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U.S. Says WikiLeaks Release Would Endanger Lives


November 28, 2010

U.S. Says WikiLeaks Release Would Endanger LivesBy REUTERS
Published: November 28, 2010
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. Filed at 8:43 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The State Department has warned the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks that its expected release of classified U.S. documents would endanger countless lives, jeopardize American military operations and hurt international cooperation on global security issues.

The department's top lawyer urged WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in a letter Saturday to keep classified documents off the website, remove records of them from its database and return any material to the U.S. government.

Lawyer Harold Koh said the department has learned that WikiLeaks provided about 250,000 documents to The New York Times, The Guardian of Britain and German magazine Der Spiegel.

Some media reports indicated the news outlets may post stories on the documents as early as Sunday and said they have also been given to newspapers Le Monde in France and El Pais in Spain.

Koh wrote that publication of the documents would "place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals" as well as military initiatives and cooperation between countries to confront problems from terrorism to pandemic disease.

The lawyer also rejected what he said was Assange's request for more information about individuals who might be at risk from publication of the documents.

"We will not engage in a negotiation regarding the further release or dissemination of illegally obtained U.S. Government classified materials," Koh wrote.

The letter echoed concerns expressed by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, in an interview with CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS."

"I would hope that those who are responsible for this would, at some point in time, think about the responsibility that they have for lives that they're exposing and the potential that's there and stop leaking this information," Mullen said in the interview due to air Sunday.

Past releases by WikiLeaks, founded by Assange, an Australian-born computer hacker, contained sensitive information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which the U.S. government had said compromised national security and put some people at risk.


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Here, I'll ask first this time......

How about the tea party ballots? Is Wikileaks gonna release any info on this or are you going to release it mac??????

In many ways I'd like to see us assassinate this guy who runs this website.

Unfortunately, with the internet, I feel like someone else will create it.

Because of this the people giving these leaks should be found and held for treason. It's absolutely ridiculous that we just seem to allow this to happen. Any Government Worker releasing info like this should understand that the risk of this is being shot.

I really don't see what other options we have. I guess we can still capture the guy running the website as a spy and set the precedent that we will send our CIA anywhere to stop this kind of activity.

I'm kinda surprised NSA hasn't launched a denial of service attack on this site yet. You'd think they would have the means to do something like that. :: shrug ::

jc Well, it's hit the fan. There are too many leaks to post. Check out Drudge, they have links to most of them.

So you hire a better hacker to hack his site and PC.

The day someone in Russia starts to wiki leak, is the day the "leak-er" ends up on wiki-obits. Our country used to have balls, intelligence and zero tolerance and would have taken care of things like this. Sign of the "progressive" times.

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I still fail to see what's wrong with WikiLeaks exposing shady foreign policy.

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Yeah, who cares if a few tidbits of vital national security issues are thrown in as well.

I'm looking at this from a different perspective...how the hell did this happen?

The military used to have very high standards when it came to the quality of individuals they enlisted to do jobs in the intelligence field...handling and analyzing classified information.

How Bradley Manning passed the basic security check to get into the military intelligence field is a mystery...yet the Army gives this guy one of the highest security clearances and sends him to Baghdad, Iraq to do a sensitive job analyzing intelligence.

I read that in Iraq, the Army allowed Manning to walk in and out of his secure work area carrying his own personal CD player that was loaded with blank CDs which Manning then used to download classified information then he just walked out with it, no questions asked...obviously no one even checked him out.

Even worse, the military security was so lax in Iraq that Manning was able to hack into State Dept. computers while on duty and download classified info onto his "phony" Lady GaGa CD (blank disc).

Anyone remember back when there were stories about the military lowering their enlistment standards to maintain recruiting goals?

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I'm looking at this from a different perspective...how the hell did this happen?

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There are many reasons how this happens.. there is no one answer, but here are some contributing factors...

1. We live in an age of continued mistrust of our government.. it started to grow in the 60s and has grown from being something the fringe radicals did to something pretty much everybody does. Some will say this mistrust is for good reason.. I'm not going to argue that. I'm just going to say that very few people in this country have the level of trust that the folks in the 50s had.. and we likely never will again. Very very very few people will ask what they can do for their country.... without at least thinking about what their country can also do for them...

2. Political correctness has woven its way into the military and the intelligence communities. Just like the Ft. Hood shooter, as we found there was AMPLE evidence to have predicted he was a potential radical Islamist but nobody said anything out of fear of being called a racist or a bigot.... "Don't ask don't tell" isn't just a sexual policy any more... there are a lot of things they won't/can't ask for fear of appearing biased or prejudicial...

3. A lot of people are wrapped up in their own "15 minutes of fame" world... where it's all about THEM... no matter who else pays for it and I'm not talking about money... whatever somebody has to do, whoever they have to hurt, as long as they get their 15 minutes of fame, their potential book and movie deal, etc... that's what its about.

those are a few of the quick reasons.. each one has many sub-reasons if you want to break it down... the 4th one is the ease and speed by which information can be disseminated... 30 years ago even if somebody was inclined to steal classified information they would sell it to the highest international bidder and we'd likely never hear about it.. posting it on the internet wasn't really an option.. and if you sold it to a newspaper back then, some of them had enough integrity to not print it if it really could endanger people... those days are gone...

Don't get me wrong, there are still a lot of fine people serving and doing their jobs the right way, but with the way information travels it's just too easy to focus on the rest.

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2. Political correctness has woven its way into the military and the intelligence communities. Just like the Ft. Hood shooter, as we found there was AMPLE evidence to have predicted he was a potential radical Islamist but nobody said anything out of fear of being called a racist or a bigot.... "Don't ask don't tell" isn't just a sexual policy any more... there are a lot of things they won't/can't ask for fear of appearing biased or prejudicial...

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I look at it as more of a poor work ethic/complacency/lack of discipline issue. The latest generations feel it is okay to perhaps bring a CD to work to listen to while in the past that was never an acceptable behavior. I even liken it to some people on this very board that joke at times about sneaking time on here while at work. They think its okay to do that......and I'm sure some bosses overlook it when they shouldn't.

Brace for the post-WikiLeaks information big chill

By KIMBERLY DOZIER and ANNE GEARAN
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) -- After the latest WikiLeaks revelations, the government is setting in motion a new information "big chill," reversing almost a decade of post-Sept. 11 efforts to nudge U.S. officials into sharing sensitive documents.

The Pentagon has detailed new security safeguards, including restraints on small computer flash drives, to make it harder for any one person to copy and reveal so many secrets. The clampdown parallels efforts at other agencies.

For the military it represents a throttling back of initiatives to let other agencies see more of the vast trove of data the Pentagon collects. The new attitude may also make intelligence information less widely available to low-level soldiers serving at "the tip of the spear" in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The tightening of sensitive information comes as the Obama administration Monday branded the leak of more than a quarter-million diplomatic memos an attack on the United States and raised the prospect of criminal prosecution against the online clearinghouse WikiLeaks.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said WikiLeaks acted illegally in posting the material. Speaking in between calls to foreign capitals as she made amends for the posting of the unvarnished memos, Clinton said the administration was taking "aggressive steps to hold responsible those who stole this information."

Attorney General Eric Holder said the government was mounting a criminal investigation. The latest disclosures, involving classified and sensitive State Department documents, jeopardized the security of the nation, its diplomats, intelligence assets and relationships with foreign governments, Holder said.

U.S. officials say they already see the information chill setting in. One official in contact with U.S. military and diplomatic staff in Iraq said the State Department and other agencies are tightening information-sharing and restricting access between the Army and nonmilitary agencies. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sharing of classified information.

Access to much of that diplomatic material had been loosened after the Sept. 11 attacks. The success of the al-Qaida plot was blamed in part on evidence that the U.S. intelligence community had adequate information on the impending attacks but failed to connect the dots because it did not share its intelligence. The walling-off of such critical information is known as "stovepiping."

As part of the 9/11 Commission reforms, the position of director for national intelligence was created to serve as nexus and arbiter for the 16-agency intelligence community and to ensure stovepiping was avoided. Various government agencies were given access to terminals in each other's data systems. In the case of the Pentagon and State Department, it brought wholesale sharing of information on the same computer system.

That loosened access may have helped enable a lone Army private to obtain sensitive files. Bradley Manning is being held in a maximum-security military brig at Quantico, Va., and though he has not yet been charged in the latest release of internal U.S. government documents, WikiLeaks has hailed him as a hero.

Officials said Manning is the prime suspect in the leaks partly because of his own description of how he pulled off his heist of classified and restricted material. "No one suspected a thing," Manning told a confidant afterward, according to a log of his computer chat published by Wired.com. "I didn't even have to hide anything."

Manning is charged in military court with taking other classified material that was later published by WikiLeaks. It is not clear whether others, such as WikiLeaks executives, might be charged separately in civilian courts.

Manning may have defeated Pentagon security systems using little more than a Lady Gaga CD and a portable computer memory stick. In his Internet chat, he said he brought a homemade music CD to work with him, erased the music and replaced it with secrets. He told a computer hacker who later turned him in that he lip-synched along with the pop singer's hit "Telephone" while making off with "possibly the largest data spillage in American history."

"Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counterintelligence, inattentive signal analysis," Manning wrote. "A perfect storm."

Joel Brenner, the nation's top counterintelligence executive from 2006 to 2009, said he had warned that the loosened intelligence networks after Sept. 11 invited massive leaks.

"The idea that you can share information without increasing the risk of leaking is foolishness," he said. "That doesn't mean you don't share, but you have to be really careful about how you do it."

Brenner said he argued for a costly overhaul of most U.S. intelligence sharing systems. His recommendations focused on reforming how the systems are engineered, so they automatically barred access or allowed only tiered access to certain information and controlling and monitoring who has access and how the access is used.

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., on the House Intelligence committee, says he'd already heard from U.S. intelligence professionals that they "won't put information up on the (classified) SIPR net," which is the military's information highway.

SIPR is short for Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, and it's thought to be the route by which accused leaker Manning accessed the information.

After 9/11, the cash-strapped State Department adopted use of the SIPR net because it meant easier sharing of information with the military, according to Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas. The two organizations have been called on to work far more closely together in recent years under the doctrine of counterinsurgency.

But until access to that system is changed or somehow modified, diplomats "are going to put a lot less in cables now," predicted former CIA director and retired Gen. Michael Hayden. He said people would likely "stick to phone calls," depriving policymakers of necessary decision-making information.

Hayden urged intelligence professionals not to reverse the data sharing that was encouraged after the intelligence failures of 9/11. Sharing information "like a network, point-to-point, instead of trickling down from the top has been a war-winner," he said. Still, he too called for more monitoring of who is accessing what and how.

Thornberry said the House intelligence committee will probably hold hearings early next year on how to improve computer security. He said the State Department latched onto the military system without thinking through how widely available that information would become.

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I got a real simple, two-part solution for this Mr. Manning.

1. A rope

2. A tree

http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeti...set=&ccode=


Exclusive: WikiLeaks Will Unveil Major Bank Scandal
by Andy Greenberg
Monday, November 29, 2010

ShareretweetEmailPrintFirst WikiLeaks spilled the guts of government. Next up: The private sector, starting with one major American bank.

In an exclusive interview earlier this month, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Forbes that his whistleblower site will release tens of thousands of documents from a major U.S. financial firm in early 2011. Assange wouldn't say exactly what date, what bank, or what documents, but he compared the coming release to the emails that emerged in the Enron trial, a comprehensive look at a corporation's bad behavior. More from Forbes.com:


"It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume," he told me.

"You could call it the ecosystem of corruption," Assange added. "But it's also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that's not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they're fulfilling their own self-interest."

WikiLeaks recent priority has clearly been the publication of hundreds of thousands of government documents: 76,000 classified documents from the war in Afghanistan, another 392,000 from Iraq, and on Sunday, the first piece of an ongoing exposure of what will likely be millions of diplomatic messages sent between the U.S. State Department and its embassies.

But that government focus doesn't mean WikiLeaks won't embarass corporations, too. Since October, WikiLeaks has closed its submissions channel; Assange says the site was receiving more documents than it could find resources to publish. And half those unpublished submissions, Assange says, relate to the private sector. He confirmed that WikiLeaks has damaging, unpublished material from pharmaceutical companies, finance firms (aside from the upcoming bank release), and energy companies, just to name a few industries.

Whether and when those secrets come out is solely a matter of Assange's discretion. "We're in a position where we have to prioritize our resources so that the biggest impact stuff gets released first."

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"It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume," he told me.

"You could call it the ecosystem of corruption," Assange added.

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I think we've pretty much known "backroom" deals take place all the time in banks and major corporations..

I don't have a problem with this kind of exposure.. My problem is with people that expose goverment secrets that could get people killed...

Julian Assange is 39 years old. I wonder what the over / under on his making it to 40 is?

What I find interesting is there's all this backlash due to the possible danger it puts operatives, but no one batted an eye when Scooter Libby got his sentence commuted after he intentionally exposed the identity of a CIA agent for political retribution.

I don't think anyone defended what Libby did, at all.

I think the debates were more about the extent and nature of what was done and who all played what part(s) in it. Who knew what, etc...




Technically speaking, while what this guy is doing is ethically unsound, he really isn't doing anything wrong (and it pains me to think that). He has no legal or other obligation to the preservation of the secrecy. I do wonder, however, what statutes on international espionage he may be violating... but my guess is zero, or he would have been shut down and silenced by now.


I am looking forward to January when they release their info on some major US bank.

Well from what I understand the US government is trying to figure out if the Espionage Act applies to him, which IMO it doesn't as he is not actively breaking laws. Like you said, you can argue the ethics of it, but as it stands, what he is doing right now is legal.

There are two sides to it that I can see:

1. If he is in violation of U.S. Espionage laws, he could be subject to extradition. One could easily establish the argument that what he is doing is nothing short of being an intermediary in espionage against the United States.

2. Along similar lines, what he is doing may violate international treaties.

I think the fact that he is the intermediary is the sticking point. There are a lot of legal challenges in this case. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

On one side, you can claim he is just a journalist
On the other, you can argue that he is an instigator

We will see where the hammer falls, but as of now, and this is just my opinion, he is only exposing shady dealings and I have not seen him directly endanger the lives of Americans. If that changes, then I think the whole argument changes.

He most certainly could be assassinated if he is acting as an enemy of the United States in a time of war.

He doesn't need to be assassinated, he just might "disappear"...

We don't need to go after him, we need to after the people that are supplying him with the information. He is just a conduit, a portal, a place to display the information. He is not breaking into government facilities and stealing information, other people are doing the stealing, he is just the clearinghouse for that information.. we need to concentrate on the sources..

There's an article linked off of an article on Yahoo News about how the Kremlin is quite displeased with him and how they "don't play by the same rules".


Moscow's bid to blow up WikiLeaks

I see that.. You don't suppose that Putin plays by the rules?

The same rules as whom.... The U.S. - or Stalin