Technology reporter, BBC News

Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks has said that the detention of an alleged confidential source by the US military does not compromise its work.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told BBC News that other potential whistle-blowers should not be put off from sending material to the site.

The US has detained US military analyst Bradley Manning on suspicion of leaking classified material to the site.

Mr Assange would not confirm whether Mr Manning was a source.

"We endeavour to protect our sources," he told BBC News. "We do not know if Mr Manning is a source, but we understand there are allegations that are being taken seriously so we are naturally inclined to try to defend [him]."

The US army in Iraq has said that Specialist (Spc) Manning was in Kuwait and had been "placed in pre-trial confinement for allegedly releasing classified information".

One video reportedly posted to the site by Mr Manning shows a US Apache helicopter killing up to 12 people - including two Reuters journalists - during an attack in Baghdad in 2007. Two children were also seriously injured in the assault on the group, which contained some armed men.

Mr Manning's identity was reportedly revealed to the US authorities by a former high-profile hacker, Adrian Lamo, whom Mr Manning had contacted via e-mail and instant messenger.

During the course of their conversations, Mr Lamo told BBC News, Mr Manning boasted about handing over military videos and 260,000 classified US embassy messages to Wikileaks.

"At the moment he gave me the information, it was basically a suicide pact," Mr Lamo said.

He handed his name to US authorities because of concerns over US national security and because he did not want to be found to have been "obstructing justice" in the course of any investigation.

"I didn't want any more FBI agents knocking at the door," he said.

Mr Lamo has previously been convicted for hacking into the New York Times, Yahoo and Microsoft. He now works as a journalist and security analyst.

But Mr Assange questioned Mr Lamo's motives and credibility.

"He has broken the most sacred oath of journalism, which is confidentiality of sources."

Mr Assange also said that some of his account did not ring true.

"We do not recognise a number of the claims made by Adrian Lamo as to what Mr Manning allegedly related to him - they cannot be factually correct."

In particular, Mr Assange said that Wikileaks has no knowledge of the 260,000 confidential messages that Mr Lamo said Mr Manning claimed to have uploaded to the site.

However, as Wikileaks never divulges its sources, confirming the existence of the documents could implicate Mr Manning.

In response, Mr Lamo said he understood why Mr Assange would not concede to handling sensitive government data.

"I wouldn't admit to having them either," he said.

He also said that he was not approached by Mr Manning as a journalist.

"I was a private citizen in a private capacity - there was no source, journalist relationship," he told BBC News.

"I did tell him that I worked as a journalist. I would have been happy to write about him myself, but we just decided that it would be too unethical."

The story of Mr Manning's arrest was first reported on wired.com by Mr Lamo's long-term associate Kevin Poulsen, also a former hacker and now a journalist.

Wikileaks has established a reputation for publishing leaked material since its first appearance on the web in 2006.

In November 2009, it published what it said were 573,000 intercepted pager messages sent during the 9/11 attacks in the United States.

Previously it had posted a list of names and addresses of people said to belong to the British National Party (BNP) and a copy of the Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta, a document that detailed restrictions placed on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Earlier this year, the website published a 2008 Pentagon report that said the site was considered a "threat to the US army".

The document says that "the possibility that current employees or moles within [the Department of Defence] or elsewhere in the US government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out".

It goes on to say that the "identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially… deter others considering similar actions from using [Wikileaks]".

The US government later confirmed to the BBC that the documents were genuine.

When the Pentagon document was leaked, the site stated that none of its sources had ever knowingly been exposed.

Now, Mr Assange said that Mr Manning's case should not put people off from contributing to the site.

"We have deliberately structured our operation to protect our sources under threat of criminal law," he said.

The site does not collect information about its sources and uses numerous web servers scattered around the world to host content.

Mr Assange said these were deliberately located in jurisdictions - such as Sweden - that could prosecute Wikileaks if it revealed a source.

It is currently advising the Icelandic government on efforts to increase legal protections for whistle-blowers in the country.

"We make it clear to [sources] that we will protect them."

He said this would apply to Mr Manning.

"Assuming that the allegations against [him] are true, we have taken steps to arrange for his protection and legal defence."

BBC © MMX

 

[WhistlingJack]

Wikileaks Commissions Lawyers to Defend Alleged Army Source

By Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter

June 11, 2010 | 3:58 pm

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange wants a copy of the chat logs in which a U.S. intelligence analyst discussed providing classified materials to the whistle-blower site, according to an e-mail shown to Wired.com by the ex-hacker who turned the analyst in.

Assange says he’s arranging the legal defense for 22-year-old Bradley Manning, now in his third week in military custody.

In the Friday e-mail to Adrian Lamo, Assange (or someone convincingly posing as him) claims he wants to forward the logs to attorneys he says he’s hired to represent Manning, though the e-mail doesn’t explain why the unnamed lawyers aren’t approaching Lamo directly.

The e-mail also contains talking points Assange would like to see Lamo adopt in describing Manning, and in explaining his decision to report the suspected leaker to law enforcement.

Subject: Manning’s defence; logs; strategy
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2010 11:20:40 +0100 (BST)
From: Julian Assange
To: [email protected]
CC: Julian Assange.

Manning’s defence team, which I have commissioned, urgently requires all emails and chat logs you alleged to have come from Mr. Manning. Please send them to me, if necessary through our online submission system. They will be used strictly for Mr. Manning’s defence, but must be complete.

In addition, it would be helpful if you described Mr. Manning, as a “whistleblower”, who had already lost his access over an unrelated issue, held no data, and was of no meaningful threat to anyone. In particular Mr. Manning was not an “alleged spy”, and it is wrong for you to describe him as such, or to suggest that there were no other approaches to resolving the situation.

It would also be helpful to all concerned if you stopped trying to justify your behaviour by whipping up sentiment against Mr. Manning in other ways. Your most effective personal strategy is to say you were scared due to your previous experiences, unthoughtful due to recent drug problems, and made a decision which you now bitterly regret and would under no circumstances repeat. Going around like a poor man’s Tsutomu, constantly drawing attention to yourself through the destruction of a young romantic outlaw figure, will leave you permanently reviled by history–and me.

JA

Wired.com could not confirm that Manning has accepted Assange’s offer of legal assistance. A phone call to his aunt, who has been in contact with Manning following his arrest, was not returned Friday. Assange did not immediately respond to inquiries from Wired.com.

Lamo says he hasn’t attempted to whip up sentiment against Manning, and that he doesn’t intend to comply with Assange’s request.

“No, I’m not going to give the logs to someone who suggests that I might have been drug-addled when I decided to turn in a spy,” says Lamo, who takes prescription medication for depression and Asperger’s Disorder. “Private Manning’s attorney can get them by discovery like everyone else.”

In his chats with Lamo, copies of which were provided to Wired.com by the ex-hacker, Manning described a crisis of conscience that led him to leak a headline-making video of a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians. He also boasted of leaking a separate video showing the notorious 2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan that Wikileaks has previously acknowledged is in its possession; a classified Army document evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat, which the site posted in March; a detailed Army chronology of events in the Iraq war; and a cache of 260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables.

Wikileaks has neither confirmed nor denied that Manning leaked information to the site, but on Sunday it tweeted that “Allegations in Wired that we have been sent 260,000 classified US embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect.”

Manning told Lamo that he expected the cables to be released in a “searchable format” to the public. The prospect of the cable leak appears to be of particular concern to the United States. One or more of Manning’s hard drives were flown to Washington on Thursday, according to the Associated Press, and State Department diplomatic security agents are examining them for evidence of the allegedly downloaded cables. The Daily Beast reported that the Pentagon is attempting to locate Assange before he publishes the cables, though it’s not clear what defence officials plan to do if they find him.

Responding to the report, Wikileaks tweeted Friday, “Any signs of unacceptable behaviour by the Pentagon or its agents towards this press will be viewed dimly.”

Assange was previously scheduled to speak at 4:30 p.m. Pacific time Friday at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Las Vegas. On Friday, Wikileaks tweeted that Assange still plans on participating on the panel, but IRE told the Daily Beast that Assange actually cancelled several days ago.

Last week, Assange was scheduled to appear beside Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, but he wound up participating from Australia over Skype instead.

Wired.com © 2010

 

[WhistlingJack]

Pentagon rushes to block release of classified files on Wikileaks

By Jerome Taylor

Saturday, 12 June 2010

It has the ingredients of a spy thriller: an American military analyst turned whistleblower; 260,000 classified government documents; and rumours that the world's most powerful country is hunting a former hacker whom it believes is about to publish them.

Pentagon and State Department officials are desperately trying to discover whether Bradley Manning, a US army intelligence officer currently under arrest in Kuwait, has leaked highly sensitive embassy cables to Wikileaks.org, an online community of some 800 volunteer cyber experts, activists, journalists and lawyers which has become a thorn in the side of governments and corrupt corporations across the globe.

Reports in the US say officials are seeking to apprehend Julian Assange, the website's founder who has pioneered the release of the kind of information the mainstream media are either unwilling or unable to publish.

Manning, 22, an intelligence analyst from Potomac, Maryland, who had been serving in Iraq, was revealed earlier this week as the source behind a highly damning leak earlier in the year that showed harrowing cockpit footage of an American Apache helicopter gunning down unarmed civilians in Baghdad three years ago.

But the Apache video may have proven to be one leak too far. Adrian Lamo, a former US hacker turned journalist who had been conversing with Manning online and later gave up his name to the authorities, said he also claimed to have handed 260,000 classified US embassy messages to Wikileaks.

According to Mr Lamo, Manning said the documents showed "almost-criminal political back dealings" made by US embassies in the Middle East which, if true, would cause enormous embarrassment to key allies in a notoriously volatile area of the world. Mr Lamo claims Manning said that "Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public".

If those responsible for the site wanted any confirmation that the US military have them in their sights, they only need to look at their own website. In March this year Wikileaks published a leaked 32-page intelligence report which described the site as a "threat to the US Army". The report added: "The possibility that current employees or moles within [the Department of Defence] or elsewhere in the US government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out."

The site has previously shown that it is prepared to publish sensitive documents from US embassies. In January Wikileaks posted a classified cable from the US embassy in Reykjavik which described a meeting between embassy chief Sam Watson, the British Ambassador, Ian Whiting, and members of the Icelandic government.

In an interview with the BBC news website – the only one he has given since Manning was arrested – Mr Assange refused to confirm whether the intelligence analyst was the source of the Apache video. He also said he had no knowledge of the 260,000 further files that Manning claimed to have leaked.

But while Mr Assange may be shunning media interviews, he seems to be making no attempt to keep a low profile. Yesterday afternoon, the site's Twitter page announced that Mr Assange would be appearing in Las Vegas later in the day for a panel discussion about protecting anonymous sources – appearing alongside former CIA agent Valerie Plame and Leonard Downie Jr, a former editor of the Washington Post who supervised much of the paper's coverage of the Watergate scandal.

An earlier tweet suggested Wikileaks would not look kindly upon any US government interference. "Any signs of unacceptable behaviour by the Pentagon or its agents towards this press will be viewed dimly," the post said.

©independent.co.uk

 

[WhistlingJack]

Icelandic Modern Media Initiative passes: a new safe haven for journalists?

Xeni Jardin at 11:27 AM Wednesday, Jun 16, 2010

Jake Appelbaum says,

The IMMI (Icelandic Modern Media Initiative) passed last night unanimously (tweet 1, tweet 2).

Read more about the IMMI here. Here's the WikiLeaks talk about IMMI from the last Chaos Communications Congress. Here's the time line.

This is a really big deal for journalists and free speech activists everywhere. This has been a major effort by hundreds of people from all over the globe, and most importantly the Icelandic people! I have an unending amount of respect for the people of Iceland. They've decided that history shouldn't be erased, that people should be free to discuss what is actually happening in the world around them, and most of all they've decided to help the entire planet with this in mind.

Below, a statement from Wikileaks founder Julian Assange about Wikileaks' involvement in this initiative.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Announce] WikiLeaks inspired "New media haven" proposal
passes Parliament
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:00:17 +0100 (BST)
From: Julian Assange

FYI:

Reykjavik, Iceland; 4:00 UTC, June 16th 2010.

The WikiLeaks advised proposal to build an international "new media haven" in Iceland, with the world's strongest press and whistleblower protection laws, and a "Nobel" prize for for Freedom of Expression, has unaminously passed the Icelandic Parliament.

50 votes were cast in favor, zero against, one abstained. Twelve members of parliament were not present. Vote results are available [here].

One of the inspirations for the proposal was the dramatic August 2009 gagging of of Iceland's national broadcaster, RUV by Iceland's then largest bank, Kaupthing.

Two changes were made to the proposal from its original form as per the opinion of the parliament's general affairs committee [Link]. The first of these altered slightly the wording of the first paragraph so as to widen the arena for research. The second of these added two new items to the list of tasks for the government:

- That the government should perform a detailed analysis, especially with respect to operational security, for the prospect of operating data centers in Iceland.

- That the government should organize an international conference in Iceland regarding the changes to the legal environment being caused by expansion of cloud computing, data havens, and the judicial state of the Internet.

Video footage from the proposal's vote will be available at:

Link 1

Link 2

For details of the proposal and press contacts, please see http://www.immi.is

BoingBoing

 

[WhistlingJack]

22 June 2010 Last updated at 10:23

Wikileaks makes contact with US government

By Chris Vallance BBC News

Whistleblower website Wikileaks has made contact with the US government over claims that an American serviceman is one of its sources.

Soldier Bradley Manning has been held for three weeks without formal charge.

The US is investigating claims that he passed confidential information to Wikileaks.

Site editor Julian Assange told BBC News that, so far, the US authorities have not yet been in touch with him.

He said that lawyers representing Wikileaks have been in touch with the US administration but that neither the Department of State nor the Department of Defense had made any attempt to approach the site.

In spite of the silence from the US, Mr Assange said he felt it was "important to have a channel open in these matters".

No conversations could take place which might reveal the identity of any source, he added.

Mr Manning was identified as an alleged Wikileaks source after former hacker Adrian Lamo, in whom he had confided, contacted the authorities.

During a series of conversations conducted online, Mr Lamo claims that Mr Manning revealed he had passed 260,000 US diplomatic cables and two confidential military videos to Wikileaks.

US state department spokesperson PJ Crowley has said that the Bureau of Diplomatic Security was examining one or more hard drives used by Mr Manning in Iraq.

Wikileaks said it did not know whether Mr Manning, who had served in Iraq as an army intelligence analyst, was the source of the leak as the website does not keep personal records of the people who approach it.

One of the videos he allegedly leaked was released by Wikileaks in April.

It contained footage from a 2007 attack by US forces in Baghdad in which 12 people died including two Reuters employees.

In the immediate aftermath of Mr Manning's exposure as the alleged source, reports appeared online claiming that the Pentagon was actively seeking Julian Assange.

On Monday he appeared as a panelist at a seminar on free speech held in the European Parliament and organised by the Alliance of Liberals And Democrats for Europe.

At a press conference ahead of the seminar Mr Assange spoke about the risk of action against Wikileaks by the US.

"The signals from the US authorities initially were mixed, however, they seem to clarifying now and I think the United States understands that it must obey the rule of law," he told reporters.

When asked by the BBC whether he was concerned that other people involved with Wikileaks might be vulnerable he said: "We are concerned to make sure that our volunteers in particular are protected."

He added that Wikileaks would "always try and represent alleged sources".

Mr Assange said that the site had contacted three lawyers to help defend Mr Manning.

Mr Manning has to date not been formally charged, and the Pentagon has declined to comment on the case while the investigation continues.

In an e-mail sent to press and supporters last week, Julian Assange said Wikileaks planned to release another US military video showing a 2009 attack on a village in Afghanistan in which numerous civilians died.

Given the current debate over whether Mr Manning is the source of the US military videos possessed by Wikileaks, Mr Assange said he was "a little more concerned" about this release.

He added that Wikileaks would "always try and represent alleged sources".

However he was confident that Wikileaks could protect itself from any action by the US government.

Mr Assange had been heartened by a groundswell of support for Wikileaks from the online community as well as prominent journalists and politicians, he said.

"I'm sure, through their support and the integrity and correctness of what we're doing we'll be fine."

BBC © MMX

 

[WhistlingJack]

6 July 2010 Last updated at 21:07

US soldier linked to Iraq helicopter video leak charged

The US military has pressed criminal charges against a soldier suspected of leaking video of a US helicopter attack in Iraq to the website, WikiLeaks.

Army Spc Bradley Manning is accused of transferring classified data on to his personal computer and transmitting it to an unauthorised third party.

Spc Manning allegedly handed over footage of an Apache helicopter killing 12 civilians in Baghdad in 2007.

He was detained in Baghdad in June, two months after the video's publication.

The army has yet to say what leaked information led to the charges, however the date of the operation cited in the charge sheet matches that of the helicopter incident - 12 July 2007.

According to a US Army statement, Spc Manning was charged on Monday with eight violations of US criminal law and four violations of army regulations governing the handling of classified information and computers.

He is accused of downloading a classified video of a military operation in Iraq and transmitting it to an uncleared third party, in violation of a section of the Espionage Act, according to the charge sheet.

Spc Manning is also alleged to have abused access to a secret-level network to obtain more than 150,000 US state department cables, some of them classified. More than 50 cables are said to have been passed to an unauthorised person.

If convicted of all charges, he could face a prison sentence of between 50 to 70 years, according to army spokesman Lt Col Eric Bloom.

Col Bloom told the BBC that the next step would be an Article 32 hearing, at which time an investigating officer will determine whether the case should go to court-martial.

In the meantime, Spc Manning was free to retain his own counsel and make telephone calls, he added. It has yet to be decided if any court-martial would be open to the public.

Spc Manning is said to have confessed to leaking the video of the helicopter attack to WikiLeaks in a series of online chats with a former computer hacker, Adrian Lamo.

He allegedly also admitted handing over other items to WikiLeaks, including a classified army document assessing the threat level of the website, which promotes the leaking of information by whistleblowers.

WikiLeaks says it does not know whether Spc Manning was the source of the leak as it does not keep personal records of the people who approach it. It also denies it has any diplomatic cables.

However, the charge sheet accuses Spc Manning of obtaining a classified cable titled "Reykjavik 13", which was published by WikiLeaks on 18 February. The cable from the US embassy in Iceland describes meetings between its charge d'affaires Sam Watson, members of the Icelandic government and the British ambassador.

Following the army's announcement that Spc Manning had been charged, WikiLeaks posted a message on Twitter.

"If the charges against Manning are true, he will be the Daniel Ellsberg of our times," it said, referring to the US military strategist who leaked 7,000 pages of top-secret documents in an effort to halt the Vietnam War.

Mr Lamo meanwhile told the BBC that he would like to apologise to the 22-year-old.

"Not for doing what I did - which I believe was right - in that it protected US and coalition service men and women abroad," he said. "But what I am sorry for is that I was not a good friend to him."

"I put the interest of many ahead of the interest of one."

The video published by WikiLeaks in April shows an Apache helicopter opening fire on a group of about eight people, whom the pilots identify as armed insurgents.

After a voice on the transmission urges the pilots to "light 'em all up", the individuals on the street are shot by the gunship's cannon.

A few minutes later a van drives to the scene, and its occupants appear to start picking up a wounded person. It, too, is fired upon.

Two children were among the casualties, along with a photographer working for the Reuters news agency and his assistant.

The US military initially said the helicopters had been engaged in combat operations against a hostile force.

BBC © MMX

 

[WhistlingJack]

New leak charges against U.S. soldier

Published: July 6, 2010 at 9:11 PM

WASHINGTON, July 6 (UPI) -- A U.S. soldier in Iraq, charged in May with leaking a video to Wikileaks of an attack that killed 12 people, faces additional charges, officials said Tuesday.

Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, 22, was formally charged Monday with unauthorized uploading of classified information to his computer and sharing it with unauthorized people, the Defense Department said. The leaking allegedly involved classified State and Defense Department files.

Manning was serving at Contingency Operating Station Hammer with the 10th Mountain Davison's 2nd Combat Brigade when he was arrested, officials said. The New York Times said he was an intelligence analyst.

Manning allegedly gave Wikileaks video of a helicopter attack that killed a reporter and cameraman for the Reuters news agency, the Times said. An edited version appeared in a documentary, "Collateral Murder."

Wired magazine reported Manning told Andrew Lamo, a former computer hacker he met online, about accessing classified information. Lamo reported him to military authorities.

"(U.S. Secretary of State) Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public," Manning told Lamo, the magazine reported.

© 2010 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 

[WhistlingJack]

14 July 2010 Last updated at 11:50

US government lifts lid on alleged leak to WikiLeaks

By Chris Vallance BBC News

The US state department has told the BBC it believes an alleged whistle-blower obtained secret diplomatic data despite being at a field base in Iraq.

Serviceman Bradley Manning, 22, faces two charges related to the illegal transfer and transmission of classified information from a US military network.

The US said he was suspected of downloading from SIPR Net.

He reportedly then passed on the data, including army videos and diplomatic messages, to the WikiLeaks website.

WikiLeaks has repeatedly said it does not have the confidential messages and the site itself is not mentioned in the charges against Private First Class (Pfc) Manning.

A former hacker, Adrian Lamo, reported Pfc Manning to the US authorities. He said the intelligence analyst admitted, in a series of online chats, to sending data to the whistle-blowing website.

In the redacted charge sheet detailing the accusations against Pfc Manning, the Army alleges that he transmitted, "to a person not authorised to receive it", a classified US Department of State cable described as "Reykjavik 13".

The US also alleges Pfc Manning obtained 150,000 US diplomatic cables without proper authorisation.

In February this year, WikiLeaks released a diplomatic cable from 13 January 2010 recording details of a meeting in Iceland between US diplomat Sam Watson, British ambassador Ian Whitting, and members of the Icelandic government.

Now the state department has told BBC News how Bradley Manning, based at the Hammer military field base in Iraq, could have accessed information unrelated to the US mission in that country.

In an e-mail, US state department spokesperson Megan Mattson said: "After the events of 11 September 2001, agencies across the federal government understood that greater information sharing was vital to protecting our national security interests.

"As part of our efforts to make Department of State information available to those who have a legitimate need to know, we established the Net Centric Diplomacy initiative, which allows Department of State information to be shared on the Department of Defence's SIPR (Secret Internet Protocol System) Net system."

Ms Mattson said that access to the system was only permitted to those "civilian and military users with appropriate security clearances".

She said that Bradley Manning was "suspected of violating the trust and confidence given to him".

Catherine Lotrionte, associate director of the Institute for Law, Science and Global Security, has a background in US intelligence work.

She told BBC News that there was "a push after 9/11 that information was going to be shared - and databases connected."

In her view, data-sharing is necessary for effective intelligence work, and the risk that it may make large data breaches easier is simply "the cost of doing business - the downside is that someone may break the rules".

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a retired US General, with extensive military intelligence experience, told BBC News that there were, "layers of clearances designed to protect and restrict access to data."

He said that sharing information was the right thing to do and the military benefits far outweighed the risks.

But Crispin Black, a former intelligence analyst for the UK government, says the content of cables can be very sensitive.

"Diplomatic cables don't usually contain huge secrets but they do contain the unvarnished truth so in a sense they can be even more embarrassing than secrets."

He told the BBC that the possibility that someone in a base in Iraq could potentially access cables about Iceland violated, the principle of "need to know" in intelligence.

According to claims by Adrian Lamo, Pfc Manning told him in online chats that he removed information by burning it onto a CD.

Mr Lamo claims that Pfc Manning told him that he disguised his activities by pretending he was listening to music by Lady Gaga.

According to Lamo, Pfc Manning is alleged to have said in one online-chat that "Hilary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack…"

WikiLeaks has consistently denied possessing the thousands of diplomatic cables Mr Lamo alleges were passed to them.

WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange told BBC News on Thursday that he was "disturbed" by the charges against Bradley Manning.

Mr Assange said that it was "clear that some of those charges relate to information that should not have been classified".

While WikiLeaks says that it is technically impossible for it to know if Pfc Manning is indeed its source, it is trying to assist in his defence.

Mr Assange said that contact had not been established with Pfc Manning personally but that he expected that would change shortly.

He said that whoever had leaked the information was a "hero" for exposing wrong-doing by the US military and accused the army of a "double standard" in prosecuting Pfc Manning.

BBC © MMX

 

[WhistlingJack]

Wikileaks Reopens for Leakers

By Ryan Singel

July 19, 2010 | 3:56 pm

Wikileaks is back in business for leakers, with two revamped ways to submit secret documents, the group announced Saturday.

The security certificate for uploading by HTTPS has been replaced, after expiring in early June. When the old certificate expired, it disabled Wikileaks’ upload system for over a month without any notice on the site.

Those with particularly sensitive documents can also once again cloak their uploads over the anonymizing system Tor. Wikileaks’ Tor Hidden Service had been a much-touted feature of the site, but was taken down without notice several months ago.

After Wired.com reported on Wikileaks’ technical issues last month, Julian Assange, the site’s leader, said that both outages were part of an upgrade to Wikileaks’ infrastructure.

The changes and other additions to Wikileaks were announced Saturday at the HOPE hacker conference in New York City by prominent Wikileaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum, who tacitly acknowledged that Wikileaks had been less than transparent about the outages. In a spirit of communicating more with supporters, he announced a new blog for Wikileaks, supplementing its active Twitter feed.

“It’s extremely important that we tell you what’s going on,” Appelbaum said. “Because whenever we do anything — when we take down the submission site to make sure that there are some new things that can be launched — we need to make sure that we let you know about it so that it doesn’t cause a huge problem in the media where we have to take a lot of time away from doing important work to talk to people that are not going to be very helpful, and in some cases are quite hostile.”

Assange had been slated to give the Saturday keynote at the hacker conference, but Appelbaum stepped in to deliver the address instead.

Wikileaks has been in the spotlight in the last few months after it released classified footage of a 2007 military attack in Iraq, where two Reuters employees were killed by U.S. soldiers in a Apache helicopter. Two children in a van that stopped to help an unarmed wounded man were also shot and severely wounded in the attack.

In May, PFC Bradley Manning, a former intelligence analyst in Iraq, was arrested on charges of leaking the video and other documents to Wikileaks, after confiding in former hacker Adrian Lamo, who turned him in.

While publishing classified documents isn’t a crime in the U.S., press reports indicate the government is concerned that Wikileaks will publish tens of thousands of sensitive State Department cables that Manning purportedly also provided Wikileaks. In chats with Lamo, Manning claimed to have given Wikileaks a database of 260,000 cables; Manning has been formally charged with downloading over 150,000 cables, and leaking more than 50 classified cables.

The reported government interest makes it unlikely that Assange would attempt to enter the U.S., where he’d likely face questioning, but he has spoken publicly twice in the U.K. in the last month.

Other new features announced include increased support for peer-to-peer file sharing and ways to find all leaks by geographic region or subject. The site also published the unique identifier of its SSL certificate, which would-be leakers can use to make sure that their connection to Wikileaks uploading server isn’t being spied on by rogue intelligence agencies.

Some of Wikileaks donations are handled by a German non-profit foundation, which last week said that the site’s spending was parsimonious, and that it would release a fuller report on the site’s budget in August.

The new upload page is handled, without explanation, through the web site for Wikileaks’s sister organization The Sunshine Press. A third security feature on Wikileaks — the ability to access documents securely over HTTPS — has yet to return, and will “take some more time until it is available,” according to the site’s new blog.

Wired.com © 2010

 

[WhistlingJack]

Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation

• Hundreds of civilians killed by coalition troops

• Covert unit hunts leaders for 'kill or capture'

• Steep rise in Taliban bomb attacks on Nato

Nick Davies and David Leigh

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 25 July 2010 22.03 BST

A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.

The disclosures come from more than 90,000 records of incidents and intelligence reports about the conflict obtained by the whistleblowers' website Wikileaks in one of the biggest leaks in US military history. The files, which were made available to the Guardian, the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel, give a blow-by-blow account of the fighting over the last six years, which has so far cost the lives of more than 320 British and more than 1,000 US troops.

Their publication comes amid mounting concern that Barack Obama's "surge" strategy is failing and as coalition troops hunt for two US naval personnel captured by the Taliban south of Kabul on Friday.

The war logs also detail:

• How a secret "black" unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for "kill or capture" without trial.

• How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.

• How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

• How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.

In a statement, the White House said the chaotic picture painted by the logs was the result of "under-resourcing" under Obama's predecessor, saying: "It is important to note that the time period reflected in the documents is January 2004 to December 2009."

The White House also criticised the publication of the files by Wikileaks: "We strongly condemn the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organisations, which puts the lives of the US and partner service members at risk and threatens our national security. Wikileaks made no effort to contact the US government about these documents, which may contain information that endanger the lives of Americans, our partners, and local populations who co-operate with us."

The logs detail, in sometimes harrowing vignettes, the toll on civilians exacted by coalition forces: events termed "blue on white" in military jargon. The logs reveal 144 such incidents.

Some of these casualties come from the controversial air strikes that have led to Afghan government protests, but a large number of previously unknown incidents also appear to be the result of troops shooting unarmed drivers or motorcyclists out of a determination to protect themselves from suicide bombers.

At least 195 civilians are admitted to have been killed and 174 wounded in total, but this is likely to be an underestimate as many disputed incidents are omitted from the daily snapshots reported by troops on the ground and then collated, sometimes erratically, by military intelligence analysts.

Bloody errors at civilians' expense, as recorded in the logs, include the day French troops strafed a bus full of children in 2008, wounding eight. A US patrol similarly machine-gunned a bus, wounding or killing 15 of its passengers, and in 2007 Polish troops mortared a village, killing a wedding party including a pregnant woman, in an apparent revenge attack.

Questionable shootings of civilians by UK troops also figure. The US compilers detail an unusual cluster of four British shootings in Kabul in the space of barely a month, in October/November 2007, culminating in the death of the son of an Afghan general. Of one shooting, they wrote: "Investigation controlled by the British. We are not able to get [sic] complete story."

A second cluster of similar shootings, all involving Royal Marine commandos in Helmand province, took place in a six-month period at the end of 2008, according to the log entries. Asked by the Guardian about these allegations, the Ministry of Defence said: "We have been unable to corroborate these claims in the short time available and it would be inappropriate to speculate on specific cases without further verification of the alleged actions."

Rachel Reid, who investigates civilian casualty incidents in Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, said: "These files bring to light what's been a consistent trend by US and Nato forces: the concealment of civilian casualties. Despite numerous tactical directives ordering transparent investigations when civilians are killed, there have been incidents I've investigated in recent months where this is still not happening.

Accountability is not just something you do when you are caught. It should be part of the way the US and Nato do business in Afghanistan every time they kill or harm civilians." The reports, many of which the Guardian is publishing in full online, present an unvarnished and often compelling account of the reality of modern war.

Most of the material, though classified "secret" at the time, is no longer militarily sensitive. A small amount of information has been withheld from publication because it might endanger local informants or give away genuine military secrets. Wikileaks, whose founder, Julian Assange, obtained the material in circumstances he will not discuss, said it would redact harmful material before posting the bulk of the data on its "uncensorable" servers.

Wikileaks published in April this year a previously suppressed classified video of US Apache helicopters killing two Reuters cameramen on the streets of Baghdad, which gained international attention. A 22-year-old intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, was arrested in Iraq and charged with leaking the video, but not with leaking the latest material. The Pentagon's criminal investigations department continues to try to trace the leaks and recently unsuccessfully asked Assange, he says, to meet them outside the US to help them. Assange allowed the Guardian to examine the logs at our request. No fee was involved and Wikileaks was not involved in the preparation of the Guardian's articles.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

 

[WhistlingJack]

Wikileaks documents show Pakistan and Taliban link

Reuters

Monday, 26 July 2010

Pakistan was actively collaborating with the Taliban in Afghanistan while accepting US aid, new US military reports showed, a disclosure likely to increase the pressure on Washington's embattled ally.

The revelations by the organisation Wikileaks emerged as Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned of greater Nato casualties in Afghanistan as violence mounts over the summer.

It also came as the Taliban said they were holding captive one of two US servicemen who strayed into insurgent territory, and that the other had been killed. The reported capture will further erode domestic support for America's nine-year war.

Documents leaked by Wikileaks said representatives from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence met directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organise militant networks fighting US soldiers.

The White House condemned the leak, saying it could threaten national security and endanger the lives of Americans. Pakistan said leaking unprocessed reports from the battlefield was irresponsible.

US national security adviser Jim Jones said the leak would not affect "our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan".

The revelations were contained in more than 90,000 classified documents which US officials focused on the period leading to the launch of President Barack Obama's Afghan strategy last December, when he authorised deployment of 30,000 additional troops.

Violence in Afghanistan is at its highest of the 9-year-old war as the thousands of extra US troops step up their campaign to drive insurgents out of their traditional heartland in the south.

"As we continue our force levels and our operations over the summer ... we will likely see further tough casualties and levels of violence," Admiral Mullen told reporters in Kabul on Sunday.

©independent.co.uk

 

[WhistlingJack]

White House says Wikileaks is endangering lives

AP

Monday, 26 July 2010

The White House accused online whistleblower WikiLeaks of endangering the lives of American, British and other coalition troops after it posted around 90,000 leaked US military records today.

The documents amount to a blow-by-blow account of six years of the Afghanistan war, including unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings as well as covert operations against Taliban figures.

The White House condemned the document disclosure, saying it "put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk".

The documents, including classified cables and assessments between military officers and diplomats, also describe US fears that ally Pakistan's intelligence service was actually aiding the Afghan uprising.

The documents, dated between January 2004 and December 2009, are largely what is called "raw intelligence" - reports from junior officers in the field that analysts use to advise policy-makers.

White House national security adviser General Jim Jones stressed that the documents described a period from January 2004 to December 2009, during the administration of President George Bush.

That was before "President Obama announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan, and increased focus on al-Qa'ida and Taliban safe havens in Pakistan, precisely because of the grave situation that had developed over several years", he said.

The New York Times said the documents suggested Pakistan "allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organise networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders".

General Jones praised a deeper partnership between the US and Pakistan, saying: "Counter-terrorism co-operation has led to significant blows against al Qaida's leadership." Nevertheless, he called on Pakistan to continue its "strategic shift against insurgent groups".

German magazine Der Spiegel reported that the records showed Afghan security officers as helpless victims of Taliban attacks.

It said the documents showed a growing threat in the north, where German troops were stationed.

While the documents provide a glimpse of a world the public rarely sees, the overall picture they portray is already familiar to most Americans.

US officials have already publicly condemned Pakistani officials' co-operation with some insurgents, like the Haqqani network in tribal areas.

The success of US special operating forces teams at taking out Taliban targets has been praised by US military and intelligence officials.

And newly-resigned General Stanley McChrystal, who was leading the Afghan war effort, made protecting Afghan civilians one of the hallmarks of his command, complaining that too many Afghans had been accidentally killed by Western firepower.

One US official said the Obama administration had already told Pakistani and Afghan officials what to expect from the document release, in order to head off some of the more embarrassing revelations.

Another US official said it may take days to comb through all the documents to see what they mean to the US war effort and determine their potential damage to national security. The official added that the US was not certain of the source of the leaked documents.

US government agencies have been bracing for the release of thousands more classified documents since the leak of a classified helicopter cockpit video of a 2007 firefight in Baghdad. That leak was blamed on a US Army intelligence analyst working in Iraq.

Spc Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was arrested in Iraq and charged earlier this month with multiple counts of mishandling and leaking classified data, after a former hacker turned him in.

Manning had bragged to the hacker, Adrian Lamo, that he had downloaded 260,000 classified or sensitive US State Department cables and transmitted them by computer to Wikileaks.org.

Lamo turned Manning in to US authorities, saying he could not live with the thought that those released documents might get someone killed.

©independent.co.uk

 

[WhistlingJack]

26 July 2010 Last updated at 19:44

US says Wikileaks could 'threaten national security'

The US has condemned as "irresponsible" the leak of 90,000 classified military records, saying their publication could threaten national security.

The documents released by the Wikileaks website include details of killings of Afghan civilians unreported until now.

The records also show Nato concerns that Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency is helping the Taliban in Afghanistan, an accusation Islamabad has denied.

The Pentagon said it might take weeks to ascertain what damage had been done.

Calling their release a "criminal act", spokesman Col Dave Lapan said officials were reviewing the documents to determine "whether they reveal sources and methods" and might endanger US and coalition personnel.

A spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he was "shocked" at the scale of the leaks, but thought that "most of this is not new".

Mr Karzai's office later said the documents "clearly support and verify Afghanistan's all-time position that success over terrorism does not come with fighting in Afghan villages, but by targeting its sanctuaries and financial and ideological sources across the borders".

The huge cache of classified papers - posted by Wikileaks as the Afghan War Diary - is one of the biggest leaks in US history. It was also given in advance to the New York Times, the Guardian and the German news magazine, Der Spiegel.

The founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, said he had no reason to doubt the reliability of the reports.

"When we publish material, what we say is: the document as we describe it is true," he said at a news conference in London.

"We publish CIA reports all the time. They are legitimate reports, but they don't mean the CIA is telling the truth."

Mr Assange said there was no one overarching revelation to come out of the cache.

"The real story of this material is that it's war - it's one damn thing after another," he said.

"It is the continuous small events, the continuous deaths of children, insurgents, allied forces, the maimed people. Search for the word 'amputation' in this material, or 'amputee', and there are dozens and dozens of references."

He compared the impact of the released material to the opening of the archives of the East German secret police, the Stasi.

In a statement, US National Security Adviser Gen James Jones said such classified information "could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk".

He said the documents covered the period from January 2004 to December 2009, before President Barack Obama "announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan".

But Mr Assange was sceptical, saying: "A new policy by Obama doesn't mean new practice by the US military."

He also said Wikileaks had "tried hard to make sure that this material does not put innocents at harm".

"All the material is over seven months old so is of no current operational consequence, even though it may be of very significant investigative consequence."

After being asked repeatedly by reporters whether he believed some of the incidents described in the documents constituted war crimes, Mr Assange said: "It is up to a court to decide, clearly, whether something is, in the end, a crime."

"That said, prima facie, there does appear to be evidence of war crimes in this material," he added.

He cited as an example an attack in June 2007 by a secret US special forces unit, Task Force 373, which used a Himars (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) to begin a raid on a compound where a senior al-Qaeda leader, Abu-Laith al-Libi, was thought to be hiding. Seven children died.

The Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) acknowledged the deaths of the children at the time, but stated that coalition troops had attacked because of "nefarious activity" there.

It did not mention they had targeted al-Libi nor used a Himars before any shots had been fired at them, and has not commented on the details included in the Wikileaks papers.

Pakistan's government, meanwhile, denied claims its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency backed the Taliban in the war in Afghanistan.

One of the leaked documents refers to an alleged meeting in December 2006 between insurgents and the former ISI chief, Lt Gen Hamid Gul, during which he claimed to have dispatched three men to Kabul to carry out attacks.

He dismissed the Wikileaks material as "pure fiction which is being sold as intelligence".

"It's not intelligence," Gen Gul, who ran the agency from 1987 to 1989, told the BBC. "It may have a financial angle to it but more than that it is not hardcore [intelligence]. I'm an old veteran. I know."

"It is all wrong. It's precisely as their intelligence regarding Saddam Hussein keeping weapons of mass destruction in his closet," he added. "This is all based on falsehood. That is why they are not winning, because they have no cause."

The Pakistani presidential spokeswoman, Farahnaz Ispahani, said the leaks might be an attempt to sabotage the new strategic dialogue between the US and Pakistan.

The reports also suggest:

* The Taliban has had access to portable heat-seeking missiles to shoot at aircraft

* A secret US special forces unit, Task Force 273, has been engaged on missions to "capture or kill" top insurgents listed on a Joint Priority Effects List (JPEL)

* Many civilian casualties - caused by Taliban roadside bombs and Nato missions that went wrong - have gone unreported

* Iran is engaged in an extensive covert campaign to arm, finance and equip the Taliban and Afghan warlords allied to al-Qaeda

The head of the Foreign Relations Committee in the US Senate said the leak came at a "critical stage" for US policy in the region.

"However illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America's policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan," Democratic Senator John Kerry said.

UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said he did not think the leaks would damage the international effort in Afghanistan.

Nick Davies from The Guardian newspaper said he was sure the leaks were genuine

Wikileaks says it delayed the release of about 15,000 reports from the archive as part of a "harm minimisation process demanded by our source".

The Guardian and the New York Times say they had no contact with the original source of the leak, but spent weeks cross-checking the information.

Earlier this year, Wikileaks posted a video on its website which it said showed the killings of civilians by a US military helicopter in Baghdad in 2007.

A US army intelligence analyst, Specialist Bradley Manning, is awaiting trial on charges including releasing classified information.

A former hacker, Adrian Lamo, said Spc Manning boasted to him about handing over military videos and 260,000 classified US embassy messages to Wikileaks.

Wikileaks has refused to identify its source for the video or the US military documents.

Meanwhile, Nato said an investigation had found "no evidence" that as many as 52 civilians died in an air strike in Helmand province on Friday.

President Karzai's office had said Afghan intelligence believed coalition forces had killed women and children in the village of Rigi. The BBC also spoke to villagers who said they had witnesses the incident.

"Any speculation at this point of an alleged civilian casualty in Rigi Village is completely unfounded," Isaf Communication Director Rear Adm Greg Smith said in a statement.

BBC News - US says Wikileaks could 'threaten national security'

 

[shruggy63]

Nice one Jack! I began wavering on the value of Wikileaks but you've reassured me. Putting real information into the public domain is a good thing. Damning the messenger as unpatriotic or treacherous is the last refuge of scoundrels.
M. Assange & colleagues didn't send anyone to war.

 

[WhistlingJack]

Indeed - anything which irritates so many people in authority must be doing something right...