WikiLeaks

Wikileaks, which began operations in December 2006, is a website devoted to making information that would otherwise be restricted available to the public. It has both been praised for breaking information on scandals, but also for revealing information that is personal or otherwise of questionable public value. It describes itself as a production of Sunshine Press, "an non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public. ... Although our work produces reforms daily and is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the 2008 Index on Censorship-Economist Freedom of Expression Award as well as the 2009 Amnesty International New Media Award, these accolades do not pay the bills. Nor can we accept government or corporate funding and maintain our absolute integrity."

A blog, wikileak.org (i.e., less the "S" in Wikileaks) has been created to report on Wikileaks.

Origins
The founder is Julian Assange, about whom little is known, except that he appears to be an Australian in his thirties. He is known to have been raised in Melbourne, and was convicted, as a teenager, of hacking into websites as a member of a hacker collective called the International Subversives. "He eventually pled guilty to 24 counts of breaking into Australian government and commercial websites to test their security gaps, but was released on bond for good behavior. His official bio describes him as "Australia's most famous ethical hacker."" Assange assisted in writing the book, Underground: Tales of hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier.

The founders were described as mostly Chinese dissidents, hackers, computer programmers and journalists. Early in the formation, the founders wrote to Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, saying, in an email released by John Young, We believe that injustice is answered by good governance and for there to be good governance there must be open governance," the email said. "New technology and cryptographic ideas permit us to not only encourage document leaking, but to facilitate it directly on a mass scale. We intend to place a new star in the political firmament of man." The email appealed to Ellsberg to be part of the "political-legal defences" the organisers recognised they would need once they started to get under the skin of governments, militaries and corporations: "We'd like … you to form part of our political armour. The more armour we have, particularly in the form of men and women sanctified by age, history and class, the more we can act like brazen young men and get away with it."

Chris McGreal, of the The Guardian, wrote "Assange, who describes what he does as a mix of hi-tech investigative journalism and advocacy, foresees a day when any confidential document, from secret orders that allow our own governments to spy on us down to the bossy letters from your children's school, will be posted on WikiLeaks for the whole world to see. And that, Assange believes, will change everything." But there are those who fear that WikiLeaks is more like an intelligence service than it would care to admit – a shadowy, unaccountable organisation that tramples on individual privacy and other rights. And like so many others who have claimed to be acting in the name of the people, there are those who fear it risks oppressing them.

Cryptome and John Young
McGreal reported that the organisers approached John Young, owner of the long-established leaked document site, Cryptome.org, and asked him to register the WikiLeaks website in his name. According to McGreal, "Young obliged and was initially an enthusiastic supporter but when the organisers announced their intention to try and raise $5m he questioned their motives, saying that kind of money could only come from the CIA or George Soros. Then he walked away. 'WikiLeaks is a fraud,' he wrote in an email when he quit. 'Fuck your cute hustle and disinformation campaign against legitimate dissent. Same old shit, working for the enemy.' Young then leaked all of his email correspondence with WikiLeak's founders, including the messages to Ellsberg."

Messages in the correspondence leaked by Young are headed, This is a restricted internal development mailinglist for w-i-k-i-l-e-a-k-s-.-o-r-g. Please do not mention that word directly in these discussions; refer instead to 'WL'. This list is housed at riseup.net, an activist collective in Seattle with an established lawyer and plenty of backbone.

Secrecy News and Steven Aftergood
Steven Aftergood, who publishes Secrecy News for the Federation of American Scientists, declined to join Wikileaks. Aftergood, who has chosen to withhold or redact certain documents based on what he considers legitimate reasons of public safety, told Wikileaks "we do not favor automated or indiscriminate publication of confidential records. In the absence of accountable editorial oversight, publication can more easily become an act of aggression or an incitement to violence, not to mention an invasion of privacy or an offense against good taste." They replied, "So we disagree on first principles? No problem, replied Wikileaks: “Advisory positions are just that — advisory! If you want to advise us to censor, then by all means do so.”

Jay Lim of Wikileaks sent an email of complaint to Aftergood, which he published on his blog. "Who’s side are you on here Stephen? It is time this constant harping stopped."

"You know full well if you make n comments about us and m negative ones about us it’ll only be the negative comment that is reported — since everyone else has only positive things to say and by your position at FAS there is an expectation of positive comment. You are not a child. As a result of your previous criticism it seem you are becoming the ‘go to’ man for negative comments on Wikileaks. Over the last year, our most quoted critic has not been a right wing radio host, it has not been the Chinese ambassador, it has not been Pentagon bureaucrats, it has been you Stephen. You are the number one public enemy of this project. On top of everything else, your quote is the only critical entry on our Wikipedia page. Some friend of openness!"

We are very disappointed in your lack of support and suggest you cool it. If you don’t, we will, with great reluctance, be forced to respond.”

After the large disclosures in 2010, Aftergood questioned the purpose of Wikileaks. He describes Wikleaks actions as symptomatic of problems with the U.S. classification system, but unfocused as far as real policy objectives. Aftergood does suggest, however, that Wikileaks grew in part from a reaction to a dysfunctional security classification system. "The Wikileaks project seems to be, more than anything else, an assault on secrecy. If Wikileaks were most concerned about whistleblowing, it would focus on revealing corruption. If it were concerned with historical truth, it would emphasize the discovery of verifiably true facts.  If it were anti-war, it would safeguard, not disrupt, the conduct of diplomatic communications.  But instead, what Wikileaks has done is to publish a vast potpourri of records — dazzling, revelatory, true, questionable, embarrassing, or routine — whose only common feature is that they are classified or otherwise restricted."

This may be understood as a reaction to a real problem, namely the fact that by all accounts, the scope of government secrecy in the U.S. (not to mention other countries) has exceeded rational boundaries. Disabling secrecy in the name of transparency would be a sensible goal — if it were true that all secrecy is wrong. But if there is a legitimate role for secrecy in military operations, in intelligence gathering or in diplomatic negotiations, as seems self-evident, then a different approach is called for.

U.S. government response
The U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Army confirmed, to the New York Times, that Wikileaks was considered a security threat. A classified report, "(U) Wikileaks.org—An Online Reference to Foreign Intelligence Services, Insurgents, or Terrorist Groups?" was produced by the Army Counterintelligence Center.

At Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald wrote that Wikileaks was targeted by the U.S. government, citing actions taken by Icelandic police against a leaker. The US Government does face hurdles in its prosecution of Wikileaks. Firstly, Wikileaks is rumored to be based in Sweden, which is outside of US jurisdiction. Additionally, the Supreme Court ruled in the Pentagon Papers case that the First Amendment protects publishing classified materials so long as the publisher did not steal the information. Steven Aftergood, however, says that Icelandic police differ with the Salon account. The Chief of Police in Reykjavik, Fridrik Smari Bjorgvinsson, Icelandic police have not been working with the American secret services on the matter, as Wikileaks spokesmen allege. The only connection he could find between the Wikileaks charges and his organization was the arrest of a 17 year-old in Kopavogur on Monday for breaking into a business premises. Wikileaks had called him an editor.

Initial disclosures of U.S. information
It published, in 2007, the U.S. operating procedures manual for the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

Even more publicized was the 2010 release of video from a U.S. attack helicopter firing on people on the ground, an incident in which two journalists were killed. Robert Gates, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, criticized Wikileaks for not providing context, saying "These people can put out anything they want, and they're never held accountable for it. There's no before and there's no after." Wikileaks countered his statement with an unsigned email saying "Classified records which we will shortly release show that there was a report of small arms fire at 9:50 a.m., somewhere in the suburb of New Baghdad, shooter and location UNIDENTIFIED. There is no reference to U.S. forces having been hit by the fire. The same records report that at 10:18, 28 minutes later, the crowd was seen and the killing commenced."

Large releases of documents
The large number of documents released in 2010 were provided by a person or persons with access to the military SIPRNET network. All of those viewed are marked with the label SIPDIS (SIPRNET Distribution).

Support
The strongly libertarian-Republican Rep. Ron Paul believes Assange should have at least the same protection as news media. He criticized fellow Republicans for calling for treason action against Assange, an Australian; treason is narrowly and precisely defined in the U.S. Constitution. Mike Huckabee had called for a treason prosecution, with execution if convicted. Paul said, "“In a free society we're supposed to know the truth.In a society where truth becomes treason, then we're in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it. Assange, who's an Australian, that we want to prosecute him for treason. I mean, aren't they jumping to a wild conclusion?  This is media, isn't it? I mean, why don't we prosecute The New York Times or anybody that releases this?”

Other responses
Washington Times columnist Jeffrey T. Kuhner called for Assange's assassination. He questioned the lack of strong response by the Obama Administration, and the failure to immediately court-martial Bradley Manning, implicated as Wikileaks' source from SIPRNET.

Attack and counterattack on the Web
Wikileaks Domain Name Service provider, EveryDNS.net has pulled support, although reports that Wikileaks has lost the domain name itself is incorrect. EveryDNS complained the attacks against Wikileaks were disrupting their entire service. As of 3 December, servers could still be addressed directly as if their IP addresses were known.

There had been an earlier denial of service attack, from an unconfirmed source possibly identified with a hacker's Twitter post. against Wikileaks' dedicated servers, and they had moved to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Infrastructure as a Service cloud computing environment. Amazon, however, dropped Wikileaks as a customer, saying When companies or people go about securing and storing large quantities of data that isn’t rightfully theirs, and publishing this data without ensuring it won’t injure others, it’s a violation of our terms of service, and folks need to go operate elsewhere. Wikileaks, on December 2, appears to be hosted on wedish ISP Bahnhof Internet and French ISP Ovh Systems.

While there have been reports of distributed denial of service attacks on Wikileaks' servers, technical details have not yet been available.

China, and some Arab countries, have blocked access to Wikileaks.

Legal actions
The intensity of U.S. government response has increased with the most recent releases, although it varies considerably among different officials. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, for example, calls it serious but not an existential threat. "Let me just offer some perspective as somebody who’s been at this a long time. Every other government in the world knows the United States government leaks like a sieve, and it has for a long time. And I dragged this up the other day when I was looking at some of these prospective releases. And this is a quote from John Adams: “How can a government go on, publishing all of their negotiations with foreign nations, I know not. To me, it appears as dangerous and pernicious as it is novel.'"

"Now, I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on. I think -- I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought. The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets."

Many governments -- some governments deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation. So other nations will continue to deal with us. They will continue to work with us. We will continue to share sensitive information with one another. Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest. In December 2010, the Swedish Supreme Court ruled that Assange, must appear before a magistrate in Stockholm to answer accusations of rape and sexual harassment brought by two Swedish women. Following the court's refusal to hear an appeal of the warrant, Swedish authorities said they were fine-tuning a "red notice" for Assange's arrest that is being relayed to member countries by Interpol, the international anti-crime cooperative." Police in Britain, where Assange is  located, had  "they could not act on the mandate without more specifics on the potential charges and the penalties Assange might face under Swedish law. " Sweden responded, on 3 December, with a new warrant.  Assange's attorney, Mark Stephens, called the entire process irregular.

Disclosures of non-U.S. information
One area of concern, with the disclosures, is of U.S. reporting on the actions of third countries, actions they had thought would be secret.

Lebanon and Hezbollah
While not part of the main disclosures, but release of unconfirmed State Department cables from 2008, published by the Arabic-language Lebanese newspaper al-Akhbar, a critic of U.S. influence in Lebanon, address tension between the U.S. backed government and the Hezbollah opposition. They show Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr promising "U.S. diplomats that the Lebanese army will not become involved in the event of an Israeli invasion of the country, because "this war is not with Lebanon, it is [with] Hezbollah." Murr, a Christian, also pleaded with U.S. diplomats to convince Israel to spare Christian areas of the country, limiting its attack to Shiite-majority regions." Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon's Druze community, has gone the farthest in publicly disavowing his former anti-Hezbollah positions -- but these documents show his highest lieutenants doing all they can to convince the United States to turn the screws on Hezbollah. In August 2008 -- notably, after the May violence and resulting power shift caused Jumblatt to disavow much of his anti-Syrian and anti-Hezbollah rhetoric -- one of his Druze allies, acting Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) commander Maj. Gen. Shawki al-Masri, made the case to U.S. officials that they should provide the LAF with attack helicopters. "We need this equipment to face this armed group Hizballah," he pleaded. "Else, we cannot face them." "

Going corporate
Assange has said That revealing various corporate secrets is next on the Wikileaks agenda. Some articles claim that Bank of America will be the next target.