WikiLeaks decides to make public all US state department cables

Information related to confidential informants will not be redacted, despite fears for their safety WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, parted company with mainstream opinion when Assange revealed his intention to make public all 250,000 raw US state department cables that have been in his hands since last year, regardless of possible reprisals to named individuals. This flies in the face of efforts by the Guardian and other news organisations to redact references to confidential informants before publishing selected cables: efforts which may now appear to have been largely wasted. Assange’s plans were foreshadowed at a secret meeting of the WikiLeaks team last November. The diary of one of those present at Ellingham Hall, the stately home which was then their base, records: “Heated conversation about rough plans on releasing cables … JA insistent all cables must somehow eventually be released.” His wish has now been realised, after a year punctuated by his arrest, heated quarrels with former associates, and a chapter of accidents within Assange’s chaotic organisation. A few days after the Ellingham Hall meeting Assange turned himself in for arrest on an extradition warrant sought by Sweden, on allegations of sexual assault by two young WikiLeaks supporters there. He is still fighting extradition. On 7 December, the day of his arrest, a huge file of WikiLeaks information was posted on the Pirate Bay filesharing site by one of his supporters. According to the group’s former No 2, computer expert Daniel Domscheit-Berg: “These people said they wanted to keep WikiLeaks operational, but they never spoke to Julian.” As a result, it was never apparently realised that the file-set included Assange’s copy of all the classified US cables. Earlier in the year, according to Domscheit-Berg, Assange gave a copy of the cables file to the Guardian, one of the news organisations with whom he had agreed to work to publish the cables in redacted form. He provided the Guardian with a password and access to a special online server, on which he said he would place a copy of the cables file, which would only remain in existence for a short time. What Assange did not reveal was that he had not followed conventional security practice and created a new password for the transaction. Instead, according to Domscheit-Berg, he had merely reused the existing master password, already known to others within WikiLeaks. “The file was never supposed to be shared with anyone at all. To get a copy you would usually make a new copy with a new password. He was too lazy to create something new.” Early this year the Guardian published a book on WikiLeaks. In the course of it the password Assange had provided, assumed to be long obsolete, was published. The book contained no information that would enable anyone to find and download the encrypted file. This series of events has had unplanned consequences in recent weeks. Domscheit-Berg, who says he parted company with Assange over security concerns among other reasons, ended up alleging to a German newspaper, Freitag, that WikiLeaks was insecure. He said a file existed on the internet that contained the raw cables, and was capable of being accessed by the published password. He and Freitag took care to provide no location information that would enable the file to be accessed by any member of the public. The quarrel with Domscheit-Berg seemed to have had seismic consequences for Assange, who is still awaiting the result of his extradition appeal. He published unsubstantiated accusations that Domscheit-Berg had links with western intelligence agencies, and started to pump out tens of thousands of previously unpublished cables, mostly apparently unredacted. “He feared he would not be the one any more to be publishing them,” says Domscheit-Berg. “He is so egocentric and completely irrational.” To protests from the Australian and US governments that he was endangering sources, Assange dropped a series of hints on Twitter as to the location of the cables file on the internet. He followed this up with a claim that he was now publishing new material because the Guardian had “betrayed” his password seven months earlier. Assange’s claims about the Guardian were untrue. David Leigh and James Ball WikiLeaks Julian Assange David Leigh James Ball guardian.co.uk

Posted by on September 1, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.