The problem isn't that WikiLeaks posted this information, but the fact that the US government did the stuff.
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ROBERT BURNS AP National Security Writer
3:04 p.m. CST, November 24, 2010
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration said Wednesday it has alerted Congress and begun notifying foreign governments that the WikiLeaks website is preparing to release sensitive U.S. diplomatic files that could damage U.S. relations with friends and allies.
Officials said the documents may contain everything from accounts of compromising conversations with political dissidents and friendly politicians to disclosures of activities that could result in the expulsion of U.S. diplomats from foreign postings.
U.S. diplomatic outposts around the world have begun notifying other governments that WikiLeaks may release these documents in the next few days.
"These revelations are harmful to the United States and our interests," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said. "They are going to create tension in relationships between our diplomats and our friends around the world."
Crowley said the public airing of what were supposed to be private communications will likely erode trust in the U.S. as a diplomatic partner. And he said they could cause embarrassment if the files include derogatory or critical comments about friendly foreign leaders.
"When this confidence is betrayed and ends up on the front pages of newspapers or lead stories on television or radio, it has an impact," Crowley said.
The release is expected this weekend, although WikiLeaks has not been specific about the timing.
Officials speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters said the administration believes that the diplomatic fallout could be substantial. Many of the cables are believed to date from the start of the Obama administration, meaning that the White House won't be able to distance itself from any disclosures.
U.S. officials are concerned that some of the leaked cables could include details of conversations in which senior foreign politicians offer candid appraisals of their governments. Those assessments could prove embarassing, not only to the United States but to the politicians and governments concerned.
Some of the documents may provide specifics of meetings U.S. diplomats have had with opposition leaders, dissidents or human rights activists in various countries that could expose them to retaliation, particularly in authoritarian nations, officials said.
In more extreme cases, officials fear the cables could divulge embassy activities or analyses that might result in American diplomats being expelled from foreign countries.
A key focus of the documents is Europe, but the cables are likely to touch on relations with many key countries in Asia and elsewhere, another official said, speaking anonymously in order to discuss internal deliberations.
Crowley said the State Department "has known all along" that WikiLeaks possesses classified State Department documents. He said it was not possible, however, to predict with precision the impact of their release because the State Department does not know which files will be released.
"We wish this would not happen, but we are obviously prepared for the possibility that it will," he said.
In two previous releases of leaked secret U.S. government documents, in July and October, WikiLeaks provided them in advance to The New York Times, the Guardian newspaper in London and the German magazine Der Spiegel on condition that they publish their stories simultaneously.
The first leak contained thousands of military field reports on the war in Afghanistan; the second was a similar but larger file on the Iraq war.
No one has been charged with providing the documents to WikiLeaks, but a person of interest in the Pentagon's investigation is Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, who was an intelligence analyst in Iraq when he was arrested by U.S. authorities in early June and jailed in Kuwait. On July 29 he was transferred to a brig at Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia.
Diplomatic cables are internal documents that would include a range of secret communications between U.S. diplomatic outposts and State Department headquarters in Washington.
The revelations they contain are likely to range from the mundane, in the case of routine reporting on meetings between U.S. and foreign government officials, to the explosive, in the case of candid assessments of foreign officials or the exposure of pressure tactics used by U.S. diplomats.
One concern, for example, is that the documents may reveal the kinds of pressure the Obama administration has put on various countries to accept the transfer of Guantanamo Bay detainees who have been cleared for release but are unwelcome in their home countries.
State Department officials said privately there was concern, too, that details about certain sensitive programs could be exposed. These might include details about surveillance at U.S. diplomatic compounds abroad or revelations about highly secret intelligence sources or practices.
A Pentagon spokesman, Marine Col. David Lapan, said the Pentagon also has notified congressional committees of an expected WikiLeaks release. He said the files are believed to be State Department documents, but they could contain information about military tactics or reveal the identities of sources.
A statement on WikiLeaks Twitter site Wednesday said "the Pentagon is hyperventilating again over fears of being held to account."
The group bills itself as a website devoted to reforming governments worldwide by exposing their secrets, and its motto on its Twitter site is "We open governments."
Another recent posting said: "The coming months will see a new world, where global history is redefined."
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Associated Press writers Lolita C. Baldor and Matthew Lee contributed to this report.
U.S. diplomats ordered to gather data on counterparts, WikiLeaks releases show
By Paul Richter and Ken Dilanian, Los Angeles Times
November 29, 2010
WikiLeaks Founder |
The cables, part of the WikiLeaks website's massive release of secret U.S. dispatches, show that diplomats have been asked to gather counterparts' credit card and frequent flier numbers, iris scans, as well as information on their Internet identities and the telecommunications networks they use.
The activities are laid out in dispatches that describe how the diplomats must fulfill their obligations under a previously undisclosed program called the National Humint Collection Directive. In the intelligence world, "Humint" is an abbreviation for "human intelligence."
U.S. and other intelligence agencies often have assigned agents to work overseas under diplomatic cover. But if foreign governments became convinced that U.S. diplomats frequently function as spies, it could put at risk their ability to conduct normal diplomatic activities and increase the odds that they could be expelled for espionage, a retired diplomat said Sunday.
It was not immediately clear from the documents when the program had started, whether diplomats had resisted it or whether any had provided information that turned out to be particularly valuable.
The cables, dating from the Bush administration in 2008 to the Obama administration in 2009, also show the State Department had a keen interest in the activities of United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and his staff.
A cable from July 2009 instructs U.S. diplomats to gather personal information on U.N. officials, including cellphone numbers, pagers and faxes; Internet and intranet user names; e-mail addresses; credit card and frequent flier account numbers; and work schedules.
It asked diplomats to pass on to the intelligence community the "plans and intentions" of U.N. officials who work on key issues, including Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea. Diplomats are also asked to seek "biographic and biometric" information on North Korean representatives to the United Nations.
In an April 2009 cable, diplomats are ordered to gather information on officials of certain African countries, including "e-mail addresses, telephone and fax numbers, fingerprints, facial images, DNA, and iris scans."
E-mail addresses and frequent flier numbers are valuable to the National Security Agency, which specializes in intercepting telephone and computer communications, to track the movements and conversations of foreign officials.
The cables tied to the Humint program were sent to embassies in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, as well as the U.S. mission to the United Nations. They were signed by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton or her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice.
State Department officials sought to minimize Clinton's role. Patrick Kennedy, the undersecretary of State for management, said in a statement Sunday evening that "the long-standing practice at the State Department is to include the secretary's name at the end of every cable sent from Washington."
But this practice did not mean that the secretary had reviewed or approved the hundreds of thousands of cables sent each year, he said.
Wayne E. White, a former senior official with the State Department's intelligence arm, said some of the activities of diplomats described in the cables are routine, such as gathering information on foreign officials' biographies, tastes, family life, work schedule and contact information. The State Department wants to know what it can about the activities and personal tastes of key officials, he said.
But detailed financial information, such as credit card numbers and frequent flier identification numbers, "strikes me as odd," White said.
The disclosure that U.S. diplomats have been seeking such information "could upset a number of foreign governments," he said.
Philip J. Crowley, the chief State Department spokesman, disputed that there has been a blurring of lines between diplomats and spies.
"Our diplomats are just that, diplomats," he said. "They represent our country around the world and engage openly and transparently with representatives of foreign governments and civil society. Through this process, they collect information that shapes our policies and actions. This is what diplomats, for our country and other countries, have done for hundreds of years."
Though U.S. diplomats are generally supportive of the United Nations staff, there have been past disclosures of U.S. intelligence gathering at the organization. In 2004, it was disclosed that the United States and Britain had recorded the conversations of then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
paul.richter@latimes.com
ken.dilanian@latimes.com
LIBYA: More laughs, not many surprises in Wikileaks releases on Moammar Kadafi
November 29, 2010 | 6:48 am
Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi sees no reason to submit a passport photo along with his U.S. visa application. After all, one of Kadafi's aides explained to an American diplomat, the colonel's picture is all over Tripoli.
"... Any one of hundreds of billboards could be photographed and shrunken to fit the application's criteria," the aide said, according to one of a series of diplomatic cables released by the WikiLeaks website.
In the end, Kadafi was persuaded to have his picture taken, but the exchange is one of numerous illuminating anecdotes to surface from the latest WikiLeaks filing, which includes highly sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables.
As world leaders scramble to deal with the aftermath of the WikiLeaks release, Kadafi stands out not only for the entertainment value of his dossier but his ability to weather scandal. After all, the same eccentric leader who insists on pitching an enormous bedouin tent in foreign capitals, keeps a cadre of female bodyguards and recently passed out copies of the Koran to an audience of paid Italian models is not going to be embarrassed by the disclosure that his favorite Ukrainian "nurse" accompanies him everywhere.
Although the leaked diplomatic cable listing Kadafi's odd habits was assigned the highest level of secrecy, many of the details were unsurprising or even benign for one of the world's most notoriously unconventional leaders.
According to the document, Kadafi's reputation for being "mercurial and eccentric" is well earned, as revealed in the logistical details of his schedule and travel:
He is afraid of flying over water for long periods of time and insists on staying on the first floor of any accommodation. He is also dependent on a close circle of trusted aides, but appears to rely less on his famous female bodyguards, taking just one with him on a trip to the United Nations headquarters in New York. His favorite among four Ukrainian nurses in his employ, a "voluptuous blond" woman named Galyna Kolotnytska, is always by his side and may be involved romantically with Kadafi.
Kadafi's interests, based on a large celebration of his rule held in the capital, include horse racing and flamenco dancing.
The report's conclusions were perhaps surprising, given the strained nature of U.S,-Libyan relations. The diplomat writing the cable stressed that engagement is necessary to "overcome the misperceptions that inevitably accumulated during Kadafi's decades of isolation."
-- Meris Lutz in Beirut
Obama doesn't like it when his government looks like a bunch of thugs. Then perhaps Obama should not allow the government bureaucrats who work for him to behave like a bunch of thugs. That would fix the problem. But instead Obama wants to play the silly game that everything the USA does is great and everything the rest of the world does is bad! Hypocrite!!!!!
Leaked U.S. cables reveal sensitive diplomacy
by Matthew Lee - Nov. 28, 2010 04:51 PM
Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Hundreds of thousands of State Department documents leaked Sunday revealed a hidden world of backstage international diplomacy, divulging candid comments from world leaders and detailing occasional U.S. pressure tactics aimed at hot spots in Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea.
The classified diplomatic cables released by online whistle-blower WikiLeaks and reported on by news organizations in the United States and Europe provided often unflattering assessments of foreign leaders, ranging from U.S. allies such as Germany and Italy to other nations like Libya, Iran and Afghanistan.
The cables also contained new revelations about long-simmering nuclear trouble spots, detailing U.S., Israeli and Arab world fears of Iran's growing nuclear program, American concerns about Pakistan's atomic arsenal and U.S. discussions about a united Korean peninsula as a long-term solution to North Korean aggression.
There are also American memos encouraging U.S. diplomats at the United Nations to collect detailed data about the U.N. secretary general, his team and foreign diplomats -- going beyond what is considered the normal run of information-gathering expected in diplomatic circles.
None of the revelations is particularly explosive, but their publication could prove problematic for the officials concerned.
The documents published by the New York Times, France's Le Monde, Britain's Guardian newspaper, German magazine Der Spiegel and others laid out the behind-the-scenes conduct of Washington's international relations, shrouded in public by platitudes, smiles and handshakes at photo sessions among senior officials.
The White House immediately condemned the release of the WikiLeaks documents, saying "such disclosures put at risk our diplomats, intelligence professionals, and people around the world who come to the United States for assistance in promoting democracy and open government."
It also noted that "by its very nature, field reporting to Washington is candid and often incomplete information. It is not an expression of policy, nor does it always shape final policy decisions."
"Nevertheless, these cables could compromise private discussions with foreign governments and opposition leaders, and when the substance of private conversations is printed on the front pages of newspapers across the world, it can deeply impact not only U.S. foreign policy interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world," the White House said.
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley played down the spying allegations. "Our diplomats are just that, diplomats," he said. "They collect information that shapes our policies and actions. This is what diplomats, from our country and other countries, have done for hundreds of years."
On its website, the New York Times said "the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match."
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claimed the administration was trying to cover up alleged evidence of serious "human-rights abuse and other criminal behavior" by the U.S. government.
The documents were again available on the WikiLeaks website Sunday afternoon. The site was inaccessible much of the day, and the group claimed it was under a cyberattack.
But extracts of the more than 250,000 cables posted online by news outlets that had been given advance copies of the documents showed deep U.S. concerns about Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs along with fears about regime collapse in Pyongyang.
The Guardian said some cables showed King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia repeatedly urging the United States to attack Iran to destroy its nuclear program. The newspaper also said officials in Jordan and Bahrain have openly called for Iran's nuclear program to be stopped by any means and that leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt referred to Iran "as evil,' an existential threat' and a power that is going to take us to war," the Guardian said.
Those documents may prove the most problematic because even though the concerns of the Gulf Arab states are known, their leaders rarely offer such stark appraisals in public.
The Times highlighted documents that indicated the U.S. and South Korea were "gaming out an eventual collapse of North Korea" and discussing the prospects for a unified country if the isolated, communist North's economic troubles and political transition lead it to implode.
The paper also cited documents showing the U.S. used hardline tactics to win approval from countries to accept freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay. It said Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if its president wanted to meet with President Barack Obama and said the Pacific island of Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to take in a group of detainees.
It also cited a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing that included allegations from a Chinese contact that China's Politburo directed a cyber intrusion into Google's computer systems as part of a "coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws."
Le Monde said another memo asked U.S. diplomats to collect basic contact information about U.N. officials that included Internet passwords, credit card numbers and frequent flyer numbers. They were asked to obtain fingerprints, ID photos, DNA and iris scans of people of interest to the United States, Le Monde said.
The Times said another batch of documents raised questions about Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his relationship with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. One cable said Berlusconi "appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin" in Europe, the Times reported.
Italy's Foreign Minister Franco Frattini on Sunday called the release the "Sept. 11 of world diplomacy," in that everything that had once been accepted as normal has now changed.
Der Spiegel reported that the cables portrayed German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle in unflattering terms. It said American diplomats saw Merkel as risk-averse and Westerwelle as largely powerless.
Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, meanwhile, was described as erratic and in the near constant company of a Ukrainian nurse who was described in one cable as "a voluptuous blonde," according to the Times.
The Obama administration has been bracing for the release for the past week. Top officials have notified allies that the contents of the diplomatic cables could prove embarrassing because they contain candid assessments of foreign leaders and their governments, as well as details of American policy.
The State Department's top lawyer warned Assange late Saturday that lives and military operations would be put at risk if the cables were released. Legal adviser Harold Koh said WikiLeaks would be breaking the law if it went ahead. He also rejected a request from Assange to cooperate in removing sensitive details from the documents.
In a session Sunday with a group of Arab journalists, Assange said, "The State Department understands that we are a responsible organization, so it is trying to make it as hard as it can for us to publish responsibly."
He called the Obama administration "a regime that doesn't believe in the freedom of the press and doesn't act like it believes it."
The New York Times said the documents involved 250,000 cables -- the daily message traffic between the State Department and more than 270 U.S. diplomatic outposts around the world. The newspaper said that in its reporting, it attempted to exclude information that would endanger confidential informants or compromise national security.
The Times said that after its own redactions, it sent Obama administration officials the cables it planned to post and invited them to challenge publication of any information they deemed would harm the national interest. After reviewing the cables, the officials suggested additional redactions, the Times said.
The newspaper said it agreed to some, but not all.
Also Sunday, the Pentagon released a summary of precautions taken since WikiLeaks published stolen war logs from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since August, the Pentagon has changed the way portable computer storage devices such as flash drives can be used with classified systems, and made it harder for one person acting alone to download material from a classified network and place it on an unclassified one.
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Associated Press staffers Juergen Baetz in Berlin, Don Melvin in London, Angela Doland in Paris, Robert H. Reid in Cairo, Brian Murphy in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Mark Lavie in Jerusalem and Nicole Winfield in Rome contributed to this article.
Iran 'must be stopped': Arab leaders implored U.S. to attack, WikiLeaks disclosures show
By Borzou Daragahi and Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times
November 29, 2010
Reporting from Beirut and Washington —
Leaders of oil-rich Arabian Peninsula monarchies who are publicly reluctant to criticize Iran have been beseeching the United States in private to attack the Islamic Republic and destroy its nuclear facilities, according to a series of classified diplomatic cables released by the WikiLeaks website.
The cables show that both Saudi King Abdullah and King Hamed ibn Isa Khalifa of Bahrain, which hosts the U.S. 5th Fleet, are among the Arab leaders who have lobbied the United States to strike Iran. According to one dispatch, a Saudi official reminded Americans that the king had repeatedly asked the U.S. to "cut off the head of the snake" before it was too late.
The cables were among more than 250,000 American diplomatic dispatches provided by WikiLeaks to five U.S. and European news outlets, which began reporting the contents on their websites Sunday. The cables offer U.S. officials' candid and sometimes unflattering analyses of foreign leaders and governments, which could strain relations with Arab and European states, Russia, China and other major players.
Among other disclosures, the cables reveal:
—U.S. officials believe North Korea has provided Iran with missiles that could allow it to strike European capitals and Moscow.
—U.S. diplomats have been assigned to gather a wide variety of information on foreign officials, including such details as credit card numbers. The United Nations secretary-general and his team have been among the special targets of this information gathering.
—The United States has carried on an unsuccessful effort to remove from a Pakistani research reactor enriched uranium U.S. officials fear could fall into the hands of militants.
—U.S. officials have been told by a Chinese source that the Chinese Politburo was behind the hacking of Google's computer system in China.
The cables are the third huge release of classified U.S. data by WikiLeaks. U.S. officials believe they were passed to WikiLeaks by a disgruntled Army private, Bradley Manning, who had access to classified computer networks as a junior intelligence analyst in Iraq. Manning is now in a military jail, but authorities believe he provided the classified data before he was arrested. WikiLeaks has been parceling it out at intervals.
The White House denounced the disclosures as "dangerous and reckless," warning that they could jeopardize the safety of foreign officials and others who have helped the United States, and would make it more difficult to conduct routine diplomacy. WikiLeaks released the documents in advance to the Guardian of Britain, Der Spiegel of Germany, Le Monde in France, El Pais in Spain and the New York Times.
U.S. officials have spent long hours in recent days notifying foreign governments that the cables would include sensitive material. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has personally called 11 capitals to try to soften the impact.
While the trove of cables did not contain startling revelations about Iran, they show that the Islamic Republic has been a preoccupation of the Obama administration and the Bush White House before it.
The documents illustrate how frightened the Arab world is of Iran's rising ambitions and its nuclear program — and how much Iran has become the center of attention in capitals around the world. At a June 2009 meeting with U.S. lawmakers, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak argued that attacking Iran any later than late 2010 "would result in unacceptable collateral damage."
Although Persian Gulf leaders recognize that the options for dealing with Iran are limited, the dispatches indicate that they repeatedly have urged U.S. military action, fearing that allowing Iran to build a nuclear bomb would shift the balance of power decisively in the region.
"That program must be stopped," one Nov. 4, 2009, cable quotes Khalifa as telling Gen. David H. Petraeus, then head of U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for U.S. military activity in the Middle East. "The danger of letting it go is greater than the danger of stopping it."
In a May 2005 meeting, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan, deputy supreme commander of the armed forces of the United Arab Emirates, urged a U.S. general to use "ground forces" to take out Iran's nuclear program. Another cable noted that even though the military official was urging the U.S. to attack, the federation did not honor U.S. requests to interdict suspicious shipments transiting its shores to Iran. A February 2010 cable attributes Bin Zayed's "near obsessive" arms buildup to his fears about Iran.
"I believe this guy is going to take us to war," Bin Zayed told a U.S. delegation in April 2006 of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "It's a matter of time. Personally I cannot risk it with a guy like Ahmadinejad. He is young and aggressive."
In December 2009, Bin Zayed told a U.S. official, "We know your priority is Al Qaeda, but don't forget Iran. Al Qaeda is not going to get a nuclear bomb."
During an April 2008 visit to Saudi Arabia, Petraeus and former U.S. envoy to Baghdad Ryan Crocker got an earful from the king and other officials about the need to confront Iran's nuclear program and its ambitions in Iraq. And during an April 2009 meeting, Saudi Prince Turki Kabeer warned American, Russian and Dutch diplomats that Riyadh could not stomach Iran's continued enrichment of uranium. "We are OK with nuclear electrical power and desalinization, but not with enrichment," he was quoted as saying.
Still, one Saudi diplomat urged Americans in 2008 to avoid war and launch talks. An Omani official asked Americans to take a more nuanced view of the Iranian issue and to question whether other Arab leaders' entreaties for war were based on logic or emotion.
Several documents showed the extent to which the U.S. has been desperately attempting to obtain detailed information on Iran's political scene and economy by interviewing sources at American diplomatic outposts in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Azerbaijan.
The U.S. has not had diplomatic relations with Iran for decades, and the documents show that Americans repeatedly have relied on European allies with embassies in Tehran to gain understanding of the Islamic Republic. According to one cable, former British envoy Geoffrey Adams advised Americans to be "steady and firm, tough but not aggressive" in late 2007 negotiations between Iranian and American officials over the security situation in Iraq.
"The current Iranian regime is effectively a fascist state and the time has come to decide on next steps," French diplomat Jean-David Levitte advised U.S. officials in September 2009.
The cables detail Iran's alleged breaches of law and protocol under Ahmadinejad and his hard-line entourage. A source at the U.S. Consulate in Dubai alleged that Iran used the Red Crescent Society to funnel weapons and militants into Iraq and Lebanon.
One cable quoted U.N. weapons inspectors as telling American officials in Vienna that Iran refused to hand over original design plans for an enrichment facility near the city of Qom. The cable quotes the U.N. officials as saying that during an inspection of the facility, Iranian technicians were "steered by unseen observers" who dispatched notes during meetings and insisted on recording all conversations.
daragahi@latimes.com
paul.richter@latimes.com
Daragahi reported from Beirut and Richter from Washington.
This is the reason the founders passed the First Amendment. They didn't want the government jailing people who disagreed with the government rulers. Of course Obama and his gang of government thugs is saying f*ck the First Amendment we are going to jail anybody that makes us look like a bunch of government criminals.
Active U.S. criminal probe into WikiLeaks release Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Authorities are conducting an intensive criminal investigation into the release of thousands of classified U.S. documents by WikiLeaks, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said on Monday.
"There is an active, ongoing criminal investigation that we're conducting with the Department of Defense," Holder said at a news conference. "We are not in a position as yet to announce the result of that investigation."
He said Sunday's leak of the classified documents, mostly cables from U.S. embassies around the world, put at risk U.S. diplomats or other individuals assisting the United States.
"To the extent that we can find anybody who was involved in the breaking of American law and who has put at risk the assets and the people that I have described, they will be held responsible, they will be held accountable," Holder said.
He said that if there are gaps in U.S. law over the disclosure of classified information, the Obama administration would work with Congress to close them. [Yea! Like jailing anybody that thinks they have First Amendment rights, or any other Constitutional right!]
WikiLeaks released 400,000 secret U.S. files on the Iraq war in October and tens of thousands of secret U.S. military documents on the war in Afghanistan in July.
No federal charges have been filed in the WikiLeaks case. The investigation so far has focused on Bradley Manning, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst in Iraq.
Manning is under arrest by the U.S. military and charged with leaking a classified video showing a 2007 helicopter attack that killed a dozen people in Iraq, including two Reuters journalists.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, has said the U.S. investigation is also looking into WikiLeaks itself. Holder made it clear that just because he was a foreigner living outside the United States, he was not immune from prosecution. [F*ck international law, we will kidnap and bring anyone we want to the USA and jail them for life for messing with the American Empire!]
"We will move to close those gaps (in U.S. law), which is not to say, which is not to say that anybody at this point, because of their citizenship or their residence, is not a target or subject of an investigation that's ongoing," Holder said.
Interpol Called for Arrest of WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange
Government tyrants have always hated free speech, especially free speech that makes them look like tyrants.
I suspect these "rape charges" are trumped up charges invented by the American Empire to punish Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks for making the American Empire look bad.
Interpol Called for Arrest of WikiLeaks Founder
By JOHN F. BURNS and ALAN COWELL
Published: December 1, 2010
LONDON — For nearly two weeks, Interpol has been circulating a broad international call for the arrest of Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks whistle-blowing organization, for questioning on sex crimes, Interpol said on its Web site on Wednesday. State’s Secrets
Articles in this series examine American diplomatic relations as a window on relations with the rest of the world in an age of war and terrorism.
In a statement issued from its headquarters in the French city of Lyon, the international police agency said that it had issued the call on Nov. 20, two days after Swedish prosecutors won court approval for a warrant that Interpol could circulate, and that it had only now received Sweden’s authorization to make its action public.
The whereabouts of Mr. Assange, 39, are unknown, but the sequence suggested that if he wanted to flee Britain, his last known location, without being arrested, he might have had to do so within 48 hours of the Swedish court ruling.
The development came as several newspapers, including The New York Times, published confidential documents from a mass of some 250,000 diplomatic cables from the State Department in Washington including communications concerning American policy in Iran, Pakistan, Korea and many other places.
In its statement, Interpol said that its 188 member countries had “been advised to ensure that their border control agencies are made aware of Assange’s Red Notice status, which is a request for any country to identify or locate an individual with a view toward their provisional arrest and extradition.”
The Swedish prosecutor’s office said almost two weeks ago that a court in Stockholm had approved its request for the arrest of Mr. Assange to face questioning on charges that he has strongly denied and that WikiLeaks has dismissed as “dirty tricks” meant to punish him for his organization’ work.
Two weeks ago, Marianne Ny, director of the Stockholm prosecutor’s office, said in a statement that she had moved to have Mr. Assange extradited to Sweden on suspicion of “rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion.”
The accusations were first made against Mr. Assange after he traveled to Sweden in mid-August and had brief relationships with two Swedish women that he has described as consensual. Attempts to reach Ms. Ny on Wednesday to clarify what action was being taken to secure Mr. Assange’s arrest and return to Sweden were unsuccessful.
According to accounts his accusers gave to the police and friends, they both had consensual sexual encounters with Mr. Assange that became nonconsensual. One woman said that Mr. Assange ignored her appeals to stop after a condom broke. The other woman said that she and Mr. Assange had begun a sexual encounter using a condom, but that Mr. Assange did not comply with her appeals to stop when it was no longer in use. Mr. Assange has questioned the veracity of those accounts.
Lawyers acting for Mr. Assange appealed against the arrest warrant at Sweden’s highest court on Tuesday, The Associated Press said in a report that also quoted President Rafael Correa of Ecuador as dismissing an offer of residence in his country made to Mr. Assange by a lower official.
A spokesman for Scotland Yard said the force had received “no intelligence” that Mr. Assange was in London, and said that British police, following what he described as normal practice in the case of Interpol Red Notices, were not involved in an active effort to arrest him.
Though officers are not dedicated to finding Mr. Assange, who is Australian, the spokesman said “if that intelligence comes in, or we have reason to believe that a person who has a red notice out on them is in a certain location, we will find them and extradite them as per the international rules.”
Unconfirmed reports on Wednesday, attributed to WikiLeaks associates, said Mr. Assange was staying out of sight somewhere outside London. The cellphones of two close associates of Mr. Assange seemed to be switched off with recorded messages saying their owners were outside Britain.
A Web report by the British Guardian newspaper, which has developed close ties with Mr. Assange in the months that the Guardian, The Times and other publications have been preparing stories based on the WikiLeaks documents, said on Tuesday that Mr. Assange was “in a secret location somewhere outside London with fellow hackers and WikiLeaks enthusiasts.”
An American journalist based in New York said that he had had contact with aides to Mr. Assange in recent days over a possible interview, and had been told to prepare for a meeting with him in Britain sometime in January.
Other reports suggested that Mr. Assange might have fled Britain for a country where he was less likely to be arrested, but these may have originated with Mr. Assange’s own statements in recent weeks suggesting that he might have to go to Moscow or Havana — statements that left open the possibility that he was dramatizing the difficulties he has encountered in finding a safe refuge, rather than outlining an actual plan. State’s Secrets
Articles in this series examine American diplomatic relations as a window on relations with the rest of the world in an age of war and terrorism.
Nor was it clear exactly how Mr. Assange’s situation had been changed by the Interpol notice.
With the threat of detention hanging over Mr. Assange, any public appearance, interviews or other activity that indicates his whereabouts could result in his arrest. If he remained in Britain, he would need to stay out of sight — something that would hold little novelty for him.
After founding WikiLeaks in 2006, Mr. Assange adopted an elusive lifestyle, spending long periods in hiding, shuttling from one country to another, and mixing brief public appearances with a more common pattern of “appearing” remotely for interviews and panel discussions by video link over the Internet. At times, he has also altered his appearance, dyeing his prematurely white hair blonde, then black, and cutting it short.
Mr. Assange arrived in Britain from Sweden in the fall, telling reporters he was concerned about possible action against him by American or British security agencies in retaliation for WikiLeaks’ earlier decision to post hundreds of thousands of secret American military documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in separate releases in July and October.
In recent days, he has communicated his views from undisclosed locations.
On Monday, he addressed reporters by video link and in an interview on Tuesday with Time magazine, Mr. Assange spoke for 36 minutes by Skype, using the occasion to call for the resignation of Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton and to assert that the State Department had rejected a request from WikiLeaks to review some of the material being published.
Mr. Assange said that all the released documents were redacted “carefully.”
“They are all reviewed and they’re all redacted either by us or by the newspapers concerned,” he said, according to Time. He added that WikiLeaks had formally asked the State Department for assistance with that. “That request was formally rejected,” he said.
Asked about his moral justification for publishing the leaks, Mr. Assange denied that his actions constituted civil disobedience. “This organization practices civil obedience, that is, we are an organization that tries to make the world more civil and act against abusive organizations that are pushing it in the opposite direction,” he said.
Authorities seek WikiLeaks founder; website moves
Posted 12/2/2010 3:19 AM ET
By Matt Apuzzo, Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The U.S. government, apparently aided by freelance computer hackers, chased WikiLeaks from an American commercial computer network and temporarily stopped the leak of embarrassing diplomatic documents. But within hours, the website was back online, publishing from a fortified bunker in Sweden.
The virtual chase Wednesday was mirrored by a real-life pursuit as European authorities hunted for the site's fugitive founder, Julian Assange, who is wanted in Sweden on rape charges.
Undeterred, Assange continued releasing confidential government documents. Some showed how the Obama administration and Congress helped persuade Spain not to pursue charges against members of George W. Bush's administration for allowing torture of terrorism suspects.
Amazon.com Inc. prevented WikiLeaks from using the U.S. company's computers to distribute State Department communications and other documents, WikiLeaks said Wednesday. The WikiLeaks site was inaccessible for several hours before it returned to servers owned by its previous Swedish host, Bahnhof, which are housed in a protective Cold-War era bunker. Tech blogs have compared it to a lair from a James Bond movie.
"We have been under attack and we have had to move to different servers," WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson said. "But we have ways and means to bypass any closure in our services."
Amazon's move to evict WikiLeaks from its servers came after congressional staff called the company to inquire about its relationship with WikiLeaks, Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut independent, said Wednesday.
"The company's decision to cut off WikiLeaks now is the right decision and should set the standard for other companies WikiLeaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material," Lieberman said in a statement. He added that he would have further questions for Amazon about its dealings with WikiLeaks.
The White House said it was taking new steps to protect government secrets after WikiLeaks released thousands of sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables. Officials said national security adviser Tom Donilon has appointed a senior aide to identify and develop changes needed in light of the document dump.
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard called WikiLeaks' publication of classified documents "an illegal thing to do" on Thursday.
But Gillard did not indicate Australia was about to take legal action against Australian-born Assange. The country's attorney general reiterated that authorities are investigating whether Assange has broken any Australian laws, but have not yet reached a conclusion.
The White House on Wednesday spurned a call from Assange for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to step down if she had any role in directing U.S. diplomats' spying on other foreign leaders. "Mr. Assange's suggestion is ridiculous and absurd, and why anyone would find his opinion here relevant is baffling," said spokesman Tommy Vietor, adding Clinton was doing an "extraordinary" job. The White House said U.S. diplomats do not engage in spying.
Clinton was in Astana, Kazakhstan, enduring repeated comments about the WikiLeaks disclosures as she met with foreign officials at a conference of international leaders.
Among those she met with was Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who had been described in newly released U.S. diplomatic cables as "feckless" and a party animal.
"We have no better friend, we have no one who supports the American policies as consistently as Prime Minister Berlusconi has, starting in the Clinton administration, through the Bush administration and now the Obama administration," she said during a summit of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
The WikiLeaks matter was discussed in virtually all of Clinton's private one-on-one meetings with European leaders and foreign ministers during the summit meeting Wednesday.
Assange remained a fugitive Wednesday, shadowed by the Europe-wide arrest warrant. A German security official, speaking on condition of anonymity because no authorization was given to discuss the legal steps, confirmed that a warrant for Assange had been issued in that country.
Hrafnsson noted the "interesting timing" of the warrant but said Assange had gone into hiding for another reason: "If you think about the threats we've heard about our people, and against Julian, it's very natural and understandable that his location is kept secret."
Assange's London-based lawyer, Mark Stephens, complained his client had yet to receive formal notice of the allegations he faces -- something Stephens described as a legal requirement under European law. The lawyer added that Assange had repeatedly offered to answer questions about the investigation, to no avail.
The exact nature of the allegations facing Assange isn't completely clear. Stephens has in the past described them as part of "a post-facto dispute over consensual, but unprotected sex." Even Swedish prosecutors have disagreed about whether to label the most serious charge as rape.
Formal charges have not been filed, but a detention order issued Nov. 18 at the request of Marianne Ny, Sweden's Director of Public Prosecution, remains in force pending an appeal by Assange. The case is now before Sweden's Supreme Court.
___
Associated Press writers Malin Rising in Stockholm; Matthew Lee and Lolita C. Baldor in Washington; Peter Svensson in New York; Robert Burns in Astana, Kazakhstan; Raphael G. Satter in London; and Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin contributed to this report.
Wikileaks documents deplorable but useful
The disclosure of the Wikileaks documents is to be deplored. They will damage American diplomacy, perhaps significantly so. Other nations will be less willing to cooperate with a country that cannot keep secrets.
Nevertheless, the leaked documents usefully clarify several world situations. And they make you wonder whether the world wouldn't be better off if diplomacy were more transparent and honest.
The most startling revelation was how directly and bluntly several Arab leaders urged the United States to take military action against Iran's nuclear program.
The deep concern among Sunni Arabs about the prospect of Shiite Persian Iran having a nuclear weapon was well known. The support for military action was not. If that intensity had been known, events in Iran may have turned out differently.
For the most part, the effort to prevent Iran from going nuclear has seemed to be primarily a U.S. preoccupation, with obvious support from Israel. Western Europe has been supportive, but only so far, so fast. Russia and China have been indifferent to hostile.
If the actionable intensity of Arab sentiment had been a larger part of the public discussion, support for tough sanctions might have hardened much more quickly and easily.
It also might have made a difference in Iran. For all the internal turmoil in Iran, there is a broad consensus in favor of the nuclear program. If true Arab sentiment had been more manifest, internal opposition may have developed.
Of course, the intensity of Arab opposition to Iran's nuclear program did manifest itself in the foggy world of international diplomacy. China apparently agreed not to block sanctions after Saudi Arabia said it would compensate for any cutback in China's supply of Iranian oil.
Nevertheless, the public environment shapes and limits realistic policy options. And the effort to prevent Iran from going nuclear suffered from the false perception that it was principally a U.S. and Israeli fixation.
The U.S. enables the duplicity of autocratic Arab leaders in part because of the belief that the truth, were it known, would agitate their populations. The Abu Dhabi crown prince told the U.S. that, were free elections held in Dubai, the Muslim Brotherhood would win. Helping Arab autocrats deceive their own people, however, hardly seems a policy with the prospects of long-term success.
The Wikileaks documents also reveal that the United States government does not always level with us.
When the Obama administration announced the cancelation of planned missile defense deployments in Poland and the Czech Republic, it said it did so because of a reassessment of the Iranian threat. According to what was said at the time, Iran didn't really pose a long-range threat, so more mobile local missile defense options would be employed instead.
Given that Iran had just launched a satellite, that didn't ring true at the time. And the Wikileaks documents indicate that, just the opposite, Iran was importing longer-range missiles from North Korea, sometimes through China which was turning a blind eye.
Although not firmly established, the Wikileaks documents leave the clear impression that the Poland-Czech deployment was abandoned as part of an understanding with Russia for support on Iranian sanctions.
Why the Obama administration would feel compelled to obfuscate in this fashion isn't clear. As an ardent missile defense hawk, I find a retreat on the Poland-Czech deployment as a trade-off for Russian support on Iran far more acceptable than doing so supposedly due to a discounting of the longer-range missile threat Iran poses.
I'm not naïve. I understand that obfuscation and even duplicity are sometimes necessary to get important things done in an imperfect and dangerous world.
Still, it seems obfuscation and duplicity often prevail even when honesty, transparency and clarity would better serve. Sometimes, people can handle the truth.
Figura Sonora en filtraciones de WikiLeaks
Hay 97 cables relacionados con el estado y aún no se revelan los tópicos de lo que tratan los documentos.
Un total de 97 cables secretos, relacionados con Nogales y Hermosillo, se generaron entre la Embajada de Estados Unidos en México y algunos de sus consulados en los últimos años, y que podrían darse a conocer en los próximos días por cortesía de WikiLeaks.
De los 2 mil 600 cables sobre México, 2 mil 285 se generaron en la capital del País y los demás en la red consular: Monterrey (159), Nogales (78), Guadalajara (32), Tijuana (27), Hermosillo (19), Ciudad Juárez (19), Matamoros (7), Nuevo Laredo (5) y Mérida (3) están relacionados con una amplia gama de asuntos.
Entre los cablegramas que ya han sido difundidos relacionados con México, figuran algunos sobre la seguridad y porosidad de la frontera y las labores de espionaje que se desarrollaron para conocer las intenciones de la representación mexicana en el seno de la ONU; ofrecen un adelanto de los tópicos discutidos y analizados por el cuerpo diplomático estadounidense lo mismo con funcionarios de México que con terceras naciones.
En la novela por entregas que ha orquestado WikiLeaks, de la mano de periódicos como The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel y El País, el caso de México será visto a contraluz de unos documentos que sacarán a relucir "asuntos relevantes" como la guerra contra el narco, adelantó Javier Moreno, director de El País, durante un chat en la versión on-line del diario.
Sin ofrecer mayores detalles del contenido de la información que ha recibido de WikiKeaks, El País, el Times o The Guardian se disponen a publicar de forma escalonada los reportes sobre México.
--------------
Intenta gobierno limitar daños tras el caso WikiLeaks
Ordena la Casa Blanca la revisión general de la custodia de la información secreta al revelarse mensajes "muy crudos".
Furiosa por la divulgación no autorizada de más de 250 mil documentos confidenciales del Departamento de Estado, la Casa Blanca ordenó una revisión general de cómo custodian la información secreta las diversas dependencias del Gobierno.
La publicación de los documentos el fin de semana por parte del sitio WikiLeaks avergonzó al gobierno del presidente Barack Obama.
Las filtraciones son inaceptables y no serán toleradas, afirmó el director de la Oficina de Administración y Presupuesto, Jacob Lew.
Los memorandos y documentos divulgados -publicados por el diario estadounidense The New York Times, el francés Le Monde, el británico The Guardian y la revista alemana Der Spiegel, entre otros- develaron mensajes crudos que normalmente no salen a la superficie de las relaciones diplomáticas.
Mostraron la ansiedad de algunos países árabes sobre el programa nuclear iraní, como la exigencia del rey Abdulá de Arabia Saudí de que Estados Unidos "corte la cabeza de la serpiente" en un ataque contra Irán.
También reflejaron las especulaciones entre Estados Unidos y Corea del Sur sobre un eventual colapso de Corea del Norte que pudiera llevar a una Corea unificada; los intentos infructuosos de custodiar uranio enriquecido de un reactor en Paquistán; y un arreglo para que Yemen haga pasar como suyos los ataques estadounidenses contra Al Qaeda en su territorio.
Otros cables muestran que Estados Unidos obligó a Eslovenia a recibir a un ex prisionero de la cárcel militar de Guantánamo a cambio de una reunión de su presidente con Obama y le ofreció millones de dólares a la isla de Kiribati en el Pacífico para que albergara a otros detenidos.
El francés Le Monde dijo que un memorando a diplomáticos estadounidenses les pedía que recolectaran datos sobre funcionarios de Naciones Unidas, incluido el secretario general Ban Ki-moon: Contraseñas en Internet, números de tarjetas de crédito, huellas digitales, fotos, ADN y escaneos oculares.
Algunos cables describen al primer ministro italiano Silvio Berlusconi como "vanidoso" y "débil", mientras que otros critican a la canciller alemana Ángela Merkel por ser "reacia a los riesgos y pocas veces creativa".
Fue "el 11 de septiembre de la diplomacia mundial", dijo el canciller italiano Franco Frattini.
Se esperaba que la secretaria de Estado Hillary Rodham Clinton se refiriera al impacto de los documentos el lunes. Además, Clinton tendrá que enfrentar las consecuencias en persona, ya que se apresta a emprender una gira por cuatro países de Asia Central y Medio Oriente, regiones que tienen un papel principal en la filtración.
Pérdida de confianza
El representante Peter Hoekstra, el principal republicano de la Comisión de Inteligencia de la Cámara baja, expresó a la cadena ABC que "el impacto catastrófico de esto es la ruptura de la confianza". Otros países, aliados o enemigos, indicó, se preguntarán: "¿Puede Estados Unidos guardar un secreto?".
Gran Bretaña, Francia, Australia, Iraq y Paquistán criticaron la filtración. Es una "revelación irresponsable", expuso la Cancillería paquistaní, mientras que el ministro de Relaciones Exteriores iraquí Hoshyar Zebari dijo que era "contraproducente e inoportuna".
Aunque ninguna de las revelaciones parecía altamente explosiva, el conjunto de la filtración causará incomodidad en numerosos países y pondrá obstáculos a los diplomáticos estadounidenses y a las iniciativas que habrían preferido mantener en secreto.
La Casa Blanca deploró la filtración porque, dijo, "pone en riesgo a nuestros diplomáticos, profesionales de inteligencia y a gente de todo el mundo que recurre a Estados Unidos en busca de asistencia para promover la democracia y un gobierno abierto".
Claro que la diplomacia estadounidense probablemente tenga que apaciguar a funcionarios de otros países tras conocerse que buscaba información confidencial sobre ellos, más allá de lo que se considera usual en las relaciones internacionales.
Minimiza acusaciones
El vocero del Departamento de Estado P.J. Crowley minimizó las acusaciones de espionaje diplomático, ya que señaló que los diplomáticos sólo buscaban información para formular políticas.
"Esto es lo que los diplomáticos, de nuestro país y otros, han hecho por cientos de años", dijo.
La Casa Blanca comentó que los cables podrían perjudicar las negociaciones privadas con otros países. "Cuando las conversaciones privadas se imprimen en las portadas de diarios de todo el mundo, pueden afectar no sólo los intereses exteriores de Estados Unidos, sino también los de aliados y amigos en todo el mundo", apuntó.
Los medios que divulgaron los documentos defendieron la decisión, que señalaron sirve al interés de la ciudadanía. El fundador de WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, dijo que Estados Unidos intentaba encubrir evidencia de "abusos a los derechos humanos y otros comportamientos criminales".
Julian Assange is not a high tech terrorist! The only terrorists here is the American government!
WikiLeaks uses Swiss Web address as options narrow
by John Heilprin - Dec. 5, 2010 10:37 AM
Associated Press
GENEVA - WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange turned increasingly to Switzerland on Sunday, dodging a barrage of threats online and in the real world to keep access to a trove of U.S. State Department cables under a Swiss Web address.
The elusive founder of the website WikiLeaks said he faced "hundreds of death threats." The site hinged on the Swiss Pirate Party's wikileaks.ch Web address, though the main server in France went offline, leaving the site reachable through a Swedish server.
That site showed Assange had begun seeking donations to an account under his name through the Swiss postal system in Berne, the Swiss capital, while also using a Swiss-Icelandic credit card processing center and other accounts in Iceland and Germany. He lost a major source of revenue when the online payment service provider PayPal cut off the WikiLeaks account over the weekend.
On the run, Assange has been widely praised and criticized. Supporters view him as a savior of the media and free speech; critics vilify him for brazenly unleashing diplomatic secrets.
U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell called Assange "a high-tech terrorist" Sunday for releasing classified material from the government. McConnell told NBC's "Meet the Press" he hopes Assange will be prosecuted for the "enormous damage" the disclosures have done to the country and to its relationship with its allies.
PayPal, a subsidiary of U.S.-based online marketplace operator EBay Inc., said the WikiLeaks website, which specializes in disclosing confidential documents, was engaged in illegal activity.
A spokesman for the financial services arm of Swiss Post told the respected Swiss weekly NZZ am Sonntag that it was reviewing its "relationship" with Assange, whose stated reason for opening the account was to have a residence in Geneva.
Swiss Post spokesman Marc Andrey said Assange would have to prove he obtained Swiss residency, lives near the Swiss border, or owns property or does business in Switzerland to keep the Postfinance bank account that he opened last month.
The U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, Donald Beyer, also told the newspaper that Switzerland "should very carefully consider whether to provide shelter to someone who is on the run from the law." The SonntagsZeitung quoted Beyer as saying he told the Swiss government that WikiLeaks would likely post more than 250 cables from the American Embassy in Berne.
French web hosting company OVH, which owns the server, didn't immediately respond to calls Sunday. France's Industry Minister Eric Besson had warned Friday that it was unacceptable to host a site that "violates the secret of diplomatic relations."
The company said earlier that it had been hosting WikiLeaks since early Thursday, after a client asked for a "dedicated server with ... protection against attacks."
The president of the Swiss Pirate Party, which controls the wikileaks.ch Web address, said he was in the process of pointing that domain name to a different server, apparently based in Sweden. The site also was still reachable through the numerical address of its Swedish server.
And the party said it noticed an increasing number of supporters creating "mirrors" of the WikiLeaks site on their own servers, meaning that copies of the site would remain up and running even if WikiLeaks were somehow to lose its own site.
"Even if you take down the server in Sweden, it's too late," Swiss Pirate Party Vice President Pascal Gloor told The Associated Press on Sunday.
"There are hundreds of mirrors of WikiLeaks now," he said. "It's a test for Internet censorship. Can governments take something off the net? I think not. There are copies of the website everywhere."
In a high-tech media building in Bienne, Switzerland, the party convened an impromptu news conference late Friday to say it had no special knowledge of Assange's whereabouts or ability to contact him, but had spoken with him weeks ago to help seek asylum in Switzerland. That was during Assange's visit to Geneva last month when he spoke to reporters at the United Nations.
Starting Friday, the Swiss Web address wikileaks.ch became the site's main access point after EveryDNS, a company based in Manchester, New Hampshire, stopped accepting traffic to the site's principal address - wikileaks.org - saying cyber attacks threatened the rest of its network.
Amazon stopped hosting WikiLeaks' Web site and governments and hackers were continuing to go after the organization.
News media reports were filled with stories about the hundreds of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, which is coming under intense legal pressure in several countries, including the United States.
In an online chat with El Pais in Spain, Assange said the hunt for him was tough. He remains free while his website spews daily embarrassment and potential diplomatic damage to the U.S.
"We have hundreds of specific death threats from U.S. military militants. That is not unusual, and we have become practiced from past experiences at ignoring such threats from Islamic extremists, African kleptocrats and so on," he said.
"Recently the situation has changed with these threats now extending out to our lawyers and my children," he added. "However, it is the specific calls from the elites of U.S. society for our assassination, kidnapping and execution that is more concerning."
Assange, who is now in Britain, according to his British lawyer, is wanted in Sweden to face allegations of sexual offenses against two women, charges he denies, but the United States has not lodged any charges against him. Nor has Britain.
In the Swedish case, Assange is the target of a European extradition process which normally takes months to produce an arrest.
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Frank Jordans contributed from Geneva.
Leaks may clog up anti-terrorism intelligence sharing
Access is already being tightened after the WikiLeaks release of sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables.
By Ken Dilanian, Tribune Washington Bureau
December 4, 2010|5:26 p.m.
Reporting from Washington — The latest disclosures by the WikiLeaks website have struck a blow against what many experts say was one of the key reforms to emerge from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: the push to widely share sensitive information among the massive intelligence bureaucracy.
Repercussions are already being felt. The State Department last week disconnected its cable traffic from the secure network used by the military, depriving military analysts of the best reporting on the political situations in their areas of operations. And the White House ordered a governmentwide review of information security "to ensure that users do not have broader access than is necessary to do their jobs effectively."
"It has certainly driven individuals in the intelligence community and beyond the intelligence community to at least reexamine information sharing," said Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, warning last week of a chilling effect. "You, of course, run the risk … that information wouldn't be shared, [and] that would undermine our ability to disrupt attacks."
It's more than a risk — it's a certainty, according to Michael Hayden, who was CIA Director under President George W. Bush. "We are now going to begin to trade off potential physical safety for information security," he said in an interview. "We'll say we're not — we'll say we are keeping the lines open, and the right people will have access. But when you rejigger this, you never get it perfect."
Leiter's agency was created after Sept. 11 to help solve what was found to be one of the biggest impediments to stopping those attacks: the stovepipes and legal barriers that prevented the CIA, the FBI and many of the other 14 intelligence agencies from sharing what they knew. A revolution has occurred on that front, with agencies moving from granting access to information on the basis of "need to know" to a model of "need to share."
But many experts say the near success of last year's alleged Christmas Day bombing attempt by a Nigerian whose father had warned U.S. authorities about his extremism — a warning not properly acted on — pointed to shortcomings that still need to be addressed. And now there is momentum in the other direction.
"There's always this dilemma between compartmentation and sharing," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said after the last WikiLeaks disclosure, of Afghanistan war logs, in October. "But I'll tell you, in this day and age with the hemorrhage of leaks in this town, I think compartmentation — appropriate, reasonable compartmentation — is the right thing to do."
Clapper, a retired Air Force general who has spent decades in the intelligence community, has been a booster of information sharing. But WikiLeaks, he said, would "have a very chilling effect on the need to share."
Intelligence community bureaucrats "have always been sort of anti-information-sharing," said James Lewis, who directs the technology program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Every single person in the agencies is now saying, 'I told you so.'"
The post-Sept. 11 information sharing mandate, placed in law by Congress, led in part to the inclusion of the massive database of State Department cables on the system of military computer networks known as the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRNet. The cables are not top-secret, but some of them contain extremely sensitive information, as the recent disclosures have shown.
SIPRNet, launched in 1991, has mushroomed to the point that it is used by as many as half a million people or more, U.S. officials say. One of them was Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, who until early 2009 was an intelligence analyst with the 10th Mountain Division in Baghdad.
Manning, 23, has been charged with illegally downloading information, including State Department cables, and is being held at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va., awaiting military legal proceedings. His lawyer declined to comment.
The charges against Manning are terse, but Manning laid out some of the details of his account of online chats with a hacker, Adrian Lamo, which were published by Wired.com. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Lamo, who turned Manning in to authorities, confirmed the authenticity of the chats. Investigators took his hard drive with all of his copies, he said.
In the chats, Manning said he had carte blanche to view and download information from SIPRNet because soldiers were constantly using CDs and other media to transfer files among computers, and no one was watching.
"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. No one suspected a thing," Manning wrote. "It was a massive data spillage … facilitated by numerous factors … both physically, technically, and culturally."
Manning said he benefited from "Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis … a perfect storm."
Normally, Pentagon officials say, workstations attached to SIPRNet do not allow for the physical removal of data. But the rules were different in war zones, officials said. Since the leak, the Pentagon has imposed a series of rules to close that gap.
Yet regardless of the security procedures, Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, asked why a lowly private had access to reports of conversations between top U.S. officials and heads of state.
"How can it be that between 500,000 and potentially over a million government employees have access to a database of sensitive State Department cables?" he wondered.
ken.dilanian@latimes.com
US: WikiLeaks release gives hit list to al-Qaida
Posted 12/6/2010 5:18 PM ET
By Sharon Theimer, Associated Press
WASHINGTON — In a disclosure of some of the most sensitive information yet revealed by WikiLeaks, the website has put out a secret cable listing sites worldwide that the U.S. considers critical to its national security. U.S. officials said the leak amounts to giving a hit list to terrorists. Among the locations cited in the diplomatic cable from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton are undersea communications lines, mines, antivenin factories and suppliers of food and manufacturing materials.
The Pentagon declined to comment Monday on the details of what it called "stolen" documents containing classified information. But a spokesman, Col. David Lapan, called the disclosure "damaging" and said it gives valuable information to adversaries.
The State Department echoed the Pentagon's statement. "Releasing such information amounts to giving a targeting list to groups like al-Qaida," agency spokesman P.J. Crowley said. British Foreign Secretary William Hague condemned the disclosure, telling the BBC it was a "reprehensible" act committed "without regard to wider concerns of security, the security of millions of people."
WikiLeaks released the 2009 Clinton cable on Sunday.
In the message, marked "secret," Clinton asked U.S. diplomatic posts to help update a list of sites around the world "which, if destroyed, disrupted or exploited, would likely have an immediate and deleterious effect on the United States."
The list was considered so confidential that the contributors were advised to come up with the information on their own: Posts are "not being asked to consult with host governments in respect to this request," Clinton wrote.
Attached to Clinton's message was a rundown of sites included in the 2008 "Critical Foreign Dependencies Initiative" list. Some of the sites, such as border crossings, hydroelectric dams and shipping lanes, could hardly be considered secret.
But other locations, such as mines, manufacturers of components used in weapons systems, and vaccine and antivenin sources, probably were not widely known. The Associated Press has decided against publishing their names due to the sensitive nature of the information.
The release came as WikiLeaks faced more pressure to end its release of secret U.S. diplomatic cables, which started last week. WikiLeaks had been working with a select group of international media, but has been offering its cable revelations to new media partners in recent days.
The Swiss postal system on Monday shut a bank account held by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, leaving him and his website with few options left for raising money. Meanwhile, WikiLeaks' Swedish servers again came under suspected attack.
Assange's attorney has been in contact with British police to discuss the Swedish arrest warrant for Assange on rape and sexual molestation charges. His British-based lawyer, Mark Stephens, said he was arranging for Assange to meet police so he could be questioned. Assange has denied the allegations.
Also Monday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder again condemned the leaks and said the espionage act is just one of the laws the U.S. could use to prosecute those involved in the WikiLeaks releases.
Holder declined to say which other laws might come into play. Possibilities include charges such as the theft of government property or receipt of stolen government property.
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Associated Press Writers Anne Flaherty and Alicia A. Caldwell and National Security Writer Robert Burns in Washington and AP Writer John Heilprin in Geneva contributed to this story.
Swiss cut off bank account for WikiLeaks' Assange
Posted 12/6/2010 1:22 PM ET
By John Heilprin, Associated Press
GENEVA — The Swiss postal system stripped WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of a key fundraising tool Monday, accusing him of lying and immediately shutting down one of his bank accounts.
The swift action by Postfinance, the financial arm of Swiss Post, came after it determined the "Australian citizen provided false information regarding his place of residence during the account opening process."
Assange had told Postfinance he lived in Geneva but could offer no proof that he was a Swiss resident, a requirement of opening such an account.
Postfinance spokesman Alex Josty told The Associated Press the account was closed Monday afternoon and there would be "no criminal consequences" for misleading authorities.
"That's his money, he will get his money back," Josty said. "We just close the account and that's it."
The setback leaves Assange with only a few options for raising money for his secret-spilling site through a Swiss-Icelandic credit card processing center and accounts in Iceland and Germany.
WikiLeaks has been under intense international scrutiny over its disclosure of a mountain of classified U.S. diplomatic cables, after previously releasing tens of thousands of classified U.S. military documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The unprecedented disclosures have embarrassed the U.S. and other governments worldwide and prompted U.S. officials to pressure the WikiLeaks site and its facilitators.
A Swiss website, wikileaks.ch, has been handling much of the traffic from WikiLeaks after other Internet service and online payment providers began severing ties with the organization.
WikiLeaks' Swedish servers came under suspected attack again Monday, the latest in a series of online computer assaults that have knocked the secret-spilling group across the Web.
WikiLeaks, in a tweet to its followers, confirmed it was having difficulty with its PRQ severs but did not elaborate.
"We are investigating the cause," it said.
While U.S. officials are investigating whether they can charge Assange, the 39-year-old Australian faces sexual misconduct allegations connected to his stay in Sweden over the summer.
The Swedish case has been described by his British lawyer Mark Stephens as a political stunt, but it could eventually lead to his extradition from Britain to Sweden. A European arrest warrant was issued for Assange last week and it is currently working its way through the British legal system.
Extradition experts say such warrants can take weeks or even months to lead to an arrest, although high profile cases tend to move faster. The BBC said the Swedish warrant was now with London's Scotland Yard -- suggesting that matters were developing quickly.
The broadcaster didn't cite its source, and the police force declined comment.
Scotland Yard would still have to seek a warrant at Westminster and City Magistrates' Court, which handles extradition, before Assange were detained. Such a move would not be announced ahead of time.
WikiLeaks founder arrested in Britain
Government tyrants worldwide hate freedom of the press!
SourceWikiLeaks founder arrested in Britain
Dec. 7, 2010 06:48 AM
Associated Press
LONDON - The spokesman for WikiLeaks says founder Julian Assange's arrest is an attack on media freedom and that it won't prevent the organization from spilling secrets on the web.
Kristinn Hrafnsson declined Tuesday to comment on Assange's state of mind prior to the arrest but confirmed he has been in touch with the 39-year-old Australian over the past 24 hours. He says the arrest will not derail the release of more secret documents.
Assange was arrested at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday and was due to appear at Westminster Magistrate's Court later in the day.
Assange had been hiding out at an undisclosed location in Britain since WikiLeaks' began releasing hundreds of U.S. diplomatic cables to the Web last week, would soon meet with officers from London's Scotland Yard.
The Internet-based organization has been battered by web attacks, cut off by Internet service providers and been subjected to a barrage of muscular rhetoric out of the United States.
In the latest development, Swiss authorities closed Assange's bank account, depriving him of a key fundraising tool. MasterCard has also pulled the plug on payments to the site, according to technology news website CNET. A European representative for the credit card company didn't immediately return a call seeking comment.
The attacks appeared to have been at least partially successful in stanching the flow of secrets -- WikiLeaks has not published any new cables to the Internet in more than 24 hours, although stories about them have continued to appear in the New York Times and The Guardian, two of the papers given advance access to all 250,000 documents.
WikiLeaks Twitter feed, generally packed with updates, appeals, and pithy comments, has been silent since Monday night, when the group warned that Assange's arrest might be imminent.
The Australian's legal troubles stem from allegations leveled against him by two women he met while in Sweden over the summer.
Assange is accused of rape and sexual molestation in one case and of sexual molestation and unlawful coercion in another.
WikiLeaks: Founder's arrest won't stop group
Posted 12/7/2010 6:24 AM ET
LONDON (AP) — The spokesman for WikiLeaks says founder Julian Assange's arrest is an attack on media freedom and that it won't prevent the organization from spilling secrets on the web.
Kristinn Hrafnsson declined Tuesday to comment on Assange's state of mind prior to the arrest but confirmed he has been in touch with the 39-year-old Australian over the past 24 hours. He says the arrest will not derail the release of more secret documents.
Hrafnsoon tells the AP that "this will not change our operation."
Assange was arrested at 9:30 a.m. (0930 GMT) Tuesday and was due to appear at Westminster Magistrate's Court later in the day.
He had been hiding out at an undisclosed location in Britain since WikiLeaks began publishing U.S. diplomatic cables last week.
Judge denies WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange bail
AP
By CASSANDRA VINOGRAD and RAPHAEL G. SATTER, Associated Press Cassandra Vinograd And Raphael G. Satter, Associated Press
LONDON – A British judge sent Julian Assange to jail on Tuesday, denying bail to the WikiLeaks founder who vowed to fight efforts to extradite him to Sweden in a sex-crimes investigation.
A WikiLeaks spokesman said the flow of secret U.S. diplomatic cables would not be affected by Assange's legal troubles, nor by the group's increasingly rocky finances as both Visa and MasterCard cut off key funding methods.
"This will not change our operation," Kristinn Hrafnsson told The Associated Press. As if to underline the point, WikiLeaks released a dozen new diplomatic cables, its first publication in more than 24 hours, including the details of a NATO defense plan for Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that prompted an indignant response from the Russian envoy to the alliance.
Assange turned himself in to Scotland Yard on Tuesday morning, and was sent to the City of Westminster Magistrates' Court in the early afternoon. He showed no reaction as Judge Howard Riddle denied him bail and sent him to jail until his next extradition hearing on Dec. 14.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, visiting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. troops in Afghanistan, was pleased that Assange was behind bars.
"That sounds like good news to me," he said Tuesday.
Assange faces rape and sexual molestation allegations in one Swedish case and sexual molestation and unlawful coercion in another. He denies the allegations, which he and his lawyers claim stem from a "dispute over consensual but unprotected sex" dating back to August.
Riddle asked the 39-year-old Australian whether he understood that he could consent to be extradited to Sweden. Assange, dressed in a navy blue suit, cleared his throat and said: "I understand that and I do not consent."
Fighting the extradition request could be difficult. Experts say that European arrest warrants like the one issued by Sweden can be tough to beat, barring mental or physical incapacity. Even if the warrant were defeated on a technicality, Sweden could simply issue a new one.
Swedish lawyer Bjorn Hurtig said it was difficult to say how long the extradition process in Britain would take — anywhere from a week to two months. He said if Assange is extradited to Sweden, he won't be kept in detention after he's been questioned, "because it's been for the sake of the questioning that he's been detained."
WikiLeaks, meanwhile, came under increasing financial pressure Tuesday as it became increasingly difficult to collect the individual donations that fund most of the operations of the loosely knit group of activists.
Visa Inc. said it would "suspend Visa payment acceptance on WikiLeaks' website pending further investigation into the nature of its business and whether it contravenes Visa operating rules." MasterCard said it would suspend payments "until the situation is resolved."
PayPal Inc., a popular online payment service, has already cut its links to the website, while Swiss authorities closed Assange's new Swiss bank account on Monday, freezing tens of thousands of euros, according to his lawyers.
WikiLeaks is still soliciting donations through bank transfers to affiliates in Iceland and Germany, as well as by mail to an address at University of Melbourne in Australia.
Beginning in July, WikiLeaks angered the U.S. government by releasing tens of thousands of secret U.S. military documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last week, it began a rolling release of what WikiLeaks says are a quarter-million cables from U.S. diplomatic posts around the world. The group provided those documents to five major newspapers, which have been working with WikiLeaks to edit the cables for publication, and has been sharing subsets of the cache with other publications in recent days.
The U.S. government has launched a criminal investigation, saying the group has jeopardized U.S. national security and diplomatic efforts around the world.
As WikiLeaks has come under legal, financial and technological attack, an online army of supporters has come to its aid, sending donations, fighting off computer attacks and setting up over 500 mirror sites around the world to make sure that the secret documents are published regardless of what happens to the organization.
Hrafnsson, the WikiLeaks spokesman, said the group had no plans yet to carry through on its threat to release the key to a heavily encrypted version of some of the most sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables — an "insurance" file that has been distributed to supporters and news media in case of an emergency.
Hackers strike back to support WikiLeaks founder
Dec. 8, 2010 06:57 AM
Associated Press
LONDON - WikiLeaks supporters struck back Wednesday at perceived enemies of founder Julian Assange, attacking the websites of Swedish prosecutors, the Swedish lawyer whose clients have accused Assange of sexual crimes and the Swiss authority that froze Assange's bank account.
MasterCard, which pulled the plug on its relationship with WikiLeaks on Tuesday, also seemed to be having severe technological problems.
The online vengeance campaign appeared to be taking the form of denial of service attacks in which computers across the Internet are harnessed - sometimes surreptitiously - to jam target sites with mountains of requests for data, knocking them out of commission.
The online attacks are part of a wave of online support for WikiLeaks that is sweeping the Internet. Twitter was choked with messages of solidarity Wednesday, while the site's Facebook page hit 1 million fans.
Offline, the organization is under pressure on many fronts. Assange, its founder, is in a U.K. prison fighting extradition to Sweden over the sex crimes case, while moves by Swiss Postfinance, MasterCard, PayPal Inc. and others have impaired the secret-spilling group's ability to raise money. The U.S. government is also investigating whether Assange can be prosecuted for espionage or other offenses.
Per Hellqvist, a security specialist with the firm Symantec, said a loose network of web activists called "Anonymous" appeared to be behind the attacks. The group, which has previously focused on the Church of Scientology and the music industry, has promised to come to Assange's aid by knocking offline websites seen as hostile to WikiLeaks.
"While we don't have much of an affiliation with WikiLeaks, we fight for the same reasons," the group said in a statement on its website. "We want transparency and we counter censorship. ... This is why we intend to utilize our resources to raise awareness, attack those against and support those who are helping lead our world to freedom and democracy."
It was not immediately clear which attacks the group was responsible for, although activists on Twitter and other forums cheered the news of each one in turn.
The website for MasterCard, which has said it will no longer process donations to WikiLeaks, was either down or sluggish early Wednesday. The company said it was experiencing "heavy traffic" but did not elaborate.
The website for Swedish lawyer Claes Borgstrom, who represents the two women at the center of Assange's sex crimes case, was unreachable Wednesday.
The Swiss postal system's financial arm, Postfinance, which shut down Assange's new bank account on Monday, was also having trouble. Spokesman Alex Josty said the website buckled under a barrage of traffic Tuesday but the onslaught seems to have eased off.
"Yesterday it was very, very difficult, then things improved overnight," he told The Associated Press. "But it's still not entirely back to normal."
While one Internet company after another has cut its ties to the websites amid intense U.S. government pressure - Amazon.com, PayPal Inc., EveryDNS - the French government's effort to stop a company there from hosting WikiLeaks has failed - at least for now.
The Web services company OVH, which is among those hosting the current site - wikileaks.ch - sought a ruling by two courts about the legality of hosting WikiLeaks in France. The judges said this week they couldn't decide on the highly technical case right away.
WikiLeaks evoked the ire of the U.S. government last spring when it posted a gritty war video taken by Army helicopters showing troops gunning down two unarmed Reuters journalists. Since then, the organization has leaked some 400,000 classified U.S. war files from Iraq and 76,000 from Afghanistan that U.S. military officials say included names of U.S. informants and other information that could put people's lives at risk.
The latest leaks have involved private U.S. diplomatic cables that included frank U.S. assessments of foreign nations and their leaders.
Hackers Give Web Companies a Test of Free Speech
By ASHLEE VANCE and MIGUEL HELFT
Published: December 8, 2010
On Wednesday, anonymous hackers took aim at companies perceived to have harmed WikiLeaks after its release of a flood of confidential diplomatic documents. MasterCard, Visa and PayPal, which had cut off people’s ability to donate money to WikiLeaks, were hit by attacks that tried to block access to the companies’ Web sites and services.
To organize their efforts, the hackers have turned to sites like Facebook and Twitter. That has drawn these Web giants into the fray and created a precarious situation for them.
Both Facebook and Twitter — but particularly Twitter — have received praise in recent years as outlets for free speech. Governments trying to control the flow of information have found it difficult to block people from voicing their concerns or setting up meetings through the sites.
At the same time, both Facebook and Twitter have corporate aspirations that hinge on their ability to serve as ad platforms for other companies. This leaves them with tough public relations and business decisions around how they should handle situations as politically charged as the WikiLeaks developments.
Some internet experts say the situation highlights the complexities of free speech issues on the Internet, as grassroots Web companies evolve and take central control over what their users can make public. Clay Shirky, who studies the Internet and teaches at New York University, said that although the Web is the new public sphere, it is actually “a corporate sphere that tolerates public speech.”
Marcia Hofmann, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said, “Any Internet user who cares about free speech or has a controversial or unpopular message should be concerned about the fact that intermediaries might not let them express it.”
She added, “Your free speech rights are only as strong as the weakest intermediary.”
The problem came into relief on Wednesday, through an effort called Operation Payback, organized by a group calling itself Anonymous. The group spent much of the day posting notes on Facebook and Twitter that told followers which companies to single out and that documented hacking successes.
But Facebook banned one of the group’s pages, saying that using the site to organize hacking attacks like that violated its terms of use. The group went on Twitter to complain.
A Facebook spokesman issued a statement saying that the company was “sensitive to content that includes pornography, bullying, hate speech, and threats of violence” and would “take action on content that we find or that’s reported to us that promotes unlawful activity.”
In an interview Wednesday morning, Joe Sullivan, Facebook’s chief security officer, addressed WikiLeaks’s own presence on the site. He said the company had not received any official requests to disable pages or accounts associated with the WikiLeaks organization.
Facebook generally resists requests by governments or advocacy groups to take down material if that content is not illegal or does not violate Facebook’s terms of service, which prohibit attacks on individuals or incitements to violence.
“Facebook is a place where people come to talk about all sorts of things, including controversial topics,” Mr. Sullivan said. It was not clear whether anyone had asked Facebook to take down the Operation Payback page.
Twitter allowed the Operation Payback account to stay active most of Wednesday. But the group’s account was disabled late in the day, after it posted a link to a file that provided thousands of consumer credit card numbers, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation.
A Twitter spokesman declined to discuss the details of the situation. “We don’t comment about the specific actions we take around user accounts,” he said.
The company is not overly concerned about hackers’ attacking Twitter’s site, he said, explaining that it faces security issues all the time and has technology to deal with the situation.
Twitter is in a particularly delicate situation because its founders have celebrated their service’s role in political protest and free speech. They have not been shy about trying to capitalize on the good will engendered by playing that role.
WikiLeaks’s own Twitter account remains active, and it is the group’s main channel for reaching supporters and the media.
Last week, Amazon.com fell into a similar position when it decided to stop storing files for WikiLeaks. Advocates of WikiLeaks complained that Amazon.com was bowing to political pressure to cut the organization from its Web services. An Amazon.com spokesman said the company was simply banning an organization that had violated its terms of service by trying to distribute documents it did not own.
The last week has given rise to a hacking war in which groups have blocked access to WikiLeaks’s Web sites by bombarding them with requests.
And now the WikiLeaks supporters have responded in kind, flying the freedom of speech banner as the motivation for their actions.
Claire Cain Miller contributed reporting.
WikiLeaks supporters protest via cyberattacks
by Raphael G. Satter and Jill Lawless - Dec. 10, 2010 12:00 AM
Associated Press
LONDON - Skirmishes raged across cyberspace between WikiLeaks supporters and the companies they accuse of trying to stifle the group, with websites on both sides of the battle line taken out of service or choked off by attacks.
The U.N.'s top human-rights official raised the alarm Thursday over officials' and corporations' moves to cut off WikiLeaks' funding and starve it of server space - something she described as "potentially violating WikiLeaks' right to freedom of expression."
Navi Pillay also expressed surprise at the scale of the online attacks that have targeted major American financial players - in some cases denying access to their websites for hours at a time.
"It's truly what media would call a cyberwar," Pillay told reporters in Geneva. "It's just astonishing what is happening." In the Netherlands, a 16-year-old boy suspected of being involved in digital attacks by Wikileaks supporters was arrested.
WikiLeaks has been under intense pressure since it began publishing about 250,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables, with attacks on its websites and threats against its founder, Julian Assange, who is in a British jail fighting extradition to Sweden on sex-crime allegations.
U.S. officials say WikiLeaks' actions have thrown diplomacy into disarray, caused countries to curtail dealings with America and, in the case of an earlier release of classified military documents, put the lives of informants at risk.
While U.S. allies have criticized WikiLeaks, some world leaders have questioned the arrest of Assange.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, questioning the reliability of leaked U.S. cables referring to his nation as undemocratic and corrupt, said the fact that Assange was in custody showed the West had its own problems with democracy.
"Why was Mr. Assange hidden in prison?" Putin asked at a news conference. "Is this democracy?"
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said he was surprised by the lack of outcry against Assange's arrest.
"This WikiLeaks guy was arrested and I'm not seeing any protest for freedom of expression," Silva said Thursday in Brasilia. "There is nothing, nothing for freedom of expression and against the imprisonment of this guy who was doing better work than many of the ambassadors."
Many U.S.-based Internet companies have cut their ties to WikiLeaks, including MasterCard Inc., Visa Inc., Amazon.com, PayPal Inc. and EveryDNS. Those moves have hurt WikiLeaks' ability to accept donations and support publishing efforts - and touched off a bout of Web-based warfare.
Retaliatory attacks - which WikiLeaks says it does not sanction - have been claimed by a loose-knit group of "hacktivists" who gather under the handle "Anonymous."
They are using a modified version of software generally used to conduct "stress testing" on websites, according to Paul Mutton, an analyst with the London-based company Netcraft, which is tracking the attacks.
The technique allows even unsophisticated supporters to participate in attacks because all they have to do is download the file, which is then remotely operated to send a stream of bogus page requests to target websites.
Mutton said the number of computers spewing out spam had jumped from 400 to 2,000 machines on Wednesday - relatively small numbers, he said, but still apparently enough to overwhelm MasterCard and Visa.
"I've been surprised at how effective it's been," he said. "You don't need huge numbers of people to carry out an attack like that."
The surprise was shared by Internet activist Gregg Housh, who is involved with Anonymous. "I was surprised Visa and MasterCard went down," he told the Associated Press.
Housh said the number of computers at Anonymous' disposal was rising rapidly, now about 3,000 strong.
Palin alleges attacks by WikiLeaks supporters
by Meredith Shiner - Dec. 8, 2010 06:01 PM
POLITICO.COM
Sarah Palin on Wednesday said her PAC's website and her personal credit card information were the targets of cyber sabotauge by hackers who support the Wikileaks project. The hacking was first reported by ABC News.
Hackers operating under the banner "Operation Payback" claimed via Twitter on Wednesday that their efforts were responsible for temporarily disabling the websites of credit card giants Visa and MasterCard . The two companies were targeted after they took steps this week to block customers from using their networks to transfer funds to Wikileaks.
Palin presumably drew Wikileaks supporters' ire after she strongly criticized the group for releasing hundreds of secret U.S. diplomatic cables, a leak the Obama administration characterized as doing major damage to the country's national security. Last week, Palin took to Twitter to blast Obama for not doing more to stop the leaks and to demand that Congress act to "defeat WikiLeaks."
A Palin aide did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, SarahPAC aide Rebecca Mansour posted a Twitter message today after the ABC report was published, saying: "Supposed WikiLeaks 'champions of free speech' attack Palin simple because she exercised hers. They're total frauds."
And Palin told ABC News via e-mail, "This is what happens when you exercise the First Amendment and speak against his [Wikileaks founder Julian Assange's] sick, un-American espionage efforts."
Operation Payback used Twitter to galvanize support for the attacks on Visa and Mastercard, prompting Twitter to suspend an anonymously authored account tied to the group.
The Arizona Republic is a member of the Politico Network.
UK court grants bail to WikiLeaks' Julian Assange
By Associated Press
December 14, 2010, 8:06 a.m.
London — A British judge granted bail to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Tuesday, but he remained in custody pending a possible appeal.
Swedish authorities were given two hours to lodge an appeal and their lawyer, Gemma Lindfield, said it was likely she would.
The 39-year-old Australian has been held in a London prison for a week after surrendering to Scotland Yard due to a Swedish arrest warrant in a sex-crimes investigation. He denies wrongdoing and his lawyer says he plans to fight extradition.
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At Tuesday's hearing, District Judge Howard Riddle said Assange must abide by strict bail conditions. He must wear an electronic tag, live at a registered address, report to police every evening and observe two four-hour curfews each day.
A total of $380,000 was put up as a guarantee by several supporters.
Assange's next court appearance was set for Jan. 11.
Supporters outside City of Westminster Magistrates' Court erupted in cheers when they heard news of the judge's ruling.
Lindfield, acting on behalf of Swedish authorities, had asked the court to deny Assange bail because the allegations in Sweden were serious, Assange had only weak ties to Britain and he had enough money "to abscond."
Sweden fights bail for WikiLeaks chief
by David Stringer - Dec. 15, 2010 12:00 AM
Associated Press
LONDON - A British judge ordered Julian Assange released on $316,000 bail Tuesday, but the WikiLeaks founder will remain in custody for at least two more days because Swedish prosecutors challenged that decision.
Assange, 39, has spent a week in a U.K. jail following his surrender to British police over a Swedish sex-crime warrant.
He denies any wrongdoing but has refused to voluntarily surrender to Sweden's request to extradite him for questioning, arguing that he could be questioned from Britain.
In a day of courtroom drama, the Australian was first told by a judge that he would be freed, then less than two hours later was informed that he had at least another 48 hours in custody.
Britain's High Court will hear the Swedish appeal, but it wasn't clear exactly when.
"They clearly will not spare any expense to keep Mr. Assange in jail," his lawyer, Mark Stephens, told journalists outside the entrance to the City of Westminster Magistrates Court in London. "This is really turning into a show trial."
Lawyer Gemma Lindfield, acting for Sweden, had asked the court to deny Assange bail, arguing Tuesday that the allegations against him are serious, that he has only weak ties to Britain and that he has "the means and ability to abscond."
Reminding the court that it had already labeled Assange "a flight risk," she argued that "nothing has changed since last week to allay the court's fears in this regard."
She also rejected attempts to link Assange's case with the work of WikiLeaks, which last month deeply angered U.S. officials by beginning to publish its trove of 250,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables. 'Serious offenses'
"This is not a case about WikiLeaks, rather a case about alleged serious offenses against two women," Lindfield told the court Tuesday.
Celebrity supporters in the court, including socialite Jemima Khan and actress Bianca Jagger, and hundreds of pro-WikiLeaks protesters outside the building cheered at District Judge Howard Riddle's decision to grant Assange bail.
Under the ruling, Assange must wear an electronic tag, stay at a specific address in southern England, report to police every evening and observe two four-hour curfews each day in addition to putting up the bond.
Lindfield said Assange is accused of rape, molestation and unlawful coercion by two women for separate incidents last August in Sweden.
Judge grants bail to WikiLeaks' Julian Assange
Posted 12/16/2010 11:13 AM ET
By Cassandra Vinograd, Associated Press
LONDON — Julian Assange will be freed on bail and sent to stay at a British country mansion, a U.K. judge ruled Thursday, rejecting prosecutors' attempts to keep the WikiLeaks founder in prison as he fights extradition to Sweden.
Cheers erupted from supporters outside the London court as the verdict by High Court justice Duncan Ouseley was reported.
Assange's lawyer, Mark Stephens, said he was "utterly delighted" with the judge's ruling, which included an order that prosecutors pay his client's court costs.
Prosecutors had argued there was a risk the 39-year-old Australian, who faces sex-crimes allegations in Sweden, would abscond if he was freed. But Ouseley said if Assange fled "he would diminish himself in the eyes of many of his supporters" -- and make famous backers like filmmaker Michael Moore look foolish.
"I don't accept that Mr. Assange has an incentive not to attend (court)," Ouseley said. "He clearly does have some desire to clear his name."
Assange, dressed in a dark gray suit, smiled and gave a thumb's up sign to a packed courtroom as he was led from the dock by guards. It was not immediately clear how long it would take before he was released.
His lawyers need to produce the 200,000 pounds ($316,000) bail pledged by several wealthy supporters. Stephens said Assange would be released "sometime later today or on a worst-case analysis tomorrow."
Assange was granted a conditional release on bail by a lower court Tuesday, but prosecutors appealed.
Ouseley made some amendments to the earlier bail conditions. Assange must wear an electronic tag, report to police every day and observe a curfew. He also must stay at a registered address -- a 10-bedroom mansion in eastern England owned by Vaughan Smith, a WikiLeaks supporter and founder of London's Frontline Club for journalists.
Assange has been in prison since Dec. 7, following his surrender to British police over a Swedish warrant. He denies any wrongdoing but is refusing to surrender to Sweden's request to extradite him for questioning.
Two women have accused Assange of sexual misconduct -- including rape, molestation and unlawful coercion -- for separate incidents in August in Sweden. He has not been charged.
Assange's lawyers say the allegations stem from a dispute over "consensual but unprotected sex" and argue that he has offered to make himself available for questioning via video link or in person in Britain.
Last month WikiLeaks deeply angered U.S. officials by beginning to publish its trove of 250,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables.
Assange's supporters suspect the claims against him are politically motivated -- a charge Sweden has denied.
Lawyer Gemma Lindfield, acting for Sweden, said the charges had enhanced Assange's reputation among his supporters, who "view it as part of the wider conspiracy."
She said given Assange's nomadic lifestyle and loose ties to some of those promising bond, there was "a real risk" he would flee.
But the judge said when Assange arrived in Britain, he had asked his lawyers to contact police so they would know where he was.
"That is not the conduct of a person who is seeking to evade justice," Ouseley said.
___
Associated Press Writer Jill Lawless contributed to this report.
Assange free on bail, confined to friend's estate
by Cassandra Vinograd - Dec. 17, 2010 12:00 AM
Associated Press
LONDON - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was released on bail Thursday - confined to a supporter's 600-acre estate but free to get back to work spilling U.S. government secrets on his website as he fights Sweden's attempt to extradite him on allegations of rape and molestation.
The silver-haired Australian, who surrendered to British police Dec. 7, will have to observe a curfew, wear an electronic tag and report to police in person every day.
But there are no restrictions on his Internet use, even as U.S. authorities consider charges related to thousands of leaked diplomatic cables and other secret documents WikiLeaks has released. The site has released just 1,621 of the more than 250,000 State Department documents it claims to possess, many of them containing critical or embarrassing U.S. assessments of foreign nations and their leaders.
Meanwhile in Washington, the man who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War defended both Assange and the Army private suspected of providing the site with thousands of sensitive government documents.
Daniel Ellsberg said Thursday that WikiLeaks' disclosure of government secrets on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and thousands of diplomatic cables was "exactly the right thing" to do.
"I think they provided a very valuable service," Ellsberg said, also referring to man suspected of leaking the documents, Pvt. Bradley Manning. "To call them terrorists is not only mistaken, it's absurd."
Dressed in a dark gray suit, Assange emerged from London's neo-Gothic High Court building late Thursday following a tense scramble to gather the money and signatures needed to free him. Speaking under a light snowfall amid a barrage of flash bulbs, Assange - who's been out of the public eye for more than a month - told supporters he will continue bringing government secrets to light. "It's great to smell the fresh air of London again," he said from outside the court. "I hope to continue my work."
Assange ignored shouted questions from the media.
Later, BBC footage captured the 39-year-old riding in a white armored four-by-four outside the Frontline Club, a venue for journalists owned by his friend and supporter Vaughan Smith. The broadcaster reported that Assange jumped upstairs for a celebratory cocktail at the bar, then went back outside to engage in a brief verbal joust with journalists over the merits of one of the leaked cables.
A few hours later, Assange arrived at Ellingham Hall, Smith's 10-bedroom mansion 120 miles northeast of central London. Assange told journalists there that his time in prison had steeled him, giving him time to reflect on his personal philosophy and "enough anger about the situation to last me 100 years."
Assange was granted conditional bail Tuesday, but prosecutors appealed, arguing that he might abscond. High Court Justice Duncan Ouseley rejected the appeal Thursday, saying Assange "would diminish himself in the eyes of many of his supporters" if he fled.
"I don't accept that Mr. Assange has an incentive not to attend (court)," Ouseley said. "He clearly does have some desire to clear his name."
WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson had said Assange might have to spend one more night behind bars anyway, because of difficulties producing the $316,000 bail pledged by several wealthy supporters, including filmmaker Michael Moore. But lawyers managed to collect the money quickly.
The restrictions Ouseley imposed on Assange amount to "virtual house arrest," Hrafnsson said. But he added that Assange can still use Smith's estate as a base for coordinating the publication of the leaked cables.
Bank of America stops dealing with WikiLeaks
Is Bank of American part of the American Police state? I suspect so.Remember all the American banks get free money (more or less) from the Federal Reserve Board. So I suspect this is why BofA is screwing over the freedom fighters at WikiLeaks!
A very good book on the unconstitutional Federal Reserve Board is "The Creature from Jekyll Island" by G. Edward Griffin. The Federal Reserve Board is nothing but a scam that illegally allows the American government to print money by the boat load.
Bank of America stops dealing with WikiLeaks
Dec. 18, 2010 09:21 AM
Associated Press
CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Bank of America Corp. has joined several other financial institutions in refusing to handle payments for WikiLeaks.
With its announcement, the Charlotte-based bank joins a fray that has ratcheted financial pressure on the website that released thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables, but has also prompted cyber attacks on businesses that cut ties with the activist site. The move also comes as WikiLeaks says it's preparing a release of information on banks, which could include documents it says it has on Bank of America.
The Charlotte-based bank released a statement Saturday saying it will no longer process any transactions that it believes are intended for the site.
"This decision is based upon our reasonable belief that WikiLeaks may be engaged in activities that are, among other things, inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments," the bank said.
Reached by phone, Bank of America spokesman Scott Silvestri declined further comment to The Associated Press on Saturday.
Other Internet companies and financial institutions-- including MasterCard Inc., Visa Inc., PayPal Inc. and Amazon.com -- have also cut ties with Wikileaks, hurting the site's ability to accept donations and support publishing efforts. The websites of some companies perceived as trying to stifle WikiLeaks have come under cyber attack in recent weeks by hackers who support its mission.
Wikileaks has said it does not sanction the hackers' work, which has caused some sites to temporarily go out of service.
WikiLeaks responded to Bank of America's announcement with a Twitter message urging supporters to stop doing business with the bank.
"We ask that all people who love freedom close out their accounts at Bank of America," WikiLeaks said in its posting Saturday. It also called on businesses to switch funds from the bank.
In an interview with CNBC on Friday, Assange said his organization has plans to soon release information about banks, and he told Forbes magazine last month that the data would show "unethical practices."
Assange told Computerworld magazine in 2009 that his organization had a trove of files on Bank of America. "At the moment, for example, we are sitting on 5GB from Bank of America, one of the executive's hard drives. Now how do we present that? It's a difficult problem," he was quoted as telling the magazine.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has said repeatedly a criminal investigation of the WikiLeaks' continuing release of some 250,000 secret U.S. State Department cables is under way and that anyone found to have broken the law will be held accountable. The Justice Department has provided no other public comment on who is under investigation or its legal strategy.
Assange said Friday he fears the U.S. is preparing to indict him.
Target secrecy, not WikiLeaks leader
A U.S. focus on openness would make Assange irrelevant
by Dana Milbank - Dec. 22, 2010 12:00 AM
Washington Post Writers Group
WASHINGTON - Julian Assange was insufferable as he left a London courthouse last week. "During my time in solitary confinement in the bottom of a Victorian prison, I had time to reflect on the conditions of those people around the world also in solitary confinement," he said after posting bail - as if nine days in an English jail fighting extradition to Sweden on sex charges made him a regular Nelson Mandela.
Before Assange motored off to his house arrest at a friend's mansion, one of his lawyers expressed his determination that Assange "will not be going back to that cell once occupied by Oscar Wilde." Oscar Wilde? Those cheeky Brits. Assange's indiscriminate dump of American government secrets over the last several months, with hardly a care for who might be hurt or what public good was served, can be summarized nicely by one of the playwright's aphorisms: Nothing succeeds like excess. I can understand why Obama administration figures want to prosecute Assange on espionage charges or other crimes. I confess I'd like to throw a cream pie in his face myself. But prosecuting Assange would give him exactly what he wants: proof that America is hypocritical, that we don't live by the freedoms we preach.
Assange would like nothing more than to be a martyr, and President Obama shouldn't give him that. The better way to deal with Assange is to make him irrelevant. The only reason WikiLeaks has been a sensation is the absurd secrecy of the Obama administration, in some ways worse than that of George W. Bush.
The reflexive classifying of things that shouldn't be secret has, by creating the perception that the United States government has much to hide, created a market for WikiLeaks. In fact, the WikiLeaks disclosures have been generally benign. Vice President Biden said Thursday that he didn't see "any substantive damage" from them. The biggest revelation was that so many supposed government secrets really aren't secrets.
The episode spotlighted Obama's surprisingly poor record on government openness. The administration has already undertaken four prosecutions of government leakers, more than any predecessor, in some cases using the arcane, World War I-era Espionage Act. At the same time, the administration stymied efforts in Congress to pass a "shield law" to protect journalists' confidential sources.
Government-secrecy watchdog Steven Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists reports that the administration has yet to produce recommendations for the "fundamental transformation" of the security-classification system Obama ordered a year ago. The government in the first six months of this year declassified only 8 million of the 400 million documents it is supposed to release by 2013.
Overclassification is so prevalent that even the Pentagon Papers, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg nearly four decades ago, are still classified as top secret. It's little wonder that Ellsberg himself has empathy for WikiLeaks. At a news conference at the National Press Club on Thursday, shortly before going to chain himself to the White House fence in a protest, the 79-year-old Ellsberg said Assange is a hero. Convicting Assange, he said, "would mean that the crown had returned to America ... and that we're really under a monarchical system of total control of information."
Ellsberg was accompanied by an activist from Assange's Australia, who lectured Americans on free speech.
"We thought that America stood firm for the Constitution, for its First Amendment rights," said the activist, Brett Solomon. "If something has changed, then let us know."
That bloke was as insufferable as Assange.
It achieves little to punish Assange. Instead, end the obsessive classification that made Assange possible and refuse to grant him the martyrdom he desires.
Norwegian paper obtains diplomatic cables; WikiLeaks gives docs to Russian journalists
Norwegian newspaper, Aftenposten, now claims to have the full cache of over 250,000 State Dept. cables originally obtained by WikiLeaks.
But it's not clear how Aftenposten got the documents, which presumably were not provided directly from WikiLeaks.
"We have no comments on how we have gained access to the documents," Editorial Manager Ronny Ruud told The Cutline.
"Moreover, I emphasize that we have access to all documents without any clauses or bonds," Ruud said. "The documents will be continuously reviewed as the basis of articles by the same editorial criteria and ethical rules as the rest of the journalism in Aftenposten."
News outlets with advanced access to the diplomatic cables—The New York Times, The Guardian (UK), El Pais (Spain), Le Monde (France) and Der Spiegel (Germany)—started published articles based on the secret documents beginning Nov. 28. WikiLeaks, as of Wednesday morning, has published 1862 out of its trove of 251,287 cables.
An English-language site—"News and Views from Norway"—reported on Aftenposten's documents and noted that because the Oslo-based newspaper is published in Norwegian, the documents will be "subject to translation from their original English and restricting their consumption, at least initially, to readers who can understand Norwegian."
Meanwhile, WikiLeaks has partnered with Novaya Gazeta, a muckraking Russian newspaper that has sharply criticized the government over the years and became a Kremlin target in the process.
WikiLeaks is providing the newspaper—which is controlled by former leader Mikhail Gorbachev and billionaire Alexander Lebedev—with Russia-specific documents. (Levedev, along with his son, owns several British newspapers)
"Assange said that Russians will soon find out a lot about their country and he wasn't bluffing," Novaya Gazeta said, according to Bloomberg News. "Our collaboration will expose corruption at the top tiers of political power. No one is protected from the truth."
The paper plans to start publishing articles next month on the materials supplied by WikiLeaks, which is said to include documents concerning the murder of renowned Novaya Gazeta reporter Anna Politkovskaya.
US press should fear being targeted: Assange
AFP
Wed Dec 22, 7:08 pm ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Wednesday that a US government effort to prosecute him should serve as a warning to journalists in the United States.
Assange, in an interview with the MSNBC television network, said there has been a "quite deliberate attempt to split off our organization from the First Amendment protections that are afforded to all publishers."
The WikiLeaks founder said he considers himself a journalist and "we all have to stick together to resist this sort of reinterpretation of the First Amendment," which guarantees the right to free speech.
"We have seen these statements, that The New York Times is, you know, also being looked at in terms of whether they have engaged in what they call 'conspiracy to commit espionage,'" he said.
"If they want to push the line that when a newspaperman talks to someone in the government about looking for things relating to potential abuses, that that is a conspiracy to commit espionage, then that's going to take out all the good government journalism that occurs in the United States," he said.
Assange added that if the "Washington authorities target us and destroy us" other journalists should be worried because "they're going to be next."
Assange rejected US Vice President Joe Biden's description of him as a "high-tech terrorist" and condemned calls for his assassination.
"The definition of terrorism is a group that uses violence or the threat of violence for political ends," he said. "Now, no one in our four-year publishing history, covering over 120 countries, has ever been physically harmed as a result of what we have done.
"Whoever the terrorists are here, it's not us," Assange said. "But we see constant threats from people... calling for my assassination, calling for the illegal kidnapping of my staff.
"What sort of message does that send about the rule of law in the United States?" he said. "I mean, if we are to have a civil society, you cannot have senior people making calls on national TV to go around the judiciary and illegally murder people -- that is incitement to commit murder."
Assange also described Bradley Manning, the US army soldier suspected of providing WikiLeaks with secret US military and diplomatic documents, as a "political prisoner."
"He has been a political prisoner without trial in the United States for some six or seven months," Assange said, adding that he did not know if the material he received was from Manning since it is submitted anonymously.
"We recently heard calls to try and set up a plea deal with Bradley Manning to testify against me, personally, to say that we engaged in some kind of conspiracy to commit espionage," he said, dismissing the charge as "absolute nonsense."
WikiLeaks: US demanding our Twitter account info
RAPHAEL G. SATTERRAPHAEL G. SATTER, Associated Press THE ASSOCIATED PRESS STATEMENT OF NEWS VALUES AND PRINCIPLES
LONDON (AP) — U.S. officials have issued a subpoena to demand details about WikiLeaks' Twitter account, the group announced Saturday, adding that it suspected other American Internet companies were also being ordered to hand over information about its activities.
In a statement, WikiLeaks said U.S. investigators had gone to the San Francisco-based Twitter Inc. to demand the private messages, contact information and other personal details of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and other supporters, including the U.S. Army intelligence analyst suspected of handing classified information to the site and a high-profile Icelandic parliamentarian.
WikiLeaks blasted the court order, saying it amounted to harassment.
"If the Iranian government was to attempt to coercively obtain this information from journalists and activists of foreign nations, human rights groups around the world would speak out," Assange said in the statement.
A copy of the court order, dated Dec. 14 and posted to Salon.com, said the information sought was "relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation" and ordered Twitter not to disclose its existence to Assange or any of the others targeted.
The order was unsealed "thanks to legal action by Twitter," WikiLeaks said.
Twitter has declined comment on the claim, saying only that its policy is to notify its users, where possible, of government requests for information.
Others named in the order include Pfc. Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private suspected of being the source of some of WikiLeaks' material, as well as Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic lawmaker and one-time WikiLeaks collaborator known for her role in pioneering Iceland's media initiative — which aims to make the North Atlantic island nation a haven for free speech.
The U.S. is also seeking details about Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp and U.S. programmer Jacob Appelbaum, both of whom have previously worked with WikiLeaks.
Assange has promised to fight the order, as has Jonsdottir, who said in a Twitter message that she had "no intention to hand my information over willingly." Appelbaum, whose Twitter feed suggested he was traveling in Iceland, said he was apprehensive about returning to the U.S.
"Time to try to enjoy the last of my vacation, I suppose," he tweeted.
Gonggrijp expressed annoyance that court officials had misspelled his last name — and praised Twitter for notifying him and others that the U.S. had subpoenaed his details.
"It appears that Twitter, as a matter of policy, does the right thing in wanting to inform their users when one of these comes in," Gonggrijp said. "Heaven knows how many places have received similar subpoenas and just quietly submitted all they had on me."
WikiLeaks also voiced its suspicion that other organizations, such as Facebook Inc. and Google Inc., had also been served with court orders, and urged them to "unseal any subpoenas they have received."
Google and Facebook's London offices did not immediately return calls seeking comment.
U.S. officials have been deeply angry with WikiLeaks for months, for first releasing tens of thousands of U.S. classified military documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, then more recently posting thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables. U.S. officials say posting the military documents put informers' lives at risk, and posting diplomatic cables made other countries reluctant to deal with American officials.
Although its relations with the U.S. government have been ugly, WikiLeaks and its tech-savvy staff rely have relied heavily on American Internet and finance companies to raise funds, disseminate material and get their message out.
WikiLeaks' Facebook page, for example, counts 1.5 million fans and its Twitter following is upward of 600,000 followers. Until recently, the group raised donations via PayPal Inc., MasterCard Inc., and Visa Inc., and hosted material on Amazon.com's servers.
But the group's use of American companies has come under increasing pressure as it continues to reveal U.S. secrets.
U.S. officials have been examining possible charges against WikiLeaks and its staff following the series of spectacular leaks, which have embarrassed officials and tarnished Washington's image.
WikiLeaks denies U.S. charges that its postings could put lives at risk, saying that Washington merely is acting out of embarrassment over the revelations contained in the cables.
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Michael Liedtke in San Francisco contributed to this report.
Twitter hit with info demand in WikiLeaks probe
by Raphael G. Satter and Pete Yost - Jan. 8, 2011 03:39 PM
Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Investigative documents in the WikiLeaks probe spilled out into the public domain Saturday for the first time, pointing to the Obama administration's determination to assemble a criminal case no matter how long it takes and how far afield authorities have to go.
Backed by a magistrate judge's court order from Dec. 14, the newly disclosed documents sent to Twitter Inc. by the U.S. attorney's office in Alexandria, Va., demand details about the accounts of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Pfc. Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst who's in custody and suspected of supplying WikiLeaks with classified information.
The others whose Twitter accounts are targeted in the prosecutors' demand are Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian and one-time WikiLeaks collaborator; Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp; and U.S. programmer Jacob Appelbaum. Gonggrijp and Appelbaum have worked with WikiLeaks in the past.
Justice Department Matt Miller declined comment on the disclosure in the case, which intensified following WikiLeaks' latest round of revelations with the posting of classified State Department diplomatic cables. The next day, Nov. 29, Attorney General Eric Holder vowed that anyone found to have violated U.S. law in the leaks would be prosecuted.
Assange said the U.S. move amounted to harassment, and he pledged to fight it.
"If the Iranian government was to attempt to coercively obtain this information from journalists and activists of foreign nations, human rights groups around the world would speak out," he told The Associated Press in an e-mail.
Legal experts have said one possible avenue for federal prosecutors would be to establish a conspiracy to steal classified information.
"They are trying to show that Manning was more than a source of the information to a reporter and rather that Assange and Manning were trying to jointly steal information from the U.S. government," said Mark Rasch, a former prosecutor on computer crime and espionage cases in the Justice Department.
The problem is distinguishing between WikiLeaks as a news organization and those who re-published the same classified information, like The New York Times, said Rasch, director of cybersecurity and privacy consulting at CSC, a Falls Church, Va., technology company.
"How do they prosecute?" asked Rasch. "The answer is by establishing a unity of interest between Manning and Assange. Make it a theft case and not just a journalist publishing information case."
The demand by prosecutors sought information dating to Nov. 1, 2009, several months before an earlier WikiLeaks release.
Manning is in a maximum-security military brig at Quantico, Va., charged with leaking video of a 2007 U.S. Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed a Reuters news photographer and his driver. WikiLeaks posted the video on its website in April of last year. Three months later, WikiLeaks posted some 90,000 leaked U.S. military records on the war in Afghanistan, including unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings as well as covert operations against Taliban figures.
The main target of the prosecutors' document demands is most likely the IP addresses of the Twitter users, said Stanford University law professor Larry Lessig, founder of the Center for Internet & Society, Stanford.
Getting a list of IP addresses - a specific code assigned to each computer that is recording as it visits web sites - could help prosecutors an effort to draw specific connections between individuals, their computers, and the information they share.
"It's not very hard for an investigator to put these things together and come back and identify a specific individual," Lessig said.
In a statement about the demand to Twitter for information, WikiLeaks said it has reason to believe Facebook and Google, among other organizations, have received similar court orders. WikiLeaks called on them to unseal any subpoenas they have received.
The document demand ordered Twitter to hand over private messages, billing information, telephone numbers, connection records and other information about accounts run by Assange and the others.
A copy of the demand, sent to the AP by Jonsdottir, said the information sought was "relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation" and ordered Twitter not to disclose its existence to any of the targets.
But a second document, dated Jan. 5, unsealed the court order. Although the reason wasn't made explicit in the document, WikiLeaks said it had been unsealed "thanks to legal action by Twitter."
Twitter declined comment on the matter, saying only that its policy is to notify its users, where possible, of government requests for information.
Neither Facebook Inc. nor Google Inc. immediately returned messages Saturday.
The Obama administration volunteered little new information about its criminal investigation against Assange and WikiLeaks after news of its subpoena leaked. Under rules governing grand jury investigations - in which U.S. prosecutors present evidence and testimony to selected private citizens behind closed doors to seek their approval to formally file charges - government lawyers are not allowed to discuss the case until charges are announced publicly.
It was not immediately clear how the data being requested would be useful to investigators. Twitter's logs could reveal the Internet addresses that Assange and WikiLeaks supporters have used, which could help track their locations as they traveled around the world. The information also might identify others with official access to WikiLeaks' account on Twitter who so far have escaped scrutiny.
Assange's lawyer, Mark Stephens, said targeting Twitter showed how desperate U.S. officials were to pin a crime on the WikiLeaks founder.
Stephens told the BBC it was an attempt to "shake the electronic tree in the hope some kind of criminal charge drops out the bottom of it."
Jonsdottir said in a Twitter message that she had "no intention to hand my information over willingly." Appelbaum, whose Twitter feed suggested he was traveling in Iceland, said he was apprehensive about returning to the U.S.
"Time to try to enjoy the last of my vacation, I suppose," he tweeted.
Gonggrijp praised Twitter for notifying him.
"It appears that Twitter, as a matter of policy, does the right thing in wanting to inform their users when one of these comes in," Gonggrijp said. "Heaven knows how many places have received similar subpoenas and just quietly submitted all they had on me."
The news of the subpoena follows months of angry back and forth between U.S. officials and WikiLeaks, which has released reams of secret U.S. military documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and more recently, thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables.
U.S. officials say posting the military documents put informers' lives at risk, and that revealing diplomatic cables has made other countries reluctant to deal with American officials.
WikiLeaks denies that its postings put any lives at risk and says Washington merely is acting out of embarrassment over the revelations contained in the cables.
WikiLeaks and its tech-savvy staff have relied on American Internet and finance companies to raise funds, disseminate material and get their message out.
WikiLeaks' frequently updated Facebook page, for example, counts 1.5 million fans and its Twitter account has a following of more than 600,000. Until recently, the group raised donations via U.S. companies PayPal Inc., MasterCard Inc., and Visa Inc., and hosted material on Amazon.com's servers.
But the group's use of American companies has come under increasing pressure as it continues to reveal U.S. secrets. PayPal and the credit card companies severed their links with site and Amazon.com booted WikiLeaks from its servers last month.
The actions sparked a cyberfight with WikiLeaks sympathizers, who attacked the company's sites for days.
Assange is currently out on bail in Britain, where he is fighting extradition to Sweden on sex crimes allegations. His next hearing is scheduled for Tuesday.
Assange: WikiLeaks to speed release of leaked documents
Jan. 11, 2011 06:40 AM
Associated Press
LONDON - WikiLeaks will step up its publication schedule of secret documents, founder Julian Assange announced Tuesday, promising more revelations based on the group's stash of confidential U.S. embassy cables and other leaks.
Assange, 39, spoke to reporters outside London's high-security Belmarsh Magistrates' Court, where he and his lawyers appeared for a hearing in his fight against extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted in a sex-crimes inquiry.
WikiLeaks sparked an international uproar when it began publishing hundreds of classified U.S. diplomatic cables late last year, revelations that caused weeks worth of embarrassing news stories for the U.S. and its allies. But the flow of leaks, published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais, has slowed recently amid a barrage of online attacks, financial difficulties and the Swedish prosecution of Assange.
The Australian computer expert said that would soon change, hinting that new media outlets were being made party to the leaks.
"We are stepping up our publishing for matters related to Cablegate and other materials," Assange said. "Those will shortly be occurring through our newspaper partners around the world - big and small newspapers and some human rights organizations."
He did not elaborate, returning to court with his lawyers without taking questions.
The WikiLeaks frontman has been under strict curfew at a manor in eastern England since his arrest last month on rape and molestation accusations stemming from encounters with two women during a trip to Sweden last summer.
The Swedish case has divided world opinion. Assange and his supporters say he is being prosecuted for political reasons, something denied by Swedish authorities and Assange's alleged victims, who insist it has nothing to do with WikiLeaks' activities.
Assange, wearing a dark suit, was in court for just 10 minutes for a discussion of his next appearance, scheduled for February 7. An outline of Assange's defense posted to his lawyers' website said he would argue that the European arrest warrant seeking his detention was improperly issued. It claimed that Assange could be extradited to the United States - and ultimately even executed or sent to Guantanamo Bay - if he were sent to Sweden.
A few people protested outside the London court, with one standing behind a banner proclaiming: "Welcome to the show trial." There were other protests timed to coincide with the hearing - including one by pro-Kremlin youth activists outside the British Embassy in Moscow.
Earlier Tuesday, WikiLeaks released a statement decrying the death threats in the United States that have been made against Assange. It drew a link between his experience and that of Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head in an Arizona massacre Saturday that killed six people and touched off a fierce debate over the toxic tone of U.S. political discourse.
WikiLeaks said its staff has been subject to "unprecedented violent rhetoric by U.S. prominent media personalities," naming former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin as one of those who have called for Assange to be hunted down like a terrorist.
American officials are trying to build a criminal case against WikiLeaks, which along with the State Department cables has also published hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. intelligence files on Iraq and Afghanistan, and a secret helicopter video showing a U.S. attack that killed two Reuters journalists and Iraqis in Baghdad.
The U.S. attorney's office in Alexandria, Va., has demanded details about the Twitter accounts of Assange and Pfc. Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst in custody who is suspected of supplying WikiLeaks with classified information.
U.S. prosecutors also targeted three other WikiLeaks supporters: Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic parliamentarian, Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp and U.S. programmer Jacob Appelbaum.
WikiLeaks said it suspects other American Internet companies like Facebook Inc. and Google Inc., have also been asked for information. Neither company has commented on the topic
You can't trust government rulers - "Over and over again, the cables captured world leaders lying -- to each other, to their allies, and to their own citizens... Diplomacy "comes across as a scheming, duplicitous profession -- which it kind of is."
WikiLeaks: 1 percent of diplomatic docs published
Posted 1/23/2011 9:19 AM ET
By Raphael G. Satter, Associated Press
LONDON — Nearly two months after WikiLeaks outraged the U.S. government by launching the release of a massive compendium of diplomatic documents, the secret-spilling website has published 2,628 U.S. State Department cables -- just over 1 percent of its trove of 251,287 documents.
Here's a look at what the consequences of the cables' release has been so far, and what the future could hold for WikiLeaks.
___
IT'S LIFTED THE VEIL ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
WikiLeaks has given the world's public an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes look at U.S. diplomacy. Among the most eye-catching revelations were reports that Arab countries had lobbied for an attack on Iran, China had made plans for the collapse of its North Korean ally, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had ordered U.S. diplomats to gather the computer passwords, fingerprints and even DNA of their foreign counterparts.
Some of the most controversial cables dealt with a directive to harvest biometric information on a range of officials. U.S. diplomats have been forced repeatedly to deny spying on their counterparts -- although none have specifically addressed the instructions to gather personal details, sensitive computer data, and even genetic material or iris scans.
Anthony Cordesman, an analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, cautioned that some cables were less explosive when taken in the context they were written. He noted that Arab belligerence toward Tehran has festered for years -- and suggested the rhetoric was being ratcheted up at a time of high tensions over Iran's nuclear program.
As for the cables on scooping up fingerprints, frequent flyer numbers, and other personal information, Cordesman said that "there isn't a diplomatic service in the world that doesn't serve its intelligence community."
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IT'S SHOWN HOW LEADERS LIE
Over and over again, the cables captured world leaders lying -- to each other, to their allies, and to their own citizens.
Diplomacy "comes across as a scheming, duplicitous profession -- which it kind of is," said Carne Ross, a former British diplomat who resigned over the Iraq war.
Ross said the most outrageous example of double-dealing he had seen so far was the 2009 cable that caught Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh sharing a joke about how another senior official had covered up a series of U.S. attacks by lying to parliament.
But there are other examples. One of the cables has Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe's longtime opposition leader-turned-prime minister, telling Western diplomats that his calls for easing sanctions against Zimbabwe are for public consumption only. Another cable cites Israeli officials, who have often insisted their controversial blockade of the Gaza Strip is targeted only at their arch-foe Hamas, as freely acknowledging that the restrictions were in fact an effort to keep the Gazan economy teetering on the brink of collapse.
The cables are laced with cynicism. One quotes a former French prime minister as dismissing a fellow socialist politician as too honest for his own good. Meanwhile Qatar's prime minister, Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim Bin Jabr Al-Thani, describes his country's apparently cordial relationship with neighboring Iran as one big charade.
"They lie to us, and we lie to them," Al-Thani is quoted as saying.
___
IT'S SHAKEN U.S. DIPLOMACY
Italy's Foreign Minister Franco Frattini drew considerable attention when he described the WikiLeaks release as the "September 11 of world diplomacy."
At the very least, the cables have angered some major world figures. Turkey's prime minister demanded that U.S. diplomats be punished for claiming that he had money stashed away in a collection of Swiss bank accounts; cables covering attempts to secure nuclear material in Pakistan drew outrage in a country where public hostility to the United States is already high; rivals such as Russia jumped on the cables to accuse the U.S. of arrogance and dishonesty.
Richard Dalton, the former British ambassador to Libya and now a fellow at London's Chatham House think tank, dismissed Frattini's prediction of a worldwide diplomatic meltdown, suggesting that things would eventually return to business as usual.
"It is -- so far -- a bump in the road," he said, although he noted longterm damage to U.S. diplomacy was still hard to gauge.
Even if the U.S. State Department rapidly recovers, individual officials still face serious damage to their careers. Officials have told The Associated Press that Ambassador Gene Cretz may lose his job as envoy to Tripoli over his descriptions of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's eccentricities.
Allied officials have been rattled by the releases as well: The German foreign minister's chief of staff took a leave of absence following the revelation that he was feeding information to Washington; Afghanistan's finance minister offered to resign after he was quoted as describing President Hamid Karzai as weak and paranoid; Britain's central banker also faced criticism after a cable caught him sharing his doubts about Prime Minister David Cameron's economic competency with the U.S. ambassador to London.
Singapore's Foreign Minister George Yeo may have been speaking for many across the world last month when he instructed officials to be less open when speaking with their American counterparts.
"The WikiLeaks disclosures have been disastrous for U.S. diplomacy," Yeo said.
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WHAT'S NEXT?
Although only a small sliver of the entire trove of State Department documents has made it online, the secret memos have been held by The New York Times, Britain's The Guardian, Germany's Der Spiegel, and Spain's El Pais for weeks, if not months. Recent cables have made news, but lately they haven't carried the same punch as earlier releases.
It isn't clear whether WikiLeaks or what it calls its "media partners" have gone through the documents in their entirety. The secret-spilling website did not return an e-mail seeking comment on its future plans, although its founder Julian Assange has repeatedly promised to speed the cables' release.
Whether or not the State Department cables have already yielded their most arresting secrets, WikiLeaks is still sitting on a huge archive of leaked data from nearly every country in the world -- including, Assange has hinted, a massive trove of e-mails from Bank of America.
And even though his website is no longer accepting submissions, Assange said secrets were still making their way to him all the time. On Monday, a Swiss ex-banker -- now under arrest for his interactions with WikiLeaks -- handed Assange his latest set of secrets, data which he claimed carried details of tax evasion by some 2,000 prominent people.
Assange said the material could be online within weeks.
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Online:
WikiLeaks: wikileaks.ch/