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US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks - David Guyatt - 13-01-2011
It's probably boringly obvious, but I think it more than likely that the war powers act (or whatever it is called?) was signed on 911 and that the Constitution and normal civilian law is suspended - and that this has not been made public.
It's the "War on Terror".
US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks - Ed Jewett - 14-01-2011
David Guyatt Wrote:It's probably boringly obvious, but I think it more than likely that the war powers act (or whatever it is called?) was signed on 911 and that the Constitution and normal civilian law is suspended - and that this has not been made public.
It's the "War on Terror".
Well, unfortunately, it's not boringly obvious to most Americans, or the mainstream press, though Peter Dale Scott, David Ray Griffin, and others have all written about this at length. The White House renews the proper Presidential directive annually keeping a "state of emergency" intact and thus enabling all sorts of other directives tucked away in a drawer somewhere in DC awaiting a POTUSian scrawl in ink and their publication in the Register to make them unassailable law for at least six months.
US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks - Peter Lemkin - 14-01-2011
David Guyatt Wrote:It's probably boringly obvious, but I think it more than likely that the war powers act (or whatever it is called?) was signed on 911 and that the Constitution and normal civilian law is suspended - and that this has not been made public.
It's the "War on Terror".
Yes, to you and I and most who are regulars here, as Ed points out to the vast majority of Americans it is not only unlikely and unthinable, but impossible....you have to understand that most Americans believe [magically or religiously] that America simply can NOT do such evil and wrong things. Period. No thinking or reading about it necessary. To them this is as immutable a fact as that the sun will rise tomorrow in the East. That is our main obstacle in America. IMO
US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks - Peter Lemkin - 14-01-2011
Freedom Assn.: "The European Arrest Warrant is a Sinister Threat to Civil Rights"
12th January 2011
" … The Freedom Association submitted a brief to the Joint Committee on Human Rights … in which they said that the EAW was put into place hastily in response to the September 11th attacks in the U.S. As such, its human and civil rights implications were never thought through by legislators who voted for it, they said. … An EAW can be issued by any government to any other in the EU and local police are obliged to arrest the suspect without any evidence of a crime having been committed being presented. … "
By Hilary White
LifeSiteNews | January 6, 2011
LONDON, January 6, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) One of the least talked-about of the European Union's agreements could also be the biggest threat to civil rights, a leading British civil rights watchdog group has said. According to a report by the Freedom Association, the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) is a direct threat to civil rights of EU citizens who can be arrested and extradited automatically, without notice and without evidence presented as to their guilt.
The European Arrest Warrant provisions came into effect in British law in January 2004 and some civil rights watchers continue to warn that they can be used to silence political dissent or to prosecute "thought crimes" such as "racism or xenophobia."
The Freedom Association submitted a brief to the Joint Committee on Human Rights that is currently sitting to discuss UK extradition policy, in which they said that the EAW was put into place hastily in response to the September 11th attacks in the U.S. As such, its human and civil rights implications were never thought through by legislators who voted for it, they said.
"Whilst our extradition treaty with the USA captures all the headlines, it is through the European Arrest Warrant that the vast majority of UK citizens are extradited," the group said. Between 2003 and 2009, 69 British citizens were extradited to the U.S., while in a single year, 2009-10, 699 people were extradited to other EU member states under the EAW.
The Freedom Association brief warns that such "purely subjective" offenses have "encouraged governments across the EU to shut down freedom of speech, which also means freedom to offend." The group warns that under its provisions, people can be extradited for "careless remarks in the heat of an argument."
"It plays into the hands of those who will use political correctness to stifle freedom of speech."
They pointed out the wide disparity of criminal offenses between member states. They gave the examples of possession of cannabis and the production of pornography, which are legal in the Netherlands, euthanasia, which is legal in Belgium, and abortion, which is illegal in Poland.
An EAW can be issued by any government to any other in the EU and local police are obliged to arrest the suspect without any evidence of a crime having been committed being presented. A local judge is then allowed to assess the case according to a narrow set of guidelines but is also not presented with any evidence against the suspect.
Citizens can be arrested and extradited for crimes they did not know they had committed, or for relatively minor offenses such as leaving a petrol station without paying or for administrative errors at border crossings. They can also be extradited, after being tried and found guilty in absentia, to serve custodial sentences.
Those detained can spend long periods in jail before facing charges, sometimes weeks or even months, for crimes which might not even have been prosecuted in Britain or even for offences which are not crimes in Britain at all. Other governments, such as Ireland and France, have either refused outright to go along with the EAW provisions, or have implemented safeguards for citizens. Not so the UK.
The Freedom Association said that the situation has recently become even worse with the adoption by the government of the European Investigation Order, which allows foreign police forces to order British forces to gather evidence, including bank statements, on UK citizens.
The first duty of a state, the group said, is to "protect its citizens, ensure a fair trial and ensure habeas corpus," the legal provision that prevents unlawful detainment.
"Like any tool of power to control citizens, national governments seem keen to use [the EAW]," the report said.
11,000 EAWs were issued in 2007, up from 6,900 in 2005. The figures show that there have been more warrants issued against UK citizens than any other EU state, due, the group says, to the reputation of British judges for lack of diligence in applying existing grounds for refusal.
"Thus, not only has the UK implemented an extradition treaty, due to its membership of the EU, which has lowered extradition safeguards, but they have also suffered most under that law."
David Blunkett, the Labour government's Home Secretary when the legislation was adopted, admitted that he did not realize at the time the vast scope of the EAW or the problems it would cause. Blunkett insisted in an interview in August that he was "right" to have adopted the legislation, but said that he had been "insufficiently sensitive" about how they could be "overused."
Nick Hallett, writing on the website of the UK Independence Party, said that few realize just what a "sinister piece of legislation" the EAW truly is. Hallett cited the case of Dr. Gerald Fredrick Toben, a German-born Australian citizen who is known for his anti-Semitism and revisionist historical writing denying the Holocaust.
German law makes Holocaust denial a crime, but it is legal in both Australia and Britain. Nevertheless, under the conditions of the EAW, Toben was arrested in 2008 at Heathrow airport while en route from the U.S. to Dubai. At that time, the three charges of racism, xenophobia and cybercrime, which were not crimes in Britain, were found by a British judge to be insufficient grounds for extradition.
German authorities argued that Toben's comments were available to be read in Germany, and therefore had been "published" in Germany.
Hallett commented, "So a man who wrote something that was not illegal in the country where it was written was arrested by another country where it was not illegal at the behest of a totally separate foreign nation."
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/few-understand-how-sinister-european-arrest-warrant-really-is-freedom-assoc/
Original headline: "Few understand how sinister' Eu
US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks - Peter Presland - 14-01-2011
Further to this yesterday:
Peter Presland Wrote:After more than a week with no new releases the WL Central blog reported there were more about to be released and an hour or so later we had a 'Cablegate' site update with about 60 new cables with release dates up to and including today (13 Jan).
However, the latest torrent files don't link to any parts of the file. Neither does the 'download full-site archive' link work.
I have had the Magnet url of the latest Torrent in my Torrent client since this morning. It reports between 15 and 20 peers connected to the tracker but there is nothing to download, which can only mean that the original file release has not been downloaded by anyone out side Wikileaks yet - or if it has those who have downloaded it, immediately stopped seeding it - a highly unlikely scenario. I've downloaded all of these since the releases started and it has never taken longer than about 5 minutes.
It's odd.
24 hours on and still there are no files available for the torrents posted on the Wikileaks site 2 days ago. Neither do the 'download full site archive' or IRC links produce anything but a 'Sorry' page.
And no word about it on the WL Central blog either.
That means there have been no updates to any of the mirror sites - including the Wikispooks one - for the last 60 or so cable releases.
This gets odder. I sense that there's a LOT going on out of sight. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the SIS's turn out to be getting close to full control.
US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks - Peter Lemkin - 15-01-2011
2011-01-15 Julian Assange & Mens Rea, Sweden & Doli Incapax: Extradition Part 4
Submitted by Peter Kemp on Sat, 01/15/2011 - 11:36
We are indebted to Julian Assange who apparently instructed his counsel to make available the "Skeleton Argument" for the extradition hearing proper.
It was expected, per my previous post Extradition Part 3 that the issue of extradition (and arrest) for the purposes of investigation only, would be a highly significant issue for the extradition arguments, and so it was.
One part of that document however that shocked me, that I have discussed with colleagues (likewise shocked) was paragraph 88, the legal implications of which I was unaware. It now seems that some (or indeed all?) of the prospective charges of a sexual nature in Sweden do not have as a required element that the prosecution must prove (for a conviction to be sustained) the element of mens rea, the "guilty mind" otherwise known as the fault element.
I have not found the relevant Swedish law and even if I did, the Google translator would not do it justice, so to speak. In the meantime I have no reason to doubt the lack of mens rea in Swedish sexual offences law per the Skeleton Argument.
Fault elements, while they can be inferred from the circumstances, range for example, from explicit clear knowledge of wrongdoing to recklessness, but as a general principle of criminal law, with exceptions and modifications of course, criminal justice systems require that not only the unlawful conduct be proven, but that the element of knowing that it was wrong needs also to be proven.
Paragraph 88 of the Skeleton Argument reads:
Mr. Assange reserves the right to argue that his extradition is barred by reason of extraneous considerations, namely that the EAW has been issued against him for the purposes of prosecuting or punishing him for his political opinions (limb (a)) and/or that he will be prejudiced at trial, etc., by reason of those opinions (limb (b)), or by reason of his gender as a result of the 2005 amendments to the sexual offences laws in Sweden which deny to men the protection of mens rea.
The latter point will also be made in respect of the "extradition offence" issue (see earlier), in that these gender amendments preclude any assumption that the Swedish offence contains the requisite element of mens rea.
Wipedia gives a good account of mens rea: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea meaning that the act alone is not sufficient, the mind also must be guilty, which is a questioning into the subjective mind of the accused.
At the opposite end, as opposed to the mens rea element, there are strict liability laws such as parking laws. Irrespective of state of the mind of the parking perpetrator, whether the coin meter is jammed; the power to the meter went off; you were having a baby in the car park and ran out of coins; even a life or death situation such as an earthquake: the "brown bombers" we well know are without mercy and will go the last mile to get you.
Nothing will save us from liability of the Scourge of the Streets, the Mania of local authority Mafia for a quick dollar: the ubiquitous, universally hated parking meters and their attendants.
Swedish law thus moves in the direction of a strict liability regime, with a prosecutor not entirely unlike a parking meter attendant, recently convicted of speeding, lacking in the finer points of persuadeability, ticketing a British judge in a car park outside the Old Bailey.
Conduct:
We can assume then that Swedish law has conduct alone as the necessary element which if proven establishes guilt, and that lack of consent is built into the conduct element.
Consent:
Looking at consent issues for the moment:
The NSW Crimes Act, for example, on knowledge of consent to sexual intercourse states:
61HA(3) Knowledge about consent. A person who has sexual intercourse with another person without the consent of the other person knows that the other person does not consent to the sexual intercourse if:
(a) the person knows that the other person does not consent to the sexual intercourse, or
(b) the person is reckless as to whether the other person consents to the sexual intercourse, or
© the person has no reasonable grounds for believing that the other person consents to the sexual intercourse.
This knowledge as it pertains to guilt or knowledge of wrongdoing, (or the opposite) is subjective, but can have external proofs, like a witness or a camera.
Juries are asked in the case of recklessness, in effect, not to apply an objective test but to focus on the mind of the accused. (R v O'Meager (1997) 101 A Crim R 196)
Apparently this is all of little to no account under Swedish law.
Instead of proving the guilty mind, a Swedish prosecution of sexual offences will ignore any reasonably held belief that the accused had as to consent, or even as to the belief and the "absolutely not guilty mind" of explicit consent: The State will instead impose an evidentiary test based on the accusation and evidence of conduct without a subjective element at all.
The state of mind of the accused, that he was innocent, along with the close corollary of belief of full consent, is no longer relevant.
(When one thinks of that at the "subjective" level, it's a corollary of sorts, perhaps it's more accurate to describe it as synonymous, but it's difficult to separate the two. In the case of sexual assault, the subjective mind knowing of consent has it it practically indistinguisable from innocence. Conversely lack of consent and guilt.)
Such a non subjective regime fits in rather well with Claes Borgstrom's statement not so long ago, "They are not jurists"
The only realistic interpretation of that is that Mr Borgstrom is saying (and I stress, not the alleged victims) that the women had difficulty in knowing, or don't know whether or not they consented. An odd circumstance to say the least, and counter intuitive.
The Swedish Prosecution, with guidance apparently from that same political figure, will decide when the alleged victims are not sure, to lay a charge, and so we see law becoming subverted by a new policy, a new politics of gender.
For sexual assault in Sweden, an indictment would read in effect something like this, ie NSW law without a mental element:
That the accused, Joe Bloggs on 3rd March 2010 at Euroville in the State of Sweden did have sexual intercourse with Heidi X without the consent of of Heidi X
.
The last bit, what we have in common law nations is the bit related to the mental element: "knowing she did not consent" is left out and irrelevant to the elements required in Sweden.
The Swedish elements required would therefore be:
1) The accused had sexual intercourse with the victim
2) The sexual intercourse occurred without the consent of the victim.
In such a regime there would be only one defence (that I can think of) and that would be for the accused to prove his innocence, and the only way to do that effectively would be to video record with audio, any and all acts of sexual intercourse.
Defence evidence otherwise by way of protestations of consent as a defence, and evidence of the subjective mind of an innocent accused, (not reckless, most reasonably believing there was consent), is of little to no account, or at best, having eliminated the subjective mens rea, an objective test is applied by the tribunal of fact, which asks, "Irrelevant to the mind of the accused, was consent given by our objective standards?"
That has to be the legal result of eliminating mens rea.
Imagine such an objective test in the hands of Mr Claes Borgstrom on the bench at trial, given the brand of gender politics that he espouses?
It's hard not to say that my advice to all men in Sweden (which I don't give incidently) is to video record all acts of sexual intercourse.
Proving one's innocence of course reverses the onus of proof contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights, Article 6, but that is the practical effect of eliminating mens rea as a required provable element of crime in Sweden.
That's what I would be arguing at Assange's extradition hearing, that if indeed the test for consent is objective and the subjective mens rea element is removed, the effect is to reverse the onus of proof, contrary to human rights law.
Most are familiar with the legal concept that a child under 10 cannot be held criminally liable--Australia and the UK among others. The principle in Latin, Doli Incapax (not to be confused with Australia's former foreign minister Dolli Downer) is a rebuttable presumption of no liability (the situation in Australia, not the UK due to amendments) for children aged 10 to 14.
Sexual offences against children under 14 has lack of consent, and knowing of that, (a mental element on the part of the accused), a complete, irrelevant, non issue.
And that is so redolent of the Swedish regime, apparently: when it comes to consent as a defence, when the alleged victim is perhaps not sure of it, Sweden's legal regime may decide, as a matter of apparent gender policy, in effect, that the victim is not only innocent like a child, but is doli incapax incapable of giving that consent as a defence for the accused.
I don't think Swedish women should be treated as doli incapax, but I'm beginning to think the Swedish legal system should be.
US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks - David Guyatt - 15-01-2011
Mean rea is a central article of western justice and law.
Almost anyone can be guilty of breaking al law without even being aware that they are doing so. There are just too many old, obscure and mostly unused laws that the public couldn't possibly be expected to know existed.
The absence of mens rea clearly defines the absence of justice as it relates to the law.
We are back in the middle ages where when the Church spoke, one was guilty, and the only thing left to determine was what punishment fitted the crime --- and that very often was based on the whim of the presiding red hat.
US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks - Peter Lemkin - 15-01-2011
David Guyatt Wrote:Mean rea is a central article of western justice and law.
Almost anyone can be guilty of breaking al law without even being aware that they are doing so. There are just too many old, obscure and mostly unused laws that the public couldn't possibly be expected to know existed.
The absence of mens rea clearly defines the absence of justice as it relates to the law.
We are back in the middle ages where when the Church spoke, one was guilty, and the only thing left to determine was what punishment fitted the crime --- and that very often was based on the whim of the presiding red hat.
Ah, we are almost back to the good old days of 'trial by ordeal'!!!!! Now there is justice! So, Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition skits were quite timely.....
...welcome to the PAST!
US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks - Magda Hassan - 20-01-2011
Wikileaks May Have Exploited Music, Photo Networks to Get Data
By Michael Riley - Thu Jan 20 05:00:00 GMT 2011
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange attends a press conference at the Frontline club in London, on Jan. 17, 2011. Photographer: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images
WikiLeaks, condemned by the U.S. government for posting secret data leaked by insiders, may have used music- and photo-sharing networks to obtain and publish classified documents, according to a computer security firm.
Tiversa Inc., a company based in Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania, has evidence that WikiLeaks, which has said it doesn't know who provides it with information, may seek out secret data itself, using so-called "peer-to-peer" networks, Chief Executive Officer Robert Boback claimed. He said the government is examining evidence that Tiversa has turned over.
The company, which has done investigative searches on behalf of U.S. agencies including the FBI, said it discovered that computers in Sweden were trolling through hard drives accessed from popular peer-to-peer networks such as LimeWire and Kazaa. The same information obtained in those searches later appeared on WikiLeaks, Boback said. WikiLeaks bases its most important servers in Sweden.
"WikiLeaks is doing searches themselves on file-sharing networks," Boback said in an interview, summing up his firm's deductions from the search evidence it gathered. "It would be highly unlikely that someone else from Sweden is issuing those same types of searches resulting in that same type of information."
Completely False'
Tiversa's claim is "completely false in every regard," said Mark Stephens, WikiLeaks' London attorney, in an e-mail. Stephens regularly represents media organizations, including Bloomberg News.
Tiversa declined to say who its client was when it noticed the Swedish downloads. Howard Schmidt, a former Tiversa adviser, is cybersecurity coordinator and special assistant to U.S. President Barack Obama.
Tiversa researchers said the data-mining operation in Sweden is both systematic and highly successful.
In a 60-minute period on Feb. 7, 2009, using so-called Internet protocol addresses that every computer, server or similar equipment has, Tiversa's monitors detected four Swedish computers engaged in searching and downloading information on peer-to-peer networks. The four computers issued 413 searches, crafted to find Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and other information-rich documents among some of the 18 million users the company estimates are on such file-sharing networks at any given moment.
Those searches led to a computer in Hawaii that held a survey of the Pentagon's Pacific Missile Range Facility in that state. Tiversa captured the download of the PDF file by one of the Swedish computers. The document was renamed and posted on the WikiLeaks website two months later, on April 29, 2009, according to a mirror image of the site.
Navy Systems
A product of the U.S. Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, the document exposed sensitive details of infrastructure changes for outfitting the base with a new sensor system. The mirror site said only that the file "was first publicly revealed by WikiLeaks working with our source."
Boback said the retrieval and posting follows a pattern his researchers have tracked over and over. They estimate that as much as half of the postings by the group could originate from information siphoned from peer-to-peer users, he said.
"There are not that many whistleblowers in the world to get you millions of documents," Boback said. "However, if you are getting them yourselves, that information is out there and available."
Tiversa provided its findings to U.S. agencies to aid what Boback called the early stages of an investigation into the matter. A separate criminal probe is being conducted by a U.S. grand jury in Virginia regarding tens of thousands of diplomatic cables and other secret material allegedly provided by U.S. Army private Bradley Manning, Stephens said in December.
Swedish Allegations
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is in the U.K. fighting extradition to Sweden, where he faces allegations of sexual molestation and rape. Lawyers for Assange have said the accusations in Sweden are politically motivated and tied to the actions of WikiLeaks.
The U.S. Justice Department declined to comment on whether there was an official investigation regarding the downloads Tiversa concluded were done by WikiLeaks, said Dean Boyd, a spokesman.
Lime Group, which owns the rights to LimeWire software, shut its operations in December and an e-mail to Tiffany Guarnaccia, a spokeswoman, couldn't be delivered. The network can be used by anyone who previously downloaded the software, peer-to-peer experts said. Sharman Networks, which owns Kazaa, referred inquiries to ICON Communications in Sydney, Australia, which didn't return e-mails seeking comment.
U.S. Probes
The U.S. investigations could provide authorities an alternate path for prosecuting WikiLeaks and Assange, said Paul Ohm, an expert in cyber crime at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Boback, whose firm has made such searches for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service to trace unauthorized downloads, argued that such conduct is just information scavenging, not illegal hacking.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn Warma in Seattle, who successfully prosecuted similar cases of unintended searching, said the systematic pillaging of computer contents through peer- to-peer networks could be pursued under federal anti-hacking statutes.
Even if not criminal, such conduct, if traced to WikiLeaks, would contradict its stated mission as a facilitator of leaked material by insiders, whose identities, Assange has said, the group takes measures not to know. The group provides an encrypted drop box on its website that it said prevents any tracing back to the source of documents.
Receptacle for Leaks
"If their information gathering doesn't consist simply of being a receptacle for leaks but of this more aggressive effort to go out and cull this information, then you're moving a clear step further from anything that resembles traditional journalistic practice," said Mark Jurkowitz, the associate director for the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The evidence could also be used by congressional committees, which Boback said are pursuing a separate inquiry to undermine WikiLeaks' claim that it's a legitimate media organization with protections under the First Amendment.
"There is a difference between being given information that may have been obtained in violation of some agreement or law versus the media itself violating the law or an agreement in order to obtain information," said Sandra Baron, the executive director of the Media Law Resource Center in New York. "The media is not allowed to steal."
Thousands of Documents
The WikiLeaks site has posted hundreds of thousands of documents in the past four years. With the exception of classified material allegedly provided by Manning, the source of its leaked documents has never been publicly identified.
On Jan. 17, a former Swiss banker, Rudolf Elmer, turned over information to Assange on almost 2,000 account holders Elmer claims are guilty of tax evasion and other crimes. The data has yet to be published by WikiLeaks.
Assange based the group's primary servers in Sweden because of the strength of that country's media laws, which prohibit authorities from inquiring about journalistic sources, he has said. The group said in 2010 that the Swedish Pirate Party, which aims to reform copyright law and ensure citizens' right to privacy, would host some of the group's servers as well.
Assange has told interviewers he aims to make leaks untraceable to avoid retaliation against providers by governments or others harmed by the information.
Sourcing Information
"We cannot comply with requests for information on sources because we simply do not have the information to begin with," WikiLeaks has said on its website.
The vulnerability of vast amounts of confidential and secret information on peer-to-peer networks is a risk well-known to researchers and security experts, as well as to information scavengers and foreign intelligence agencies, according to Eric Johnson, an expert on peer-to-peer technology at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business in Hanover, New Hampshire.
The networks are popular with U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, who use them to download music and videos, as do teenagers who sometimes download material on their parents' computers, Johnson said. A Congressional subcommittee held hearings in 2007 and 2009 on inadvertent sharing on such sites.
In 2009, Tiversa found the entire blueprints and avionics package for Marine One, the presidential helicopter, on a computer linked to Iran, according to Boback's 2009 testimony at the hearings. His firm also found a leak of a file of a LimeWire user that showed the safe-house location of the president's family.
Terrorism Targets
In late 2009, WikiLeaks published a spreadsheet detailing vulnerable, potential terrorist targets in Fresno County compiled by State of California security officials and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. It noted locations for caches of bomb-grade fertilizers; the location of large gasoline and propane reserves; and the coordinates of key military and law enforcement sites and their functions.
Asked to aid in the investigation of the leak by U.S. authorities that the company declined to identify, Tiversa found the spreadsheet was inadvertently exposed by a California state employee using a peer-to-peer network in August 2008, more than a year before WikiLeaks posted it.
A WikiLeaks post of Army intelligence documents in 2009 included reports on Taliban leaders and their movements, as well as confidential notes of meetings where complaints were voiced about the performance of Iraqi police. Those documents were exposed to unauthorized searching on peer-to-peer networks more than eight months earlier in September 2008, Tiversa investigators found after they were asked to investigate the matter by a client the company declined to identify.
Order of Battle
The Pentagon's 58-page Afghanistan Order of Battle was exposed in a file-sharing network in January 2009 and posted on WikiLeaks four months later. For a downloaded list of every Chevron Corp. property in the U.S. and Canada, the posting gap was two months -- from March to May 2009, the firm found.
Confidential documents can be mined from peer-to-peer networks using malicious software that sucks out information unrelated to the song, photo or other material users want to share. In most cases, Johnson said all that is needed is weak security settings or user mistakes that allow searchers to dig into the computers of users who don't realize that confidential files on their hard drives can be tapped.
Congressional Legislation
The U.S. House of Representatives last year approved a bill that would prohibit peer-to-peer file sharing software on any U.S. government computer.
If federal prosecutors can definitely link the theft of confidential information directly to WikiLeaks and its core of paid staffers and volunteers, they would still face significant challenges. The legal tools available to them for a criminal prosecution aren't firmly tested, according to lawyers and peer- to-peer experts.
"It's not a slam dunk either way" said Ohm, a former Justice Department prosecutor.
In 2008, a federal court in Oklahoma found that removing pornographic pictures from a computer by an FBI agent using LimeWire didn't constitute an illegal search. In contrast, Warma successfully prosecuted two Seattle cases recently involving individuals who retrieved financial information through LimeWire "in excess of authorization." Warma said retrieving confidential information through peer-to-peer networks could be prosecuted under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
"I can almost guarantee you there is a task force at the Department of Justice that's been tasked with creatively coming up with theories to use against WikiLeaks," Ohm said. "I'm sure that in those conversations the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act has come across the board, especially with this new twist of peer-to-peer networks."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-20/wikileaks-may-have-exploited-music-photo-networks-to-get-classified-data.html
US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks - David Guyatt - 20-01-2011
Sounds to me to be an obvious ploy on the part of the US government to get Assange extradited to the US on espionage charges.