US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks

[Peter Lemkin]

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(U) Executive Summary
(S//NF) Wikileaks.org, a publicly accessible Internet Web site, represents a potential force
protection, counterintelligence, operational security (OPSEC), and information security
(INFOSEC) threat to the US Army. The intentional or unintentional leaking and posting of US
Army sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org could result in increased threats to
DoD personnel, equipment, facilities, or installations. The leakage of sensitive and classified
DoD information also calls attention to the insider threat, when a person or persons motivated by
a particular cause or issue wittingly provides information to domestic or foreign personnel or
organizations to be published by the news media or on the Internet. Such information could be of
value to foreign intelligence and security services (FISS), foreign military forces, foreign
insurgents, and foreign terrorist groups for collecting information or for planning attacks against
US force, both within the United States and abroad.
(S//NF) The possibility that a current employee or mole within DoD or elsewhere in the US
government is providing sensitive information or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot
be ruled out. Wikileaks.org claims that the ―leakers‖ or ―whistleblowers‖ of sensitive or
classified DoD documents are former US government employees. These claims are highly
suspect, however, since Wikileaks.org states that the anonymity and protection of the leakers or
whistleblowers is one of its primary goals. Referencing of leakers using codenames and
providing incorrect employment information, employment status, and other contradictory
information by Wikileaks.org are most likely rudimentary OPSEC measures designed to protect
the identity of the current or former insiders who leaked the information. On the other hand, one
cannot rule out the possibility that some of the contradictions in describing leakers could be
inadvertent OPSEC errors by the authors, contributors, or Wikileaks.org staff personnel with
limited experience in protecting the identity of their sources.
(U) The stated intent of the Wikileaks.org Web site is to expose unethical practices, illegal
behavior, and wrongdoing within corrupt corporations and oppressive regimes in Asia, the
former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East. To do so, the developers of the
Wikileaks.org Web site want to provide a secure forum to where leakers, contributors, or
whistleblowers from any country can anonymously post or send documentation and other
information that exposes corruption or wrongdoing by governments or corporations. The
developers believe that the disclosure of sensitive or classified information involving a foreign
government or corporation will eventually result in the increased accountability of a democratic,
oppressive, or corrupt the government to its citizens.[2]
(S//NF) Anyone can post information to the Wikileaks.org Web site, and there is no editorial
review or oversight to verify the accuracy of any information posted to the Web site. Persons
accessing the Web site can form their own opinions regarding the accuracy of the information
posted, and they are allowed to post comments. This raises the possibility that the Wikileaks.org
Web site could be used to post fabricated information; to post misinformation, disinformation,
and propaganda; or to conduct perception management and influence operations designed to
convey a negative message to those who view or retrieve information from the Web site.[3]
http://wikileaks.org/file/us-intel-wikileaks.pdf
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(U) Diverse views exist among private persons, legal experts, advocates for open government
and accountability, law enforcement, and government officials in the United States and other
countries on the stated goals of Wikileaks.org. Some contend that the leaking and posting of
information on Wikileaks.org is constitutionally protected free speech, supports open society and
open government initiatives, and serves the greater public good in such a manner that outweighs
any illegal acts that arise from the posting of sensitive or classified government or business
information. Others believe that the Web site or persons associated with Wikileaks.org will face
legal challenges in some countries over privacy issues, revealing sensitive or classified
government information, or civil lawsuits for posting information that is wrong, false,
slanderous, libelous, or malicious in nature. For example, the Wikileaks.org Web site in the
United States was shutdown on 14 February 2008 for 2 weeks by court order over the publishing
of sensitive documents in a case involving charges of money laundering, grand larceny, and tax
evasion by the Julius Bare Bank in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland. The court case against
Wikileaks.org was dropped by Julius Bare Bank, the US court order was lifted and the Web site
was restored in the United States. Efforts by some domestic and foreign personnel and
organizations to discredit the Wikileaks.org Web site include allegations that it wittingly allows
the posting of uncorroborated information, serves as an instrument of propaganda, and is a front
organization of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).[4]
(S//NF) The governments of China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Thailand, Zimbabwe, and
several other countries have blocked access to Wikileaks.org-type Web sites, claimed they have
the right to investigate and prosecute Wikileaks.org and associated whistleblowers, or insisted
they remove false, sensitive, or classified government information, propaganda, or malicious
content from the Internet. The governments of China, Israel, and Russia claim the right to
remove objectionable content from, block access to, and investigate crimes related to the posting
of documents or comments to Web sites such as Wikileaks.org. The governments of these
countries most likely have the technical skills to take such action should they choose to do so.[5]
(S//NF) Wikileaks.org uses trust as a center of gravity by assuring insiders, leakers, and
whistleblowers who pass information to Wikileaks.org personnel or who post information to the
Web site that they will remain anonymous. The identification, exposure, or termination of
employment of or legal actions against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers
could damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others from using Wikileaks.org to make
such information public.
[Back to Table of Contents]
(U) Key Judgments
(S//NF) Wikileaks.org represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence,
OPSEC, and INFOSEC threat to the US Army.
(S//NF) Recent unauthorized release of DoD sensitive and classified documents provide
FISS, foreign terrorist groups, insurgents, and other foreign adversaries with potentially
actionable information for targeting US forces.
(S//NF) The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the
US government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot
http://wikileaks.org/file/us-intel-wikileaks.pdf
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be ruled out. The claim made by Wikileaks.org that former US government employees
leaked sensitive and classified information is highly suspect, however, since
Wikileaks.org states that the anonymity of the whistleblowers or leakers is one of its
primary goals.
(U//FOUO) The Wikileaks.org Web site could be used to post fabricated information,
misinformation, disinformation, or propaganda and could be used in perception
management and influence operations to convey a positive or negative message to
specific target audiences that view or retrieve information from the Web site.
(U//FOUO) Several countries have blocked access to the Wikileaks.org Web site and
claim the right to investigate and prosecute Wikileaks.org members and whistleblowers
or to block access to or remove false, sensitive, or classified government information,
propaganda, or other malicious content from the Internet.
(U//FOUO) Wikileaks.org most likely has other DoD sensitive and classified information
in its possession and will continue to post the information to the Wikileaks.org Web site.
(U//FOUO) Web sites such as Wikileaks.org use trust as a center of gravity by protecting
the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers. The identification,
exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current
or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this
center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the
Wikileaks.org Web site.

[Magda Hassan]

WikiLeaks and the Iran-AQ Connection


Posted By Marc Lynch Tuesday, July 27, 2010 - 2:25 PM [/url]



Most of the response to the WikiLeaks Afghanistan document release thus far has focused on the [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/opinion/27exum.html?ref=opinion]absence of major revelations, with most of the details reinforcing existing analysis rather than undermining official discourse about the war. A similar response is appropriate to a story making the rounds that the documents bolster the case for significant connections between Iran and al-Qaeda. Information in the documents, according to the Wall Street Journal, "appear to give new evidence of direct contacts between Iranian officials and the Taliban's and al Qaeda's senior leadership." What's more important in these stories than the details found in the documents about Iran's activities in Afghanistan is the attempt to spin them into a narrative of "Iranian ties to al-Qaeda" to bolster the weak case for an American attack on Iran.

There's no secret about Iran's role in Afghanistan, of course -- this has long been a staple of the debate over Afghan policy, and has also long been pointed out as an area of potential cooperation or conflict between Washington and Tehran. As with much of the rest of the WikiLeaks documents, much of what has been found about Iran's role in Afghanistan is already generally known, while other information in them is of dubious provenance. It's not like we didn't know about Iran and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. These new details do add to the case for taking Iran into account more effectively when designing Afghanistan policy, on both the military and political dimensions. But they don't add up to some kind of smoking gun demonstrating an Iranian alliance with al-Qaeda.
This use of the WikiLeaks documents brings back some old memories, of a long time ago (March 2006) in a galaxy far far away when the Pentagon posted a massive set of captured Iraqi documents on the internet without context. Analysts dived into them, mostly searching for a smoking gun on Iraqi WMD or ties to al-Qaeda. The right-wing blogs and magazines ran with a series of breathless announcements that something had been found proving one case or another. Each finding would dissolve when put into context or subjected to scrutiny, and at the end it only further confirmed the consensus (outside of the fever swamps, at least) that there had been no significant ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda. But the cumulative effect of each "revelation", even if subsequently discredited, probably fueled the conviction that such ties had existed and did help maintain support for the Iraq war among the faithful. The parallel isn't exact -- in this case, there actually is something real there, and these documents were released against the government's will -- but it does raise some flags about how such documents can be used and misused in the public debate.
That experience is something to remember when an "Iranian ties to al-Qaeda" claim, loosely backed by reference to these documents, enters into the argument to attack Iran which I expect to heat up in the coming few months. It would be irresponsible and misleading to use of the documents to bolster the weak case for war with Iran by raising the specter of "ties to al-Qaeda". But then, the agitation to attack Iran is already following the Iraq script so faithfully that it really only seems natural that we'd get some questionable or exaggerated reports about Iranian ties to al-Qaeda to complete the loop. The tragedy may not yet be over, but farce is impatiently waiting in the wings.

http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/201...connection

[Ed Jewett]

The Political Spinning of the WikiLeaks Release: Anti-war Whistleblowing or War Propaganda

by Larry Chin

Global Research, July 30, 2010

Since the release of classified US military papers by WikiLeaks, the material has been aggressively spun by various political factions. Meanwhile, virtually no attention has been devoted to investigating the source of this “leak”, or questioning the agenda behind it.

According to the Associated Press, a US official who spoke on condition of anonymity stated that the US government is not certain who “leaked” the 91,000 documents to the online whistle blowing web site.

Unlike a previous WikiLeak exposing the murder of Iraqi civilians in a US airstrike, , nobody has been apprehended, arrested or pressured by the Pentagon, the CIA or any US agency.

The White House has expressed no intense concern. It did not block the release or deny the material. Government officials, led by President Obama, have almost casually dismissed the expose as nothing new.

The major mainstream newspapers that had full early access to the material---The New York Times, Der Spiegel and the Guardian---also had ample time to frame and steer the discourse surrounding it, and (particularly in the case of the White House-friendly New York Times) conduct damage control.

Leak as anti-war fodder

The new material obviously adds to what is already known for years: US forces are mired in a dirty and horrific war, and committing atrocities and war crimes. Corruption is rampant, allies are despicable and untrustworthy, and there appears no end in sight.

For critics of US policy, the expose reinforces their tired call for the war to end. However, the value of these particular papers (in terms of turning public opinion against the war) is questionable. This is not a potent high-level Pentagon Papers-type leak, and today’s society is a far cry from the 1970s.

Today’s acquiescent, ignorant and grossly manipulated mass populace---one that fully embraces and supports the manufactured “war on terrorism”---wholeheartedly supports any and all means to “prevent another 9/11”. A decade of Bush-Cheney criminality and mass murder failed to trigger any interest from a general US population that has been shocked into servitude, and further brain-addled by ubiquitous corporate right-wing media. Another day, another massacre.

Leak as imperial war propaganda

Where the WikiLeaks papers gain significance is in the detail revealed about the operations of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) and, more specifically, the manner in which leading government figures and the media have interpreted these items.

The ISI is being accused of “undercutting” US operations, “conspiring with’ and aiding the “powerfully resurgent” Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, aiding the killing of US forces, and organizing “networks of militants” across the region. An all-out propaganda attack against Pakistan led by the White House is underway.

Essentially, Pakistan is being branded as a terrorist state and a worthy target of military attack, along with Iran, which is also fingered by the WikiLeak for backing Taliban militants within Afghanistan.
.
Hamid Gul, former ISI chief and major regional player, accuses the US of orchestrating the expose to shift attention away from the US government’s “own failings”, in order to “force Pakistan's hand on policy in Afghanistan”.

According to Gul “they [the Americans] want to bash Pakistan, at this time to come up with this leak. I refuse to believe it is not on purpose.”

The Obama administration, eager for a pretext to escalate the Central Asia/Middle East (resource) war into Pakistan and Iran, has certainly found ammunition with the WikiLeak expose.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the “leak” occurred just prior to a new $33 billion/30,000 troop surge for Afghanistan was signed in the US Congress, and ahead of a possible military attack on Iran, which former CIA Director Michael Hayden says is "inexorable".

The glaring omission

As accusations and attacks on Pakistan and its “terrorist ISI” rise in intensity, not one mainstream media report mentions the fact that the ISI is a virtual branch of the CIA, and one that operates on behalf of Anglo-American policy.

It is fact that the ISI, with full Anglo-American direction, has long been a driving force behind “Islamic militants” and “terrorists” throughout the world, including “Al-Qaeda”. The CIA and ISI have cooperatively fomented instability and tension throughout Central Asia and the Middle East, playing all sides for geostrategic gain. This “strategy of tension” is one of the hallmarks of the “war on terrorism”. The ISI was also directly involved with the false flag operation of 9/11.

According to Michel Chossudovsky:
“The ISI actively collaborates with the CIA. It continues to perform the role of a ‘go-between' in numerous intelligence operations on behalf of the CIA. The ISI directly supports and finances a number of terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda.”
If the ISI is responsible for terrorism, the funding and aiding of “Islamic militants”, and the killing of US forces, logic dictates that its big brethren---the CIA and officials in Washington---are also guilty and involved.
The manner in which the ISI is under fire, while omitting any mention of the ISI’s guiding superiors in Washington speaks to a deliberate anti-Pakistan/pro-US bias.



Whose political weapon?



Until the source of this WikiLeak is revealed, along with the motive for the “leak”, all that remains is a political Rohrschach Test, open to interpretation.

The ultimate beneficiary is whatever faction controls the interpretation.

In the end, only Pakistan and Iran have been politically damaged, while the Obama administration has a new pretext to escalate and intensify its continuing resource war.

[Ed Encho]

I am suspicious of the convenient serendipity of the information included by Wikileaks that alleges an Iran-al CIAda linkage that just happens to pop up when the plans for the attack in Iran are back in vogue. The economy continues to deteriorate and the lies can only last so long about the "Green Shoots" and all of that other horseshit that only pimps the government shovelling money into the Wall Street scam to keep those precious stock prices up. Truth is that the job cuts are now once again to use one of the favorite phrases of the media propagandists "picking up steam" as rapacious U.S. corporations continue to cut to meet revenue forecasts. In the city where I live today's newspaper headlines dealt with a well known accounting firm with a local presence has cut just 500 jobs, sending them to India and hitting 500 more households with a sucker punch right in the gut. Offshoring is like crack cocaine to American corporations, they just can't get enough of it but the real effects on the population is devastating to society.

But I digress....

The ongoing implosion of the U.S. economy, the fascist Republican party obstructionism of any sort of public works jobs programs to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure and get people back to work and their brownshirt racist to the core Tea Party thugs foaming at the mouth are ominous signs of what is coming. I have never in my life experienced the fomenting of racial hatred as is now occurring in America, it is only a matter of time until a convenient false flag trigger event sets up the conditions for an escalation of the wars with the joint US-Israel Iran strike, the crackdown by the police state that Obama has done nothing to dismantle and then the marching orders delivered on high from Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin to unleash the rabid dogs on the dark complected scapegoats and there will be blood in the streets.

It's all starting to build to a crescendo here in the belly of the beast of our rotting empire. As Leonard Cohen once sang, "the future is murder". The obvious next step is more war justifying more oppression to crush dissent along with austerity to continue to fund the slaughter and the Wall Street scum, the blood barters who profit off of it all.

Just my two cents

EE

[Ed Jewett]

The WikiLeaks “Insurance” File

July 31st, 2010 From now on, I’m going to include a standard WikiLeaks disclaimer in the form of a link to a previous post.
—
Is WikiLeaks hanging a Sword of Damocles over elements of the U.S. Government?
Via: Cryptome:
The file, “insurance.aes256,” is ten times the size of the seven other files combined. Appears to be encrypted with AES Crypt. Wonder if it includes the 15,000 Afghan files withheld, or the original raw files, or perhaps much more, pre-positioned for public release (“insurance”) against an attack expected to come from DoD and Justice or parties unknown. A passphrase to be distributed or published widely in case of a takedown.

[Magda Hassan]

Witness says WikiLeaks investigators sought to limit disclosure


By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 1, 2010

Before the online site WikiLeaks published a trove of classified documents about the Afghanistan war, government investigators interviewed Boston-area acquaintances of a military analyst charged with providing other documents to the site in an effort to prevent additional leaks, according to one person interviewed in the probe.
The investigators from the Army and the State Department seemed to be "looking for classified documents that they thought to be in the Boston area," said the acquaintance, who would discuss the sensitive matter only on the condition of anonymity. "I got the impression that we're still in the process of containing a leak."
The man, a computer expert who met Pfc. Bradley E. Manning in January, said he told the investigators in mid-June that he knew of no such documents.
The interview was among at least two investigators conducted in the Boston area after Manning was accused of giving WikiLeaks State Department cables and a video of a helicopter attack in which unarmed civilians were killed in Baghdad. Officials have said they are investigating whether Manning leaked the Afghanistan documents made public last week, a disclosure that prompted condemnation from the Obama administration.



The computer expert also said the Army offered him cash to, in his word, "infiltrate" WikiLeaks. "I turned them down," he said. "I don't want anything to do with this cloak-and-dagger stuff."
Army Criminal Investigation Division spokesman Chris Grey declined to comment on the claim. "We've got an ongoing investigation," he said. "We don't discuss our techniques and tactics."
Another Manning acquaintance who was questioned said investigators "assumed that he was the one who did it and were trying to understand why, what was going on with him psychologically, to either make it so nobody gets to this point in the future or spot people who've gotten to this point and make sure they didn't do any damage."
This acquaintance, also a computer expert who spoke on the condition of anonymity, is affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He said he was interviewed twice in June in Cambridge, Mass., shortly after Manning was detained. Manning was charged in July.
Manning, who lived in Potomac and was stationed at Fort Drum, N.Y., before shipping out to Baghdad last year, had hoped he would serve his time and then use the G.I. Bill to go to college. His military attorney has declined to comment.
"He was definitely interested in making a positive impact on the world," said Danny Clark, a friend of Manning's who runs a small tech firm in Cambridge and has declined to be interviewed by military investigators.
Meanwhile, friends and family are raising money for Manning's defense, including a private lawyer to augment the Army-provided defense lawyer. The San Francisco-based war resisters' group Courage to Resist has raised $11,418 and is aiming for $100,000, assuming a "sizable contribution from WikiLeaks," said Jeff Paterson, project director.
Manning has been transferred from Kuwait, where he had been detained, to Quantico. He was charged in military court in July and will have a preliminary hearing to determine if he should face a court-martial.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is scheduled to appear on NBC's "Meet the Press" and CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday to further denounce WikiLeaks for endangering the lives of U.S. troops and Afghan civilians. White House officials are concerned that more potentially damaging information could be released by the group in the coming weeks.
One senior military official balked at a suggestion by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates that the WikiLeaks disclosure could cause the Pentagon to limit the distribution of classified information to combat field units, where it is harder to monitor what analysts are downloading.
"Limiting intelligence to troops in combat is a non-starter," said the official. "It doesn't make sense to use WikiLeaks as a reason to limit information to the troops who need it." Such limits could "get soldiers killed," the official said.
The classified computer systems in Iraq and Afghanistan don't have the same safeguards that exist in the United States. "In the States, there are rack and scoring servers that watch where analysts go," the official said. At the time of his arrest, Manning was an intelligence analyst at a relatively small base in Iraq.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...03058.html

[Peter Lemkin]

There have been a number of developments in the US government’s investigation into the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks and the recent leaking of over 90,000 secret military reports about Afghanistan. On Thursday, authorities at Newark Liberty International Airport detained and questioned a twenty-seven-year-old WikiLeaks volunteer named Jacob Appelbaum. He was questioned for three hours and had his laptop computer and three cellphones seized. Appelbaum is a US citizen who was arriving in Newark after an international flight.

Meanwhile, investigators in the Army’s criminal division have reportedly questioned two students in Boston about their ties to WikiLeaks and Private First Class Bradley Manning, a leading suspect in the leak. Adrian Lamo, the hacker who turned Manning in, says two students at MIT have admitted to him that they assisted Manning in downloading and distributing the leaked documents.

[Magda Hassan]

Adrian Lamo Is a “Volunteer” for Project Vigilant, a Private Internet Surveillance Company Closely Linked to U.S. Intelligence

August 2nd, 2010 Via: Forbes:
A semi-secret government contractor that calls itself Project Vigilant surfaced at the Defcon security conference Sunday with a series of revelations: that it monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers, hands much of that information to federal agencies, and encouraged one of its “volunteers”, researcher Adrian Lamo, to inform the federal government about the alleged source of a controversial video of civilian deaths in Iraq leaked to whistle-blower site Wikileaks in April.
Chet Uber, the director of Fort Pierce, Fl.-based Project Vigilant, says that he personally asked Lamo to meet with federal authorities to out the source of a video published by Wikileaks showing a U.S. Apache helicopter killing several civilians and two journalists in a suburb of Baghdad, a clip that Wikileaks labelled “Collateral Murder.” Lamo, who Uber said worked as an “Adversary Characterization” analyst for Project Vigilant, had struck up an online friendship with Bradley Manning, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst who currently faces charges of releasing the classified video.
In June, Uber said he learned from Lamo’s father that the young researcher had identified Manning as the video’s source, and pressured him to meet with federal agencies to name Manning as Wikileaks’ source. He then arranged a meeting with employees of “three letter” agencies and Lamo, who Uber said had mixed feelings about informing on Manning.
“I’m the one who called the U.S. government,” Uber said. “All the people who say that Adrian is a narc, he did a patriotic thing. He sees all kinds of hacks, and he was seriously worried about people dying.”
Uber says that Lamo later called him from the meeting, regretting his decision to inform on Manning. “I’m in a meeting with five guys and I don’t want to do this,” Uber says Lamo told him at the time. Uber says he responded, “You don’t have any choice, you’ve got to do this.”
“I said, ‘They’re not going to throw you in jail,’” Uber said. “‘Give them everything you have.’”
…
According to Uber, one of Project Vigilant’s manifold methods for gathering intelligence includes collecting information from a dozen regional U.S. Internet service providers. (ISPs) Uber declined to name those ISPs, but said that because the companies included a provision allowing them to share users’ Internet activities with third parties in their end user license agreements (EULAs), Vigilant was able to legally able to gather data from the Internet carriers and use it to craft reports for federal agencies. A Vigilant press release says that the organization tracks more than 250 million IP addresses a day and can “develop portfolios on any name, screen name or IP address.”
“We don’t do anything illegal,” says Uber. “If an ISP has a EULA to let us monitor traffic, we can work with them. If they don’t, we can’t.”
And whether that massive data gathering violates privacy? The organization says it never looks at personally identifying information, though just how it defines that information isn’t clear, nor is how it scrubs its data mining for sensitive details.
ISP monitoring is just one form of intelligence that Vigilant employs, says Uber. It also gathers variety of open source intelligence and numerous agents around the world. In Iran, for instance, Uber says Vigilant created an anonymous Internet proxy service that allowed it to receive information from local dissidents prior to last year’s election, including early information indicating that the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was skewed by fraud.
Uber, who formerly founded a private sector group called Infragard that worked closely with the FBI, compares the organization’s techniques with Ghostnet, the Chinese cyber espionage campaign revealed last year that planted spyware on computers of many governments and NGOs. “We’ve developed a network for obfuscation that allows us to view bad actors,” he says.
Uber says he’s speaking publicly about Vigilant because he wants to recruit the conference’s breed of young, skilled hackers. By July 2011, the organization hopes to have more than 1,300 new employees.
The organization already has a few big names. According to a San Francisco Examiner article last month, it employs former NSA official Ira Winkler and Suzanne Gorman, former security chief for the New York Stock Exchange.
—
Elite U.S. Cyber Team Courts Hackers to Fight Terror
Via: AFP:
An elite US cyber team that has stealthily tracked Internet villains for more than a decade pulled back its cloak of secrecy to recruit hackers at a DefCon gathering.
Vigilant was described by its chief Chet Uber as a sort of cyber “A-Team” taking on terrorists, drug cartels, mobsters and other enemies on the Internet.
“We do things the government can’t,” Uber said on Sunday. “This was never supposed to have been a public thing.”
Vigilant is an alliance of slightly more than 600 volunteers and its secret ranks reportedly include chiefs of technology at top firms and former high-ranking US cyber spies.
The group scours Internet traffic for clues about online attacks, terrorists, cartels and other targets rated as priorities by members of the democratically run private organization.
Vigilant also claimed to have “collection officers” in 22 countries that gather intelligence or coordinate networks in person.
“We go into bars, look for lists of bad actors, get tips from people…” Uber said.
“But, a significant amount of our intelligence comes from our monitoring the Internet. We are looking at everything on websites, and websites are public.”
He was adamant that Vigilant stays within US law while being more technologically nimble than government agencies weighed down by bureaucracy and internal rivalries.
“Intelligence is a by-product of what our research is,” Uber said. “Our research is into attacks, why they happen and how we can prevent them.”
Vigilant shares seemingly significant findings with US spy agencies, and is so respected by leading members of the hacker community that Uber was invited to DefCon to recruit new talent.
Uber said that Vigilant came up from underground after 14 years of operation in a drive to be at “full capacity” by adding 1,750 “vetted volunteers” by the year 2012.
“We are good people not out to hurt anybody,” Uber said. “Our one oath is to defend the US Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.”
Anything that can be looked at legally on the Internet is fair game for Vigilant, with email and encrypted transactions such as online shopping off limits.
The holy grail for Vigilant is finding out who is behind cyber attacks. Inability to figure out who launches online assaults routinely leaves companies or governments without targets to fire back at.
“This is a completely unsolved problem,” Uber said. “We’ve probably been working on it as long as the government has.”
Vigilant has developed its own “obfuscation” network to view “bad actors” on the Internet without being noticed.
He told of uncovering evidence of fraud in the latest presidential election in Iran while testing a way for people to slip information out of countries with oppressive regimes.
The information obtained was given to US officials.
“They expected fraud but they didn’t expect the wholesale fraud that we passed along,” Uber said.
Vigilant’s network claimed a role relaying Twitter messages sent by Iranian protestors in the aftermath of the election.
The group is bent on gathering intelligence by any legal means and then putting the pieces together to see bigger pictures.
“The wholesale tapping of the Internet around the world can’t be done,” Uber said. “We are looking at what people write, how people attack, how attacks happen…we don’t care who that person is.”
Uber is working on a mathematical model to spot when terrorist organizations are recruiting teenagers online. The group has 100 projects in the works.
“Our end goal is to provide software as a service to government agencies so we can get out of the business of intelligence,” Uber said.
Along with technology savants, Vigilant is recruiting sociologists, psychologists, and people with other specialties.
The wall between “feds” and hackers has been crumbling at DefCon, which has become a forum for alliances between government crime fighters and civilians considered digital-age “ninjas.”
http://cryptogon.com/?p=16768

[Peter Lemkin]

AMY GOODMAN: It’s been ten days since the whistleblower website WikiLeaks published the massive archive of classified military records about the war in Afghanistan, the largest leak in US history with some, oh, more than 91,0000 documents released. But the fallout in Washington and beyond is far from over. Justice Department lawyers are reportedly exploring whether WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange could be charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 for publishing classified Afghan war documents.

On Thursday, authorities at Newark Liberty International Airport detained and questioned a twenty-seven-year-old WikiLeaks volunteer named Jacob Appelbaum. He was questioned for three hours, had his laptop computer and three cellphones seized. Appelbaum is a US citizen who was arriving at Newark after an international flight.

Meanwhile, investigators in the Army’s criminal division have reportedly questioned two students in Boston about their ties to WikiLeaks and Private First Class Bradley Manning, a leading suspect in the leak. Adrian Lamo, the hacker who turned Manning in, says two students at MIT have admitted to him that they assisted Manning in downloading and distributing the leaked documents.

At a news conference in the Pentagon last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates denounced the leaking of the documents.

DEFENSE SECRETARY ROBERT GATES: The battlefield consequences of the release of these documents are potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and Afghan partners, and may well damage our relationships and reputation in that key part of the world. Intelligence sources and methods, as well as military tactics, techniques and procedures, will become known to our adversaries. This department is conducting a thorough, aggressive investigation to determine how this leak occurred, to identify the person or persons responsible, and to assess the content of the information compromised.


AMY GOODMAN: Speaking at the same news conference, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accused WikiLeaks of having blood on its hands.

ADM. MIKE MULLEN: Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is, they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family. Disagree with the war all you want, take issue with the policy, challenge me or our ground commanders on the decisions we make to accomplish the mission we’ve been given, but don’t put those who willingly go into harm’s way even further in harm’s way just to satisfy your need to make a point.


AMY GOODMAN: That was the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen.

We’re joined on the phone now from Britain by Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. Why don’t you start off by responding to this charge that you have blood on your hands, Julian?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, we’ve got to be careful, Amy. Mullen actually was quite crafty in his words. He said "might already have" blood on my hands. But the media has gone and turned that into a concrete definition. There is, as far as we can tell, no incident of that. So it is a speculative charge. Of course, we are treating any possible revelation of the names of innocents seriously. That is why we held back 15,000 of these documents, to review that.

Now, some names may have crept into others and may be unfortunate, may not be. But you must understand that we contacted the White House about that issue and asked for their assistance in vetting to see whether there would be any exposure of innocents and to identify those names accordingly. Of course, we would never accept any other kind of veto, but in relation to that matter, we requested their assistance via the New York Times, who the four media partners involved—us, Der Spiegel, The Guardian and the Times—agreed would be the conduit to the White House so we wouldn’t step on each other’s toes. Now, the White House issued a flat denial that that had ever happened. And we see, however, that in an interview with CBS News, Eric Schmidt, who was our contact for that, quoted from the email that I had relayed to the White House, and that quote is precisely what I had been saying all along and completely contradicts the White House statement.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, you’re correct that even when Admiral Mike Mullen was on Meet the Press this week and was challenged about the statement about blood on the hands, that he said "could"—you’re right—or "might." But he also pointed out, as Newsweek did, they said that the Taliban has begun to threaten Afghans listed in the document as aiding American troops. What is your response to that?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, we have to be careful again. I reviewed the statement of someone that a London paper claimed to be speaking for some part of the Taliban. Remember, the Taliban is actually not a homogenous group. And the statement, as far as such things go, was fairly reasonable, which is that they would not trust these documents; they would use their own intelligence organization’s investigations to understand whether those people were defectors or collaborators, and if so, after their investigations, then they would receive appropriate punishment. Now, of course, that is—you know, that image is disturbing, but that is what happens in war, that spies or traitors are investigated.

Now, these statements, all together, are designed to distract from the big picture. And it’s really quite fantastic that Gates and Mullen, Gates being the former head of the CIA during Iran-Contra and the overseer of Iraq and Afghanistan, and Mullen being the military commander for Iraq and Afghanistan—I’m not sure what his further background is—who have ordered assassinations every day, are trying to bring people on board to look at a speculative understanding of whether we might have blood on our hands. These two men arguably are wading in the blood from those wars. According to the statistics we pulled out of the Afghan War Diary, those reports covering six years, we see in the internal reporting itself, just of the regular US Army and not the top-secret operations, that 20,000 people have been killed. And similarly, we know from Iraq Body Count that there’s 108,000 people, where there’s media reports and other evidence to show, that have died in Iraq. The hypocrisy in these statements is extraordinary.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian, Marc Thiessen, the former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote a column in Tuesday’s Washington Post calling WikiLeaks a "criminal enterprise." He went on to write—let me quote—"Assange is a non-U.S. citizen operating outside the territory of the United States. This means the government has a wide range of options for dealing with him. It can employ not only law enforcement but also intelligence and military assets to bring Assange to justice and put his criminal syndicate out of business. The first step is for the Justice Department to indict Assange." Again, these are the words of Marc Thiessen, who is the former speechwriter for George W. Bush, writing in Washington Post.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, extraordinary. But I see, we can guess, what perhaps would have happened to this organization under Bush. But we should have some concerns in that Obama has authorized the assassination of US citizens overseas. And what will happen? Will that be—we’ll see some statement leading to that sort of behavior. It appears that this administration is not above that. I see this a bit as a floating balloon that Thiessen has put up. Of course, he is no doubt doing it in order to show that he’s at the vanguard of that school of thought. And it will be seen whether that balloon gets shot down or not by the American people. And if it doesn’t get shot down by criticism, then it will be assumed that that behavior is in some way acceptable. Now, in Europe, it’s another matter. What Thiessen is saying is that US forces would enter European territory without—illegally and conduct an illegal act, like they did in Italy, kidnapping some al-Qaeda. But disturbing to me is to see these references to deal with journalists that were previously done to al-Qaeda.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about Jacob Appelbaum, a volunteer for WikiLeaks who was held at Newark Airport, when he came in, for a number of hours, detained and questioned. Can you explain what happened to him, what you understand happen to him?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, my understanding—and I haven’t spoken to Jacob, however; you know, this is sort of third-hand reports—is that, yes, he was detained after coming back from—let’s start it from the beginning. So, Jacob filled in for me at a talk in New York City. And at that talk, some six Homeland Security persons arrived, and Jacob left and then came to Europe briefly. And on his return, he was detained at the airport and asked questions for some three-and-a-half hours. He was not permitted to call a lawyer or make, indeed, any phone call at all. His three phones were seized, and his laptop briefly seized. The phones have not been returned. And he was asked questions about his political views on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

AMY GOODMAN: He was asked about where you are.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes, I’ve heard that report, as well. My understanding is that he did not comply with those sorts of requests.

AMY GOODMAN: He was also approached afterwards at a Defcon conference where he was speaking about the Tor Project. What is the Tor Project?

JULIAN ASSANGE: So, the Tor—I have some interference here on the line. The Tor—the Tor Project is—I’m sorry, Amy, the interference here is too bad. Can you perhaps call back, as I cross in from something else?

AMY GOODMAN: Julian, we’re going to go to an early break. Then we’re going to come back to you. We’re going to fix this line. Julian Assange is the founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. When we get back to him, I want to ask him about Mike Rogers, the Michigan Congress member [Editor’s note: Rogers was incorrectly identified on the show as being from Alabama], who says that Bradley Manning, who—should be tried for releasing documents to WikiLeaks, the Afghan war documents, and, if found guilty, should face death for treason. We’re speaking with Julian Assange. We’ll be back with him, after we clear up the interference, in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We’re speaking with Julian Assange. I’m Amy Goodman. Julian Assange is the editor-in-chief and founder of WikiLeaks.

Julian, are you there? We’re just trying to fix the phone line.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yes. It seems good now, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s better.

Let me ask you about Congressman Mike Rogers from Alabama, who said "the alleged release by a soldier of documents relating to the war in Afghanistan to "http://www.wikileaks.org">WikiLeaks.org constitutes treason and should be considered a capital offense." I’m reading from the Daily Press & Argus in Alabama. He hasn’t been charged for the release of these documents. He’s been charged with the release of other documents, though he’s been called a person of interest in this. But what is your response to Congressman Mike Rogers?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, you start to understand that Congressman Mike Rogers is part of the Senate Intelligence Committee, so this is an individual who is meant to be—

AMY GOODMAN: House. The House Intelligence Committee.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Sorry, sorry. Yes, the House Intelligence Committee. So this is an individual who is meant to be overseeing the intelligence Industry in the United States. So that’s the sort of first takeaway, is that this, like, war hawk is meant to be overseeing and holding to account behavior of those involved in war.

His call for execution, well, it’s not only legally wrong—Congress has not declared war, so that option, as I understand, is not available to him. Also, for an execution to occur, the President must, or authority of the President must, authorize it. Now, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. If the political will in the United States doesn’t shoot down these floating balloons that Rogers and Thiessen are putting up, then we could see a shift towards finding that behavior or similar behavior acceptable. People have to shoot those statements down; otherwise, they will become the new norm.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about something that Declan McCullagh has written on CNET. He said, "Perhaps as a way to avoid additional legal pressure or [extrajudicial] punitive measures on Assange and Appelbaum, a few days ago Wikileaks posted an intriguing 1.4GB file simply titled 'Insurance.' It’s encrypted, meaning that if visitors are sent it in advance, Wikileaks would have to release only the key or passphrase to allow the contents to be read." Can you explain what this file is, Julian Assange?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, I think it’s better that we don’t comment on that. But, you know, one could imagine in a similar situation that it might be worth ensuring that important parts of history do not disappear.

AMY GOODMAN: And just to clarify, you have released more than 91,000 documents. You say you’re withholding 15,000. Does that mean you have released 76,000, or 15,000 in addition you are withholding?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, we have released 76,000, and we have 15,000 in addition that our staff are working through to make sure that informers are not named. This particular collection is from a—it’s labeled in such a way that would tend to imply that there may be innocent informers in there. There’s certainly many of inordinacies. That’s an important thing to understand, that many of these informers are using special forces and other parts of the military to conduct vendettas against their political or business opponents. Others are taking bribes and framing people by coming up with outlandish allegations.

It’s really quite difficult to work our way through this. What do we do in the case of a governor, as an example, that has been taking bribes from the United States military? Do we—and collaborating with them, as a result. Is that something that is of genuine interest to the people of Afghanistan? Well, of course, it is, if the governor is cooperating with a foreign occupying power as a result of him taking money. So these things are quite difficult and time-consuming to work out. And that’s one of the reasons that we ask the White House and the like to ask ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force, to help us with the labor of going through this. We are a relatively small organization, and the labor costs and getting through this material are very demanding, as every day that the important stories are not released is another day that justice for those people that have been killed is denied.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald and others have written about Project Vigilant. He writes, "Vigilant, an alliance of some 600 volunteers, has been scouring internet traffic for 14 years and passing [the] information to the US federal authorities, said its director, Chet Uber. [...] He said the Florida-based group [has] encouraged one of its members, Adrian Lamo, to inform the authorities about Bradley Manning, the former intelligence analyst who allegedly provided the Wikileaks site with classified military information. [...] Mr Uber said [Mr] Lamo had been reluctant to expose his friend so the Vigilant chief arranged for him to meet federal agencies. [...] Its members reportedly include the [ex-]security chief for the New York Stock Exchange and former technology officials at the National Security Agency and the FBI." Can you talk about Project Vigilant?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, it’s an interesting trend that we’re seeing. You know, when the Pentagon Papers came out, really, most of the impact, at least as far as I can see, wasn’t from the content of the material; rather, it’s—the back reaction against the Pentagon Papers exposed something else. It exposed the inner workings and thoughts of the Nixon administration. And we are starting to see something like that happening in this case, that the—if you like, the crackdown and the attempt at covering up is revealing some of the inner workings of the security sector and the Obama administration, the United States. And Project Vigilant is an example of that.

So, one of the—the informer in this case, a sort of researcher for Wired magazine by the name of Adrian Lamo, who’s alleged to have shopped or ratted out Mr. Manning to the FBI, apparently was involved with this military contractor that had a program to engage in mass spying. The head of that—on US soil. The head of that organization says that they seen 250 million IP addresses daily with software that’s installed in some 600 locations around the United States. So this seems to be a, if you like, a privatized version of the National Security Agency, perhaps giving the government a bit more freedom.

Now, we do—we don’t—we have some public record in relation to Project Viligant. The rest of the statements are coming from this man who’s the CEO. His interest in speaking about this publicly needs to be understood. He seems to be wanting to drum up more people in various ISPs and other organizations to install this spy software on—either for ideological reasons or for promise of payment. And it’s a disturbing trend to see that indirection into a private company for spying. And he says that—he speaks quite carefully and says that the spying that’s occurring on internet use in the United States through his organization is as a result of a little sort of line in the small print that they get when they sign up, that is not seen, and that small print has been used to collect and spy on these people without breaking the law.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Julian Assange, founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. By the way, that quote that I read, the piece, wasn’t Glenn Greenwald, though he’s written about it, but Tom Leonard in The Telegraph in London. Project Vigilant press release says the organization tracks more than 250 million IP addresses a day and can develop portfolios on any name, screen name or IP address.

Jeremy Scahill has stayed with us. We were talking to him about President Obama’s speech and the drawdown in Iraq. Jeremy, your comment on what Julian has said?

JEREMY SCAHILL: [COLOR="Purple"]Well, I mean, I think the attacks that are being put forward by Marc Thiessen, Mike Rogers, even by the Secretary of Defense and the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I mean, the painful, bloody irony of what they’re saying about WikiLeaks and about the individuals that provided these documents to WikiLeaks is that the US is the primary force jeopardizing Afghans every day, Afghan civilians every day. When you read in the documents these assassinations, essentially, of civilians that are taking place, why is there no outrage about that? Why aren’t there courts-martial of the individuals responsible for these massacres? Where are the prosecutions for murder? I mean, Marc Thiessen can write with a straight face about the crimes of Julian Assange and his criminal syndicate, and yet supports the kind of, you know, slaughter that we see happening in these night raids on a regular basis.

The other issue I would raise, when we talk about the sort of rats that Julian is talking about that are trying to hunt down people that are essentially whistleblowers, is that the Washington Post just did this massive series about the private intelligence industry. Hundreds of thousands of private contractors working for for-profit companies are given access to top-secret documents on a daily basis. You know, I think that the Pentagon should be much more concerned about these corporations that are potentially sharing classified information with other clients, be they corporate clients or foreign governments, than they are about, you know, whistleblowers, because the real threat to US national security likely comes from the fact that we’ve given all of these contractors access to this information, while they simultaneously work for other governments and other corporations. [/COLOR]

So, I mean, I just—the main point I would say here is that journalists that dwell on this issue of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks endangering Afghan collaborators with the US should spend a little bit of time focusing on who’s been killing Afghan civilians on a regular basis. Yes, forces within the Taliban do it, but so, too, do US military forces. And there’s no accountability for those kinds of killings.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, thanks, Jeremy. I see the sort of one positive outcome from these attacks on us, which, of course, are designed to deflect from the 20,000 deaths that we exposed in this material, including thousands of children, is that—

AMY GOODMAN: Can you repeat the number, Julian Assange, of numbers of civilians killed, that you think are—

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, there’s around 20,000 in this material. Because the information is sort of well structured, you can get a computer program to just add it all up. And so, there are around 20,000 individuals. Accounts of 20,000 deaths are in this material. And, you know, the Afghan government has complained that last week there was a NATO attack that killed fifty-two. So, it really is quite extraordinary that the press is—that some parts of the press are concentrating on some hypothetical threat to some people.

I mean, when the London Times sort of issued like—was the first to push on this. It’s a rival to The Guardian, that had fourteen pages reprinted. And the example that they raised was that someone, who turned out had been dead for two years, that we were alleged to have killed—if you actually read the headline, the named man was already dead, but constructed in such a way that it looked like we had done it. But, in fact, the US military or something else had killed this man. To use against—

So the beneficial thing I see coming out of this is, well, we finally have statements from Mullen and Gates, that they have concern for Afghan civilians in this process. Now, of course, it would be nice to see that actually translate into something on the ground. We have to look at the garden itself.

I mean, this material was available to everyone, as far as I can see, on SIPRNet, which is the secret network, which is not a high classification. It’s just a low- to medium-level classification, so available to hundreds of thousands or millions of individuals, and included Afghan informants’ and collaborators’ names. That is not how, for example, we do things. We always use code names. We never keep those names. And the US has simply shown contempt for these Afghans. They never really cared about them at all—and that’s why it didn’t help us to try and go through this enormous quantity of material to find these names-–and never engaged in correct security procedures to protect its sources in the first place, because they didn’t give a damn about them.

AMY GOODMAN: Lynne Cheney, the daughter of Dick Cheney, went on Fox and said, "I’d really like to see President Obama move to ask the government of Iceland to shut the website down. I’d like to see him move to shut it down ourselves if Iceland won’t do it.” Julian?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, a source of great delight in Iceland, actually—that statement, I mean. She is a not terribly liked individual. Well, I shouldn’t say that, actually. Her father is a not well liked individual. And she seems to share the same politics and patronage, networking, their extended friends and so on. So, the Icelandic people are fierce and fiercely independent, and I’m sure they’re not going to be cowered by Liz Cheney.

AMY GOODMAN: Right, that was Liz Cheney, Cheney’s daughter. How are you protecting yourself at this point, Julian Assange?

JULIAN ASSANGE: Well, I would like to tell you all about it, Amy, but, you know, that might not be wise. However, there are countries, Western countries, even countries in NATO, that are strongly supportive of what we do politically. And, for example, the UK has announced—UK Parliament has announced two inquiries into Afghanistan, one on the civilian casualties and the other on what is the exit strategy and how to get out of it. The Dutch government just formally announced its exit from Afghanistan. And other governments around the world involved in the ISAF coalition have, in bigger and small ways, announced that they are trying to do something about the revelations in this material.

And all of them are taking note of what the United States’ attitude is, which is, instead of immediately saying these relevations are a serious concern, we never wanted to harm Afghan civilians or to bribe the media, as an example of one of the revelations in there, and we intend to launch an immediate investigation to understand this and compensate those people accordingly and change our procedures—that’s what the rest of the world wants to hear. That’s what Afghanistan, the people of Afghanistan want to hear. But instead they heard a personal attack on me and on our organization and an announcement that they would be going after the whistleblower or whistleblowers involved in this. And now we see them living up to those words and stalking around Boston, spying and harassing MIT graduates, and trunking around the United Kingdom, where they raided Manning, the alleged whistleblower, for a video release called "Collateral Murder," in her home in Wales.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Julian Assange, we’re going to leave it there, founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, speaking to us from abroad. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. And on that issue of "Collateral Murder," what WikiLeaks called the video of July 12th, 2007, of a military, US military Apache attack on residents of Baghdad, two Reuters employees killed in that, you can go to our website, democracynow.org, to see the discussion and the video.

[Peter Presland]

Assange and Scahill make some seriously good points in that 'Democracy Now' interview. In spite of his 9-11 'naivity' (as I'm prepared to provisionally categorise it). Some of the stuff in that interview is absolutely unanswerable to anyone capable of shedding their flag-waving blinkers.

For completeness, here is a link to a relevant Marc Thiessen piece in the Washington post yesterday. It's scary stuff - as in:

Assange is a non-U.S. citizen operating outside the territory of the United States. This means the government has a wide range of options for dealing with him. It can employ not only law enforcement but also intelligence and military assets to bring Assange to justice and put his criminal syndicate out of business.

The first step is for the Justice Department to indict Assange. Such an indictment could be sealed to prevent him from knowing that the United States is seeking his arrest. The United States should then work with its international law enforcement partners to apprehend and extradite him.
Assange seems to believe, incorrectly, that he is immune to arrest so long as he stays outside the United States. He leads a nomadic existence, operating in countries such as Sweden, Belgium and Iceland, where he believes he enjoys the protection of "beneficial laws." (He recently worked with the Icelandic parliament to pass legislation effectively making the country a haven for WikiLeaks). The United States should make clear that it will not tolerate any country -- and particularly NATO allies such as Belgium and Iceland -- providing safe haven for criminals who put the lives of NATO forces at risk

With appropriate diplomatic pressure, these governments may cooperate in bringing Assange to justice. But if they refuse, the United States can arrest Assange on their territory without their knowledge or approval. In 1989, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel issued a memorandum entitled "Authority of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to Override International Law in Extraterritorial Law Enforcement Activities."

This memorandum declares that "the FBI may use its statutory authority to investigate and arrest individuals for violating United States law, even if the FBI's actions contravene customary international law" and that an "arrest that is inconsistent with international or foreign law does not violate the Fourth Amendment." In other words, we do not need permission to apprehend Assange or his co-conspirators anywhere in the world.

Arresting Assange would be a major blow to his organization. But taking him off the streets is not enough; we must also recover the documents he unlawfully possesses and disable the system he has built to illegally disseminate classified information.

This should be done, ideally, through international law enforcement cooperation. But if such cooperation is not forthcoming, the United States can and should act alone. Assange recently boasted that he has created "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking." I am sure this elicited guffaws at the National Security Agency. The United States has the capability and the authority to monitor his communications and disrupt his operations.