Wikileaks Payback - Offensive and Defensive

[Peter Lemkin]

WikiLeaks By David Leigh & Luke Harding angryfire

Paperback £9.99

Introduction

by Alan Rusbridger

Back in the days when almost no one had heard about WikiLeaks, regular emails started arriving in my inbox from someone called Julian Assange. It was a memorable kind of name. All editors receive a daily mix of unsolicited tip-offs, letters, complaints and crank theories, but there was something about the periodic WikiLeaks emails which caught the attention.

Sometimes there would be a decent story attached to the emails. Or there might be a document which, on closer inspection, appeared rather underwhelming. One day there might arrive a diatribe against a particular journalist - or against the venal cowardice of mainstream media in general. Another day this Assange person would be pleased with something we'd done, or would perambulate about the life he was living in Nairobi.

In Britain the Guardian was, for many months, the only paper to write about WikiLeaks or to use any of the documents they were unearthing. In August 2007, for instance, we splashed on a remarkable secret Kroll report which claimed to show that former Kenyan president Daniel Arap Moi had been siphoning off hundreds of millions of pounds and hiding them away in foreign bank accounts in more than 30 different countries. It was, by any standards, a stonking story. This Assange, whoever he was, was one to watch.

Unnoticed by most of the world, Julian Assange was developing into a most interesting and unusual pioneer in using digital technologies to challenge corrupt and authoritarian states. It's doubtful whether his name would have meant anything to Hillary Clinton at the time - or even in January 2010 when, as secretary of state, she made a rather good speech about the potential of what she termed 'a new nervous system for the planet'.

She described a vision of semi-underground digital publishing - 'the samizdat of our day' that was beginning to champion transparency and challenge the autocratic, corrupt old order of the world. But she also warned that repressive governments would 'target the independent thinkers who use the tools'. She had regimes like Iran in mind.

Her words about the brave samizdat publishing future could well have applied to the rather strange, unworldly Australian hacker quietly working out methods of publishing the world's secrets in ways which were beyond any technological or legal attack.

Little can Clinton have imagined, as she made this much praised speech, that within a year she would be back making another statement about digital whistleblowers - this time roundly attacking people who used electronic media to champion transparency. It was, she told a hastily arranged state department press conference in November 2010, 'not just an attack on America's foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community.' In the intervening 11 months Assange had gone viral. He had just helped to orchestrate the biggest leak in the history of the world - only this time the embarrassment was not to a poor east African nation, but to the most powerful country on earth.

It is that story, the transformation from anonymous hacker to one of the most discussed people in the world - at once reviled, celebrated and lionised; sought-after, imprisoned and shunned - that this book sets out to tell.

Within a few short years of starting out Assange had been catapulted from the obscurity of his life in Nairobi, dribbling out leaks that nobody much noticed, to publishing a flood of classified documents that went to the heart of America's military and foreign policy operations. From being a marginal figure invited to join panels at geek conferences he was suddenly America's public enemy number one. A new media messiah to some, he was a cyber-terrorist to others. As if this wasn't dramatic enough, in the middle of it all two women in Sweden accused him of rape. To coin a phrase, you couldn't make it up.

Since leaving Nairobi, Assange had grown his ambitions for the scale and potential of WikiLeaks. In the company of other hackers he had been developing a philosophy of transparency. He and his fellow technologists had already succeeded in one aim: he had made WikiLeaks virtually indestructible and thus beyond legal or cyber attack from any one jurisdiction or source. Lawyers who were paid exorbitant sums to protect the reputations of wealthy clients and corporations admitted - in tones tinged with both frustration and admiration - that WikiLeaks was the one publisher in the world they couldn't gag. It was very bad for business.

At the Guardian we had our own reasons to watch the rise of WikiLeaks with great interest and some respect. In two cases - involving Barclays Bank and Trafigura - the site had ended up hosting documents which the British courts had ordered to be concealed. There was a bad period in 2008/9 when the high court in London got into the habit of not only banning the publication of documents of high public interest, but simultaneously preventing the reporting of the existence of the court proceedings themselves and the parties involved in them. One London firm of solicitors over-reached itself when it even tried to extend the ban to the reporting to parliamentary discussion of material sitting on the WikiLeaks site.

Judges were as nonplussed as global corporations by this new publishing phenomenon. In one hearing in March 2009 the high court in London decided that no one was allowed to print documents revealing Barclays' tax avoidance strategies - even though they were there for the whole world to read on the WikiLeaks website. The law looked a little silly.

But this new form of indestructible publishing brought sharp questions into focus. For every Trafigura there might be other cases where WikiLeaks could be used to smear or destroy someone. That made Assange a very powerful figure. The fact that there were grumbles among his colleagues about his autocratic and secretive style did not allay the fears about this new media baron. The questions kept coming: who was this shadowy figure 'playing God'? How could he and his team be sure of a particular document's authenticity? Who was determining the ethical framework that decided some information should be published, and some not? All this meant that Assange was in many respects - more, perhaps, than he welcomed - in a role not dissimilar to that of a conventional editor.

As this book describes, the spectacular bursting of WikiLeaks into the wider global public eye and imagination began with a meeting in June 2010 between the Guardian'sNick Davies and Assange. Davies had sought out Assange after reading the early accounts that were filtering out about the leak of a massive trove of military and diplomatic documents. He wanted to convince Assange that this story would have more impact and meaning if he was willing to ally with one or two newspapers - however traditional and cowardly or compromised we might be in the eyes of some hackers. An agreement was struck.

And so a unique collaboration was born between (initially) three newspapers, the mysterious Australian nomad and whatever his elusive organisation, WikiLeaks, actually was. That much never became very clear. Assange was, at the best of times, difficult to contact, switching mobile phones, email addresses and encrypted chat rooms as often as he changed his location. Occasionally he would appear with another colleague - it could be a journalist, a hacker, a lawyer or an unspecified helper - but, just as often, he traveled solo. It was never entirely clear which time zone he was on. The difference between day and night, an important consideration in most lives, seemed of little interest to him.

What now began was a rather traditional journalistic operation, albeit using skills of data analysis and visualisation which were unknown in newsrooms until fairly recently. David Leigh, the Guardian's investigations editor, spent the summer voraciously reading his way into the material. The Guardian's deputy editor in charge of news, Ian Katz, now started marshalling wider forces. Ad hoc teams were put together in assorted corners of the Guardian's offices in King's Cross, London, to make sense of the vast store of information. Similar teams were assembled in New York and Hamburg - and, later, in Madrid and Paris.

The first thing to do was build a search engine that could make sense of the data, the next to bring in foreign correspondents and foreign affairs analysts with detailed knowledge of the Afghan and Iraq conflict. The final piece of the journalistic heavy lifting was to introduce a redaction process so that nothing we published could imperil any vulnerable sources or compromise active special operations. All this took a great deal of time, effort, resource and stamina. Making sense of the files was not immediately easy. There are very few, if any, parallels in the annals of journalism where any news organisation has had to deal with such a vast database - we estimate it to have been roughly 300 million words (the Pentagon papers, published by the New York Times in 1971, by comparison, stretched to two and a half million words). Once redacted, the documents were shared among the (eventually) five newspapers and sent to WikiLeaks, who adopted all our redactions.

The extent of the redaction process and the relatively limited extent of publication of actual cables were apparently overlooked by many commentators - including leading American journalists - who spoke disparagingly of a 'willy nilly dump' of mass cables and the consequent danger to life. But, to date, there has been no 'mass dump'. Barely two thousand of the 250,000 cables have been published and, six months after the first publication of the war logs, no one has been able to demonstrate any damage to life or limb.

It is impossible to write this story without telling the story of Julian Assange himself, though clearly the overall question of WikiLeaks and the philosophy it represents is of longer lasting significance. More than one writer has compared him to John Wilkes, the rakish 18th-century MP and editor who risked his life and liberty in assorted battles over free speech. Others have compared him to Daniel Ellsberg, the source of the Pentagon Papers leak, described by the New York Times's former executive editor, Max Frankel, as 'a man of incisive, devious intellect and volatile temperament'.

The media and public were torn between those who saw Assange as a new kind of cyber-messiah and those who regarded him as a James Bond villain. Each extremity projected on to him superhuman powers of good or evil. The script became even more confused in December when, as part of his bail conditions, Assange had to live at Ellingham Hall, a Georgian Manor set in hundreds of acres of Suffolk countryside. It was as if a Stieg Larsson script had been passed to the writer of Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes.

Few people seem to find Assange an easy man with whom to collaborate. Slate's media columnist, Jack Shafer, captured his character well in this pen portrait:

'Assange bedevils the journalists who work with him because he refuses to conform to any of the roles they expect him to play. He acts like a leaking source when it suits him. He masquerades as publisher or newspaper syndicate when that's advantageous. Like a PR agent, he manipulates news organisations to maximise publicity for his 'clients', or, when moved to, he threatens to throw info-bombs like an agent provocateur. He's a wily shape-shifter who won't sit still, an unpredictable negotiator who is forever changing the terms of the deal.'

We certainly had our moments of difficulty and tension during the course of our joint enterprise. They were caused as much by the difficulty of regular, open communication as by Assange's status as a sometimes confusing mix of source, intermediary and publisher. Encrypted instant messaging is no substitute for talking. And, while Assange was certainly our main source for the documents, he was in no sense a conventional source - he was not the original source and certainly not a confidential one. Latterly, he was not even the only source. He was, if anything, a new breed of publisher-intermediary - a sometimes uncomfortable role in which he sought to have a degree of control over the source's material (and even a form of 'ownership', complete with legal threats to sue for loss of income). When, to Assange's fury, WikiLeaks itself sprang a leak, the irony of the situation was almost comic. The ethical issues involved in this new status of editor/source became more complicated still when it was suggested to us that we owed some form of protection to Assange - as a 'source' - by not inquiring too deeply into the sex charges leveled against him in Sweden. That did not seem a compelling argument to us, though there were those - it is not too strong to call them 'disciples' - who were not willing to imagine any narrative beyond that of the smear.

These wrinkles were mainly overcome - sometimes eased by a glass of wine or by matching Assange's extraordinary appetite for exhaustive and intellectually exacting conversations. As Sarah Ellison's Vanity Fair piece on the subject concluded:

'Whatever the differences, the results have been extraordinary. Given the range, depth, and accuracy of the leaks, the collaboration has produced by any standard one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years.'

The challenge from WikiLeaks for media in general (not to mention states, companies or global corporations caught up in the dazzle of unwanted scrutiny) was not a comfortable one. The website's initial instincts were to publish more or less everything, and they were at first deeply suspicious of any contact between their colleagues on the newspapers and any kind of officialdom. Talking to the State Department, Pentagon or White House, as the New York Times did before each round of publication, was fraught territory in terms of keeping the relationship with WikiLeaks on an even keel. By the time of the Cablegate publication, Assange himself, conscious of the risks of causing unintentional harm to dissidents or other sources, offered to speak to the State Department - an offer that was rejected.

WikiLeaks and similar organisations are, it seems to me, generally admirable in their single minded view of transparency and openness. What has been remarkable is how the sky has not fallen in despite the truly enormous amounts of information released over the months. The enemies of WikiLeaks have made repeated assertions of the harm done by the release. It would be a good idea if someone would fund some rigorous research by a serious academic institution about the balance between harms and benefits. To judge from the response we had from countries without the benefit of a free press, there was a considerable thirst for the information in the cables - a hunger for knowledge which contrasted with the occasional knowing yawns from metropolitan sophisticates who insisted that the cables told us nothing new. Instead of a kneejerk stampede to more secrecy, this could be the opportunity to draw up a score sheet of the upsides and drawbacks of forced transparency.

That approach - a rational assessment of new forms of transparency - should accompany the inevitable questioning of how the US classification system could have allowed the private musings of kings, presidents and dissidents to have been so easily read by whoever it was that decided to pass them on to WikiLeaks in the first place.

Each news organisation grappled with the ethical issues involved in such contacts - and in the overall decision to publish - in different ways. I was interested, a few days after the start of the Cablegate release, to receive an email from Max Frankel, who had overseen the defence of the New York Times in the Pentagon papers case 40 years earlier. Now 80, he sent me a memo he had then written to the New York Times public editor. It is worth quoting as concise and wise advice to future generations who may well have to grapple with such issues more in future:

1. My view has almost always been that information which wants to get out will get out; our job is to receive it responsibly and to publish or not by our own unvarying news standards.

2. If the source or informant violates his oath of office or the law, we should leave it to the authorities to try to enforce their law or oath, without our collaboration. We reject collaboration or revelation of our sources for the larger reason that ALL our sources deserve to know that they are protected with us. It is, however, part of our obligation to reveal the biases and apparent purposes of the people who leak or otherwise disclose information.

3. If certain information seems to defy the standards proclaimed by the supreme court in the Pentagon papers case ie that publication will cause direct, immediate and irreparable damage we have an obligation to limit our publication appropriately. If in doubt, we should give appropriate authority a chance to persuade us that such direct and immediate danger exists. (See our 24-hour delay of discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba as described in my autobiography, or our delay in reporting planes lost in combat until the pilots can perhaps be rescued.)

4. For all other information, I have always believed that no one can reliably predict the consequences of publication. The Pentagon papers, contrary to Ellsberg's wish, did not shorten the Vietnam war or stir significant additional protest. A given disclosure may embarrass government but improve a policy, or it may be a leak by the government itself and end up damaging policy. 'Publish and be damned,' as Scotty Reston used to say; it sounds terrible but as a journalistic motto it has served our society well through history.

There have been many longer treatises on the ethics of journalism which have said less.

One of the lessons from the WikiLeaks project is that it has shown the possibilities of collaboration. It's difficult to think of any comparable example of news organisations working together in the way the Guardian, New York Times, Der Speigel, Le Monde and El País have on the WikiLeaks project. I think all five editors would like to imagine ways in which we could harness our resources again.

The story is far from over. In the UK there was only muted criticism of the Guardian for publishing the leaks, though their restraint did not always extend to WikiLeaks itself. Most journalists could see the clear public value in the nature of the material that was published.

It appears to have been another story in the US, where there was a more bitter and partisan argument, clouded by differing ideas of patriotism. It was astonishing to sit in London reading of reasonably mainstream American figures calling for the assassination of Assange for what he had unleashed. It was surprising to see the widespread reluctance among American journalists to support the general ideal and work of WikiLeaks. For some it simply boiled down to a reluctance to admit that Assange was a journalist.

Whether this attitude would change were Assange ever to be prosecuted is an interesting matter for speculation. In early 2011 there were signs of increasing frustration on the part of US government authorities in scouring the world for evidence to use against him, including the subpoena of Twitter accounts. But there was also, among cooler legal heads, an appreciation that it would be virtually impossible to prosecute Assange for the act of publication of the war logs or state department cables without also putting five editors in the dock. That would be the media case of the century.

And, of course, we have yet to hear an unmediated account from the man alleged to be the true source of the material, Bradley Manning, a 23-year-old US army private. Until then no complete story of the leak that changed the world can really be written. But this is a compelling first chapter in a story which, one suspects, is destined to run and run.

Alan Rusbridger is the editor of the Guardian

[Magda Hassan]

When I checked yesterday this website had already been hacked and redirected to Fox News and some clip on You Tube. Don't mess with Anonymous :mexican:pcguru So much for hubris.

Security
Ex-Anonymous Hackers Plan To Out Group's Members

Mar. 18 2011 - 12:19 pm | 21,821 views | 0 recommendations | 20 comments
By ANDY GREENBERG
The nameless revolution that calls itself Anonymous may be about to have its own, online civil war.
A hacker startup calling itself Backtrace Securitymade up of individuals who formerly counted themselves as part of Anonymous' loose digital collectiveannounced plans Friday to publish identifying information on active members of Anonymous. According to one source within the Backtrace group, it will release the names and instant messaging logs of dozens of Anonymous hackers who took part in attacks on PayPal, Mastercard, the security firm HBGary, Westboro Baptist Church, and the Marine officials responsible for the detainment of WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning.
That spokesman, who goes by the name Hubris and calls himself BackTrace's "director of psychological operations," tells me that the group (Backtrace calls itself a company, but Hubris says it's still in the process of incorporating) aims to put an end to Anonymous "in its current form." That form, Hubris argues, is a betrayal of its roots: Fun-loving, often destructive nihilism, not the political hacktivism Anonymous has focused on for much of the past year. "[Anonymous] has truly become moralfags," says Hubris, using the term for hackers who focus on political and moral causes instead of amoral pranks. "Anonymous has never been about revolutions. It's not about the betterment of mankind. It's the Internet hate machine, or that's what it's supposed to be."
Backtrace has posted a triple-encrypted torrent file labeled "insurance"a tip of the hat to WikiLeakson its website, BacktraceSecurity.com, and says it's posting hundreds of links to copies on filesharing sites. Early next week the group plans to release the keys to unlock that file, which contains the names, pseudonyms, chat logs and methods of the Anonymous hackers. It's a tactic, Hubris says, designed to cause "maximum fear and distress" for the individuals Backtrace is outing.
Backtrace's members largely haven't been active in Anonymous for yearsHubris says he only participated in the anti-Scientology protests in 2009 and none of its more recent operations. But he and others with Backtrace gained access to Anonymous hackers' information by infiltrating the group with false identities and other "social engineering" tricks that he says fooled members into revealing themselves. "The whole point of this is that we didn't break any laws," Hubris says. "All we did was hack peoples' minds, because they're fucking retarded."
An image from the group's site, Backtracesecurity.com

Backtrace hopes to turn those digital dark arts into a business. Hubris sent me a "mission statement" for the group that calls Backtrace "an information security provider" focusing on "psychological operations/social engineering and deep investigative research."
"Backtrace Security assists our clients predict and neutralize emerging social threats," the statement reads. "While other security companies specialize in hardware/software vulnerabilities and exploitation; Backtrace specializes in the human experience."
And doesn't the group fear the same retaliation from Anonymous that hit HBGary Federal, the last firm to claim it could identify Anonymous' leaders? In that case, Anonymous spilled 71,000 of the company's emails onto the Web, defaced the company's website, and hijacked the Twitter account of Aaron Barr, its chief executive. After a variety of dirty tricks were revealed in the company's hacked emails, including proposals to launch cyberattacks on WikiLeaks and threaten its supporters, Barr resigned from the company.
Hubris says he's confident Backtrace won't face the same fate. He calls the Anonymous hackers "script kiddies" and downplays their skills, arguing that the HBGary hack was based merely on the company's reusing passwords and falling victim to social engineering. "If you do enough damage to someone, you don't have to fear retaliation." says Hubris. "Once the world sees who these kids are and what they stand for, no one will follow them."
Hubris hopes to launch Backtrace as a startup while also calling attention to what he sees as Anonymous' hypocrisy. "They say they fight for free speech, but then they use fear and intimidation, like Scientology or Fox News," he says. "That's not freeodm of speech, and we won't put up with that crap."
And how would Hubris prefer Anonymous spend its time? "Making fun of stupid people on the Internet. Laughing at natural disasters. Like back to the good old days," he says. "Not trying to overthrow governments."

[Peter Lemkin]

The fight between Twitter and the US government on WikiLeaks information that the social network possesses was in court again on Tuesday. WikiLeaks has been targeting the Maghreb with leaks since the uprisings began, and Julian Assange has already indicated that this may form part of his defence against the justice department's case against him. By SIPHO HLONGWANE.


On Tuesday Virginia federal judge Theresa Buchanan heard arguments between the US justice department and social networking and micro-blogging site Twitter. The US authorities wanted Twitter to hand over information relating to WikiLeaks in a bid to gather evidence against Julian Assange which could show he had colluded with US military serviceman Bradley Manning in obtaining secret documents published on various news sites and WikiLeaks. The defence argued against this, invoking the First Amendment, and also requested that the judge make public the prosecution's affidavit about why it needed the information in the first place. Buchanan reserved her judgment, and did not reveal when she would make her ruling.

The matter is before a judge because Twitter's crack legal team, led by Alexander Macgillivray, challenged a secret subpoena obtained by the justice department, requiring Twitter to release certain information to them. The subpoena mainly covers Assange, Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir, and computer hackers Jacob Applebaum and Rop Gonggrijp, but could also include information in the hands of hundreds of other people. The document was made public at Twitter's request as well. WikiLeaks alleges other sites like Google and Facebook have been subpoenaed too.

According to a WikiLeaks press release, the organising intended to turn this into a First Amendment issue. "Tuesday's case in Virginia involves the US government seeking to obtain vast amounts of private information that would jeopardise and chill First Amendment rights of association, of expression, of political assembly, of speech," the statement said.

"At its essence it seeks information that can be converted into a list of individuals, across the globe, who have followed, communicated with, and received messages from WikiLeaks the very sort of government intrusion into basic freedoms that the Supreme Court ruled was prohibited by the First Amendment," WikiLeaks said.

WikiLeaks (or at least Assange) seemed to be wanting to exploit the uprisings in the Maghreb and Middle East as a reason why the US government should leave them alone. In the statement, Assange said: "This is an outrageous attack by the Obama administration on the privacy and free speech rights of Twitter's customers - many of them American citizens. More shocking, at this time, is that it amounts to an attack on the right to freedom of association, a freedom that the people of Tunisia and Egypt, for example, spurred on by the information released by Wikileaks, have found so valuable."

According to AFP, Assange said to Australia's Special Broadcasting Service that WikiLeaks had "no doubt" sparked the Middle East revolts by being "significantly influential" in the fall of Tunisia's Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Assange reportedly said: "It does seem to be the case that material we published through a Lebanese newspaper, Al Akhbar, was significantly influential to what happened in Tunisia. And then there's no doubt that Tunisia was the example for Egypt and Yemen and Jordan, and all the protests that have happened there."

The world can now add WikiLeaks to the growing list of "things" that started Tunisia's "Burning Man" and Egypt's 25 January revolutions, including Obama's Cairo speech, Condoleezza Rice's Cairo speech, Facebook, Twitter, Bush's Iraq war (no, really, ask Glenn Beck) and Andile Lungisa's NYDA conference.

What is certainly true is that the leaked diplomatic cables being published by the Guardian are from the Maghreb and the Middle East, and very well timed. Between 6 and 11 January, the Guardian was publishing leaks about the International Whaling Commission, Greece's asylum issues and Switzerland's counter-terrorism initiatives. From 18 January, four days after Ben Ali fled from Tunisia, the leaks shifted to the Middle East, starting with Turkey, then moving on to France's involvement in Tunisia. The first cable on Egypt after the first uprisings was published on 28 January and detailed a discussion with Mubarak's son on Iran and the Gaza.

To date, WikiLeaks has published 97 cables which purportedly emanated from the US embassy in Cairo. Of those, 83 were published after 28 January. So far, WikiLeaks has released 3,891 documents from its cache of 251,287 cables.

The Twitter subpoeanas form one small facet in the case the US justice department hopes to build against WikiLeaks. On Tuesday, the leaks-publishing site didn't appear at the US court hearings; Assange is caught up in his own case in London fighting extradition to Sweden on charges of sexual impropriety. There is still a long way to go before Assange, or anyone else at WikiLeaks, knows whether they will ever have to face a judge in the US. In the meantime, they will probably look at where to start a new people's revolution. Or at least claim credit for it.

[Peter Lemkin]

http://advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/2...its-users/

[Peter Lemkin]

With all the hoopla that seems eternally to surround WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, one might easily have formed the impression that WikiLeaks is a thriving concern, and that Assange himself is still the world's most powerful and effective champion of press freedom. While it's true that WikiLeaks has accomplished great things, initiating a powerful worldwide movement toward transparency and free speech, a closer look reveals that recent defections have badly crippled the WikiLeaks organization and that the increasingly erratic, mercurial Assange may have shot his bolt. The defectors have moved on and are developing a successor site, OpenLeaks, which seems likely to take up where WikiLeaks left off.

WikiLeaks has been unable to accept submissions of new documents for over six months. According to former WikiLeaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg's recent book, Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website, that is because WikiLeaks is no longer in possession of the secure submission platform built by a programmer identified in the book only as "the architect." Both Domscheit-Berg and the architect broke with Assange in September 2010 along with at least four other staffers. When he departed the architect apparently packed up his intellectual property and took it with himsince he felt that WikiLeaks was not being run properly, taking his software back meant that at least he couldn't be held responsible for any disasters arising from its use.

This submission system is a maze of encryptions and techno-obfuscations spread across a worldwide network, designed to make the identity and whereabouts of potential whistleblowers completely untraceable. The implementation of such a system is far more difficult than it might sound. A few things are absolutely necessary in order to prevent all kinds of mess from occurring, both for the leak sites and for the informants they enable. First, there must be no earthly way of knowing where the material comes from, not even under the legal compulsion of a government or court. Second, the material has to be encrypted, so that it can't be read by anyone who might want to steal it. Third, the material has to be kept absolutely secure, backed up in many safe places. This is the sort of system eventually devised by the architect on behalf of WikiLeaks, before he became so furious with Julian Assange that he pulled up stakes and vamoosed.

Other whistleblower initiatives such as the Al Jazeera Transparency Unit, BalkanLeaks
et al. ask (but do not always require) that those submitting documents use the anonymous Tor network to transmit their material across the web. GreenLeaks, which is focused on environmental issues, requests submission by post: you put your stuff on a pen drive and send it along in the mail. You'd think that even one of Len Deighton's lowliest goons could foil this system (wait by mailbox in trenchcoat, etc.), but what the GreenLeaks submissions strategy really suggests is the vulnerability of Internet traffic to detection. This group has decided that, for the moment at least, the ordinary post is safer.

It seems unlikely that just using Tor servers would be enough to protect a source's anonymity completely. Apparently it is possible to track users coming in and out of the Tor network, for example. Though a knowledgeable computer user could protect himself by using anonymous public Wi-Fi connections and so on, until OpenLeaks (or equiv.) is online and able to offer a securely anonymous system for submissions, would-be whistleblowers will be taking more than the ideal zero amount of risk by sending their information over the Internet.

Packet-sniffing technology was scary enough ten years ago. Today it's safe to assume that determined parties can track nearly everything that takes place online. With the kind of heat there must be on every stray packet that even brushes up against the various WikiLeaks domains, it would be crazy for them to accept submissions until they've rebuilt a new, rock-solid system. Thus the architect's departure last September meant that WikiLeaks could no longer accept new documents safely.

In a sense, WikiLeaks has been closed for business since that day.

I don't know exactly why, as of the end of 2010, three months after our departure, the system is still not really back up on its feet. It shows that the current team is overtaxed and perhaps, to some extent at least, just not up to the job. It also shows how unsecure the system is. It has become a security risk for everyone involved.
Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Inside WikiLeaks

[Magda Hassan]

I'm not sure when that was written. I do know that wikileaks was working just fine the other week when I last checked but haven't been there for a few weeks. Daniel (and possibly co, not sure about them) is a bastard and it was allegedly he who sabotaged the file upload system when he flounced out the door. The rest of the Wikileaks team were busy dealing with the arrest and court cases, domain name disappearance and setting up mirrors, funding blockades by the banks and creditcard companies and the fall out from Daniels' alleged sabotage but they eventually got it back up. To act the way he did and when he did demonstrates he has no genuine interest in the wikileaks philosophy, transparency, whistleblower protection. He seems to be just a spoiled egotist who wanted more attention and threw a big dummy spit to get it.

[Peter Lemkin]

I'm not sure when that was written. I do know that wikileaks was working just fine the other week when I last checked but haven't been there for a few weeks. Daniel (and possibly co, not sure about them) is a bastard and it was allegedly he who sabotaged the file upload system when he flounced out the door. The rest of the Wikileaks team were busy dealing with the arrest and court cases, domain name disappearance and setting up mirrors, funding blockades by the banks and creditcard companies and the fall out from Daniels' alleged sabotage but they eventually got it back up. To act the way he did and when he did demonstrates he has no genuine interest in the wikileaks philosophy, transparency, whistleblower protection. He seems to be just a spoiled egotist who wanted more attention and threw a big dummy spit to get it.

Magda, it was my understanding for months too that Daniel was the villain in the piece. I guess the question was if the anonymous programmer who developed the untraceable system for submitting leaks also defected or was forced to - and if that has damaged Wikileaks input. I'm sure they have enough information for years of output still. Another question would be if someone like Berg just had different ideas, or was a Trojan horse to destroy from within..... Time will tell.

[Magda Hassan]

I don't know if he was trojan to begin with but he sure has gone to the other side. Enticed or by his own volition I don't know. Yes, he damaged it, or tried to. But Wikileaks has also been set up so that it can perpetuate itself and is not dependent on any one person or one group of people. So what damage he did was fixed by others. Meanwhile he is touting for business and putting down the competition to make himself look better. And some are buying his story...

[Peter Lemkin]

While there are likely many programmers and white-hackers who would be able to build a secure system for submitting materials anonymously, it seems that even Assange [who has a very powerful white-hacking background] was unable to invent this, and had someone other do it. I hope they find a new person who can - or have already. Very strange is the system, apparently, set up by the group Green Leaks, where they ask the person to put the information without any indication of who they are on a flash disk and post it to Green leaks. There seem to be so many flaws here. First, sometimes post just doesn't arrive, and second intelligence agencies will just pick up, open and stop any such arrivals to Green Leaks [or replace with opposite information]. Lastly, most people would not know how to remove their fingerprints, DNA, mailing location, etc. from the flash drive....by which they could be traced.

[Peter Lemkin]

A federal grand jury is meeting at 11 am EST in Alexandria, Virginia. The grand jury is being employed to "build" a case against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who just won a gold medal for peace and justice from the Sydney Peace Foundation.
"The WikiLeaks case is part of a much broader campaign by the Obama administration to crack down on leakers," writes Carrie Johnson of NPR. Johnson is one of a few reporters in the US press who has published a report today on this stirring development in the United States. She finds "national security experts" cannot "remember a time when the Justice Department has pursued so many criminal cases based on leaks of government secrets."
The number of people subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury is unclear (and not in any of the few news articles published on the grand jury so far). What is known is that at least one individual from Cambridge was issued a subpoena seeking to compel him to testify before a Grand Jury. Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com reported the individual served had a public link to the WikiLeaks case and it was "highly likely" the subpoena was connected to the WikiLeaks Grand Jury investigation.
There are two other federal Grand Juries that are ongoing in the country. In San Jose, California, a Grand Jury has been empanelled to investigate the "hacktivist" group, Anonymous. Another Grand Jury in Chicago has been empanelled to target antiwar, labor and international solidarity activists for their political action.
The last news reports on the Grand Jury investigating Anonymous came in the beginning of February. Then the Grand Jury began to review "evidence" in multistate raids that took place on January 27. The "evidence" includes "computers and mobile phones seized from suspected leaders" and was to be used to investigate the "denial-of-service attacks" the group launched in December against MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and the UK-based Moneybookers.com.
There are not many details known. What is evident is those who are serving on the Grand Jury are working to piece together all the information that they have on Anonymous so the government might have a case, which could then lead to indictments.
Much further along in the grand jury process is the Grand Jury in Chicago. In fact, just days ago one of the activists, Hatem Abudayyeh, had his and his wife's bank accounts frozen by the US Treasury Department. He and twenty-three activists from Chicago, Minneapolis and the greater Midwest have been subpoenaed to testify before a Grand Jury on suspicions of providing material support to foreign terrorist groups, Abudayyeh and thirteen other activists had their homes raided by the FBI back in September of last year. The activists were called to appear before a Grand Jury in October. More activists were raided and subpoenaed, bringing the total number of activists facing investigation to twenty-three by the end of the year. The activists were called to appear before the Grand Jury in Chicago on January 25 of this year. They all refused to testify.
The activists subpoenaed consider the Grand Jury investigation to be a "fishing expedition." That, in fact, may be how Julian Assange and staff members of Wikileaks view the WikiLeaks Grand Jury investigation.
A statement on "Grand Juries" posted on the Coalition to Stop FBI Repression website explains the nature and processes of a federal grand jury.
A grand jury is a panel of jurors who hear evidence from a prosecutor and decide whether or not to charge someone with a crime. The grand jury can subpoena pretty much anyone they want and ask about anything, and people can be jailed for contempt if they do not answer questions. The jurors are hand-picked by prosecutors with no screen for bias. All evidence is presented by a prosecutor in a cloak of secrecy. The prosecutor has no responsibility to present evidence that favors those being investigated. Grand jury witnesses have no right to have a lawyer in the room to object to how the prosecutor is conducting the proceedings.
The grand jury process "dates back to the Nixon administration's attack on the social movements of the 1970s." One can surmise from the statement that Anonymous, WikiLeaks and antiwar, labor and international solidarity activists have become ensnared in a grand jury process that is "neither fair nor even handed, no matter who is in charge."
A more detailed explanation of the grand jury process can be found in the archives of Firedoglake.com. User Masoninblue explains typically 17 to 23 citizens serve on the grand jury and meet once per week for about 18 months to hear witness testimony, review evidence and vote on the issuing of indictments. The Fifth Amendment requires all federal felony prosecutions to be by grand jury indictment "unless a defendant waives his right to be prosecuted by indictment and agrees to be prosecuted by information."
A grand jury's chief task is to vote on whether the government has "presented sufficient evidence to establish probable cause that the defendant(s) have committed crime(s) charged. Twelve members vote to approve the indictment. A "foreperson" of the grand jury hands down the indictment to a District Court Clerk's Office.
Grand juries do not typically decline to issue indictments. All twenty-three of the subpoenaed activists are currently bracing themselves for indictments and have launched a "Pledge of Resistance" campaign to organize support for when they are indicted.
It is likely those subpoenaed in investigations of WikiLeaks and Anonymous will in the end be indicted too.
In case the process does not yet sound unfair or unjust, like something that can be used as "a tool for political repression," consider the following:
Grand juries meet in secret and its members take an oath never to discuss what happens inside the grand jury room. The only other people present in the room when the grand jury is in session are a court reporter who transcribes the proceedings, a federal prosecutor who presents the government's case, the case agent who is the law enforcement officer in charge of the investigation, and the witness who is testifying. Witnesses may appear with counsel, but their attorney must wait outside the grand jury room while the witness is testifying. The witness must answer all questions truthfully under penalty of perjury. The witness can request a recess in response to a question in order to consult with counsel outside the grand jury room. The witness may refuse to answer any question on the ground that a truthful answer might tend to incriminate the witness, or lead to the discovery of evidence that might tend to incriminate the witness. Since the Fifth Amendment protects this privilege to refuse to answer, no witness can be punished for refusing to answer a question on the basis of asserting the Fifth Amendment. Properly subpoenaed witnesses who refuse to appear before the grand jury, or who appear but refuse to answer questions without asserting the Fifth Amendment, may be held in contempt of the grand jury and jailed until such time as they agree to answer the question, or the grand jury term expires, whichever happens first.
These details can all be confirmed by Tom Burke, one of the twenty-three activists subpoenaed to appear before the Grand Jury in Chicago:
As an activist or any citizen, you're called to face a grand jury where there's no judge in the proceedings. There's only the US prosecutor. It's like a preemptive trial. So the US prosecutor gets to pick the 23 jurors. There's no one from your side in the room. The US prosecutor guides the 23 through the process. They tend to want to help and identify with the prosecutor. They just hear one side of the story. When you enter the room, your lawyer is not allowed to be with you. You have to excuse yourself and go to the hallway to talk. Media is not allowed to watch it and you can't have your family or friends support you in the room either.
The shady nature of the grand jury process has led all twenty-three activists being investigated to refuse to testify. They stand in solidarity and may face jail time. They know there may be consequences for not providing testimony, but they are convinced the Grand Jury they are being called to appear before is part of a new McCarthyism in America.
This is a choice those subpoenaed to testify in Alexandria can make. Those asked to speak on WikiLeaks' operations can refuse to give testimony. If individuals subponeaed know the others who are being called before the grand jury, they can stand together united against a "fishing expedition" that seeks to conjure up a case.
It is not obvious or clear that any crime has been committed, but the government feels a burden, perhaps because of the political climate soured by Republican politicians, to prosecute and hold responsible at least someone they can claim was involved in recent WikiLeaks releases.
The government is likely to use information obtained through an order for Twitter user data from the accounts of three individuals linked to WikiLeaks: member of Icelandic Parliament, Birgitta Jonsdottir, Rop Gonggrijp, founder of Internet service provider XS4ALL, and Jacob Appelbaum, a computer programmer. Legal questions surrounding the obtaining of this data for investigating WikiLeaks may be all the more reason for those subpoenaed to testify to refuse to appear before the grand jury.
WikiLeaks has urged those seeking protection to contact the Center for Constitutional Rights.