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shruggy63 Banned
Joined: 06 May 2009 Total posts: 204 Gender: Unknown |
 Posted: 11-06-2010 21:59 Post subject: Wikileaks |
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Wikileaks seems to be really under fire (pun intended) at the time of writing! Log on now if you can. This is conspiracy to suppress information in action.
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| WhistlingJack Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Total posts: 4297 Location: The Sewers of The Strand Age: 9 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 31-07-2010 15:48 Post subject: |
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I feel it may be useful to maintain this thread as a depository for stories about Wikileaks, rather than them being scattered randomly across the boards, so here goes: -
| Quote: | UK air traffic control goes after Wikileaks
Good luck with that
By John Oates
Posted in Government, 9th December 2009 15:23 GMT
The National Aviation and Transport Services (NATS) is threatening legal action against Wikileaks because the website has published a recording of the crashing of BA flight 038, call sign Speedbird 38, which came down just short of the Heathrow runway in 2008.
Earlier this month Wikileaks published an audio recording of air traffic controllers seeing, and reacting to, the crash and images of the control system. The Boeing 777 hit the ground just on the threshold of the runway at Heathrow. There were injuries, but no deaths.
NATS is claiming absolute copyright over the recording.
Richard Churchill-Coleman, general counsel and company secretary for NATS wrote to Wikileaks claiming copyright but also justifying the move. He said the tape was part of an ongoing investigation and that the confidentiality of evidence in such an inquiry was vital.
Churchill-Coleman said this atmosphere of confidentiality allowed air traffic controllers and pilots to give evidence freely without fearing the consequences. This atmosphere makes it easier for lessons to be learned and therefore air safety improved.
He added that the recording: "adds little to the public good apart from satisfying the public's general curiosity".
Wikileaks does not often obey such takedown notices and is unlikely to do so in this case.
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| WhistlingJack Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Total posts: 4297 Location: The Sewers of The Strand Age: 9 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 31-07-2010 15:54 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Congressmen steam over Wikileaks TSA breach
I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll achieve very little
By Chris Williams
Posted in Government, 11th December 2009 14:24 GMT
Three US Congressmen, outraged that parts of US government airport security manuals were inadvertently published and then posted on Wikileaks and Cryptome, are demanding to know what legal weapons are available against whistleblowing websites.
Republicans Peter King, Charles Dent and Gus Bilirakis wrote to the Department of Homeland Security this week with a series of questions about the bodged publication of a Transport Security Administration (TSA) document.
The manual revealed standard screening procedures at airports. Sensitive portions had been redacted before it was published, but a simple cut-and-paste operation beat the attempted blackout.
The results, which discussed limitations of screening equipment and procedures, were posted on Cryptome and Wikileaks.
In a letter the Congressmen asked: "How has the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration addressed the repeated reposting of this security manual to other websites and what legal action, if any, can be taken to compel its removal?"
The answer of course, as experience shows, is none.
Repeated legal huffing and puffing at Wikileaks by offshore banks, air traffic controllers, calculator makers and Scientologists has met with no success. Or at least no success that has had any effect, thanks to the site's global network of mirror servers.
Cryptome meanwhile specialises in national-security-related documents, and is long-versed in the celebrated strategy adopted by the respondent in Arkell v Pressdram.
But perhaps aware that takedown has proved impossible, the Republican trio also ask if DHS believes "criminal penalties necessary or desirable to ensure such information is not reposted in the future?"
The Congressmen's other questions are about TSA redaction procedures, how the blunder came about and what officials will do to avoid a repeat. Five individuals were suspended this week, pending an investigation.
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| WhistlingJack Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Total posts: 4297 Location: The Sewers of The Strand Age: 9 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 31-07-2010 16:35 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Iceland to be 'journalism haven'
By Chris Vallance, Reporter, BBC News
Iceland could become a "journalism haven" if a proposal put forward by some Icelandic MPs aided by whistle-blowing website Wikileaks succeeds.
The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), calls on the country's government to adopt laws protecting journalists and their sources.
It will be filed with the Althingi - Iceland's parliament - on 16 February.
If the proposal succeeds it will require the Icelandic government to consider introducing legislation.
Julian Assange, Wikileaks' editor, told BBC News that the idea was to "try and reform Iceland's media law to be a very attractive jurisdiction for investigative journalists".
He has been in Iceland for a number of weeks and is advising MPs on the IMMI.
The hope is that journalist-friendly laws will encourage media businesses to move to Iceland.
"If it then has these additional media and publishing law protections then it is likely to encourage the international press and internet start-ups to locate their services here," Mr Assange said.
He believes the political mood in Iceland is receptive to the need for change.
"The Icelandic press has itself suffered from libel tourism, so there does seem to be the political will to push this through."
Wikileaks is a non-profit website that has established a reputation for publishing leaked material.
In October 2009, it posted a list of names and addresses of people said to belong to the British National Party (BNP).
Other high-profile documents hosted on the site include a copy of the Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta, a document that detailed restrictions placed on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
It recently had to suspend operations because of a lack of funding.
The IMMI aims to pull together good practice from around the world and incorporate it into a single body of law.
"We've found good laws in different countries but no country that has all of these laws put together," said Mr Assange.
The proposal has been informed by Wikileaks' experience in fighting legal threats to publication.
"In my role as Wikileaks editor, I've been involved in fighting off many legal attacks," Mr Assange said in an e-mail.
"To do that, and keep our sources safe, we have had to spread assets, encrypt everything, and move telecommunications and people around the world to activate protective laws in different national jurisdictions.
"We've become good at it, and never lost a case, or a source, but we can't expect everyone to go through the extraordinary efforts that we do."
Measures in the IMMI include legal protection for sources and whistleblowers and the protection of communications between sources and journalists.
The proposals also include steps to end so-called "libel tourism", the practice of pursuing libel actions in the most favourable legal jurisdiction irrespective of where the parties are based.
But legal threats are faced not just by journalists, but by publishers, internet hosts and other "intermediaries", Wikileaks said. As a result, the proposals include plans to clarify the protection for "mere conduits".
Wikileaks has been working with a small group of Icelandic legislators on the issue.
One of the proposal's supporters, Birgitta Jonsdottir of The Movement, a political party with 3 MPs in the Icelandic parliament, told the BBC that she was confident the measure would become law.
"From what I have experienced from discussions with MPs from all the different parties, there is incredible good will," she said.
But the troubles of the financial sector may lead some Icelanders to be sceptical of efforts to transform their country and Ms Jonsdottir is aware of the need not to make exaggerated claims,
"We don't want to be the Vikings of transparency in the way the bankers presented themselves," she said.
But Ms Jonsdottir believes that making a strong statement in favour of freedom of expression could be a way for Iceland to create a positive new identity.
"There are still very many Icelanders who feel ashamed. I think it is part of the self-recovery we have to go through," she said.
At a meeting with a small group of Icelandic MPs about the IMMI, to which the BBC had exclusive access, Mr Assange stressed how Iceland's image would benefit from becoming a champion of free speech.
For example, one of the proposals calls for the creation of The Icelandic Prize for Freedom of Expression which "promotes Iceland and the values represented in this proposal".
Whether arguments like that are persuasive enough to convince a majority of Iceland's legislators remains to be seen. Mr Assange says that at present around 14 MPs are known to support the proposal.
There is also interest in the IMMI among some members of the Icelandic government.
The Icelandic Minister for Education Culture and Sports Katrin Jakobsdottir told the BBC that she thought that "the general idea was good" and said that she thought that it "might get positive support".
But she stressed that it was very early days and that the changes would involve many ministries.
She said that elements of the proposal coincided with changes to media law currently being considered by her department.
But not everyone is convinced of the need for an Icelandic "journalism haven".
Andrew Scott Senior, lecturer in law at the London School of Economics and a critic of the need for extensive libel reform in the UK, said that caution was needed.
"The provisions allowing defendants to counter-sue 'libel tourists' in their home courts could transform the humble Icelander into a legal superman, virtually untouchable abroad for comment written - and uploaded - at home," he said.
"Its debatable whether such laws are ever appropriate."
His view is not shared by Mr Assange.
"We have received approximately 100 legal threats in the past 18 months so we are keen to see legislation that protects the press and quality reporting", he said.
At present Wikileaks operates in a number of different jurisdictions to "take advantage of good laws," he said.
"It seems the Icelandic proposal is going to pull all those laws together and put them in one place."
Story from BBC NEWS:
Published: 2010/02/12 08:32:05 GMT
© BBC MMX |
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| WhistlingJack Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Total posts: 4297 Location: The Sewers of The Strand Age: 9 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 31-07-2010 16:42 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | WikiLeaks posts video from Iraq
WikiLeaks has posted a video on its website which it claims shows the killing of civilians by the US military in Baghdad in 2007.
The website's organisers say they were given the footage, which they say comes from cameras on US Apache helicopters.
They say they decrypted it, but would not reveal who gave it to them.
The WikiLeaks site campaigns for freedom of information and posts leaked documents online. So far there has been no official Pentagon response.
However, Reuters and the Associated Press have quoted unnamed US military officials as confirming the video was genuine.
The video, released on Monday, is of high quality and appears to be authentic, the BBC's Adam Brookes in Washington says.
It is accompanied by a recording of the pilots' radio transmissions and those of US troops on the ground.
The video shows a street in Baghdad and a group of about eight people, whom the helicopter pilots identify as armed insurgents.
The transmissions says of one of the individuals: "He's got an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade]. I'm going to fire."
After a voice on the transmission urges the pilot to "light 'em all up", the individuals on the street are shot by the gunship's cannon.
A few minutes later a van drives to the scene, and its occupants appear to start picking up a wounded person.
It, too, is fired upon. Altogether, around 12 people die.
The transmission continues: "Looks like we've got some slight movement from the van that was engaged. Looks like a kid."
US soldiers on the ground establish there are two child casualties and agree to take them to a hospital, according to the transmission.
"Well it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle," says a voice.
Two journalists working for Reuters were killed on the day the incident took place in July 2007.
A spokeswoman for the news agency said they were not sure if the individuals in the footage included those two Reuters journalists.
WikiLeaks has published a statement from Reuters news editor-in-chief David Schlesinger saying that the video was "graphic evidence of the dangers involved in war journalism and the tragedies that can result".
At the time, the US military said the helicopters were engaged in combat operations against a hostile force.
WikiLeaks said the video demonstrated that civilians had died in the incident, and that the US military's rules of engagement were flawed.
The website's organisers complained recently of coming under surveillance by the US government, and of harassment by other governments, ostensibly for their role in posting leaked documents on sensitive subjects.
Story from BBC NEWS:
Published: 2010/04/06 02:30:55 GMT
© BBC MMX |
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| WhistlingJack Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Total posts: 4297 Location: The Sewers of The Strand Age: 9 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 31-07-2010 16:50 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Wikileaks: More background material on Iraq massacre leak
Xeni Jardin at 8:25 PM Monday, Apr 5, 2010
Update, 9pm PT: The US military has issued a statement on the massacre investigation (6.52MB PDF).
An update on that video released earlier today by Wikileaks, which shows US occupying forces shooting and killing civilians—including two Reuters journalists—in Baghdad. Wikileaks has released additional photographs and video that provide more background. These include interviews with survivors of the attack: a widow and her two children and one of the last two photos taken by war photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen before he was shot by American airmen during the 2007 incident.
NYT item here. "Lots of people are avoiding talking about the murderous attack on the van and the wounded; and strawmanning camera/RPG confusion as the issue," Wikileaks tweets. The materials released just now address this issue.
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| WhistlingJack Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Total posts: 4297 Location: The Sewers of The Strand Age: 9 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 31-07-2010 16:52 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | US 'tracing' Iraq killings video
The US military says it is trying to retrieve the original video tapes of a controversial helicopter attack on a group of people in Iraq in 2007.
Footage of the attack was published on the internet by the website WikiLeaks.
Two of those killed were Reuters news agency employees whose cameras were mistaken for weapons, the US says.
The Pentagon has not questioned the video's authenticity but says it cannot make a complete verification until the original tapes have been located.
"We're attempting to retrieve the video from the unit who did the investigation," US Central Command spokesman Capt Jack Hanzlik was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency.
"We had no reason to hold the video [at Central Command] nor did the higher headquarters in Iraq," he added.
Helicopter crew can be heard celebrating on the video after firing at and killing alleged Iraqi insurgents, whom they refer to as "dead bastards".
A US military investigation into the attack concluded that correct rules of engagement were followed, despite the mistaken identification.
A spokesman for President Obama described the incident as "extremely tragic".
Story from BBC NEWS:
Published: 2010/04/07 10:21:19 GMT
© BBC MMX |
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| WhistlingJack Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Total posts: 4297 Location: The Sewers of The Strand Age: 9 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 31-07-2010 16:57 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | How Wikileaks shone light on world's darkest secrets
How does a website run by just five full-time staff generate so many scoops? Archie Bland investigates
Thursday, 8 April 2010
When the Ministry of Defence first came across Wikileaks, staffers were stunned. "There are thousands of things on here, I literally mean thousands," one of them wrote in an internal email in November 2008. "Everything I clicked on to do with MoD was restricted... it is huge." The website, an online clearing house for documents whose authors would generally prefer them to stay in the private domain, has since been banned from the MoD's internal computers, but it did no good: eventually, that email ended up on Wikileaks. And when a US Army counter-intelligence officer recommended that whistleblowers who leaked to the site be fired, that report ended up on Wikileaks too.
The authorities were right to be worried. If any further proof were needed of the website's extraordinary record in holding the authorities to account, it came this week, in the release of shocking video footage of a gung-ho US helicopter attack in Iraq that killed 12 people, including two unarmed employees of the Reuters news agency.
The US government had resisted Freedom of Information requests from Reuters for years. But when an anonymous whistleblower passed the video on to Wikileaks, all that quickly became futile. An edited version of the tape had received almost 4 million hits on YouTube by last night, and it led news bulletins around the world.
"This might be the story that makes Wikileaks blow up," said Sree Sreenivasan, a digital media professor at New York's Columbia Journalism School. "It's not some huge document with lots of fine print – you can just watch it and you get what it's about immediately. It's a whole new world of how stories get out."
And yet despite Wikileaks' commitment to the freedom of information, there is something curiously shadowy about the organisation itself. Founded, as the group's spokesman Daniel Schmitt (whose surname is a pseudonym) put it, with the intention of becoming "the intelligence agency of the people", the site's operators and volunteers – five full-timers, and another 1,000 on call – are almost all anonymous. Ironically, the only way the group's donors are publicly known is through a leak on Wikileaks itself. The organisation's most prominent figure is Julian Assange, an Australian hacker and journalist who co-founded the site back in 2006. While Assange and his cohorts' intentions are plainly laudable – to "allow whistleblowers and journalists who have been censored to get material out to the public", as he told the BBC earlier this year – some ask who watches the watchmen. "People have to be very careful dealing with this information," says Professor Sreenivasan. "It's part of the culture now, it's out there, but you still need context, you still need analysis, you still need background."
Against all of that criticism, Wikileaks can set a record that carries, as Abu Dhabi's The National put it, "more scoops in its short life than The Washington Post has in the past 30 years". By earning its place as the natural destination for anyone with sensitive information to leak who does not know and trust a particular journalist – so far, despite numerous court actions, not a single source has been outed – Wikileaks has built up a remarkable record.
Yes, it has published an early draft of the script for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Wesley Snipes' tax returns; but it has also published the "Climategate" emails, an internal Trafigura report on toxic dumping in Ivory Coast, and the standard operating procedures for Guantanamo Bay.
Whatever the gaps in its procedures, there is little doubt that the website is at the forefront of a new information era in which the powerful, corrupt and murderous will have to feel a little more nervous about their behaviour. "There are reasons I do it that have to do with wanting to reform civilisation," Assange said in an interview with salon.com last month. "Of course, there's a personal psychology to it, that I enjoy crushing bastards. I like a good challenge."
Full disclosure: What we wouldn't know without Wikileaks
Trafigura's super-injunction
When commodities giant Trafigura used a super-injunction to suppress the release of an internal report on toxic dumping in the Ivory Coast in newspapers, it quickly appeared on Wikileaks instead. Accepting that the release made suppression futile, Trafigura lifted the injunction.
The CRU's 'Climategate' leak
Emails leaked on the site showed that scientists at the UK's Climate Research Unit, including director Phil Jones, withheld information from sceptics
The BNP membership list
After the site published the BNP's secret membership list in November 2008, newspapers found teachers, priests and police officers among them. Another list was leaked last year. The police has since barred officers from membership.
Sarah Palin's emails
Mrs Palin's Yahoo email account, which was used to bypass US public information laws, was hacked and leaked during the presidential campaign. The hacker left traces of his actions, and could face five years in prison.
Copyright 2010 Independent Print Limited |
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| WhistlingJack Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Total posts: 4297 Location: The Sewers of The Strand Age: 9 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 31-07-2010 17:07 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Australian Wikileak founder's passport confiscated
TOM ARUP
May 17, 2010
Julian Assange, the Australian founder of the whistleblower website Wikileaks, says he had his passport taken away from him at Melbourne Airport and was later told by customs officials that it was about to be cancelled.
Last year Wikileaks published a confidential Australian blacklist of websites to be banned under the government's proposed internet filter.
The Age has been told that Assange's passport is classified ''normal'' on the immigration database, meaning the Wikileaks director can travel freely on it.
Assange told The Age his passport was taken from him by customs officials at Melbourne Airport when he entered the country last week after he was told ''it was looking worn''.
When the passport was returned to him after about 15 minutes, he says he was told by authorities that it was going to be or was cancelled.
Passports are routinely taken from travellers for short periods by immigration officials if they are damaged.
Wikileaks has risen to prominence for posting leaked footage of US forces laughing at the dead bodies of 12 people they had just killed in Iraq in 2007.
It was in the Australian spotlight last year after publishing a confidential blacklist of websites that forms the basis of the government's proposed internet filter.
The list as published by Wikileaks then blocked links to YouTube clips, sites on euthanasia, fringe religions, and traditional pornography - as well as the websites of a tour operator and a dentist.
The government says the intention is to block extreme sites depicting such things as child pornography, bestiality and rape.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority has also asked the Australian Federal Police to investigate the leaking and publishing of the Australian internet blacklist.
But a spokeswoman for the AFP said yesterday the federal police had dropped the case earlier this year because it was ''not in our jurisdiction''.
Assange said half an hour after his passport was returned to him, he was approached by an Australian Federal Police officer who searched one of his bags and asked him about his criminal record relating to computer hacking offences in 1991.
Assange's allegations about his passport were first made on SBS current affairs program Dateline, which aired a story on the Wikileaks founder.
Copyright © 2010 Fairfax Media |
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| WhistlingJack Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Total posts: 4297 Location: The Sewers of The Strand Age: 9 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 31-07-2010 17:26 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Julian Assange profiled in New Yorker
Mark Frauenfelder at 9:23 AM Monday, May 31, 2010
Julian Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks.org, a Web site that “collect[s] documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish[es] them.” He is profiled by Raffi Khatchadourian in the June 7, 2010 issue of The New Yorker.
| Quote: | | Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay, and the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account. The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put it to me, “I’m living in airports these days.” He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries. |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17657 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 31-07-2010 17:31 Post subject: |
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While media attention has been heaped upon Wiki-Leaks, one person has been largely forgotten: Bradley Manning. Private Bradley Manning has been accused of previously supplying information to Wikileaks and is under suspicion of providing the documents which have been released. Bradley is now held in isolation from the outside world, in military detention in Quantico Military Base. Bradley faces, for his alleged actions, up to 52 years imprisonment. Here are two articles regarding Bradley. Full texts at link
| Quote: | The Significance Of The ‘Support Bradley Manning’ Campaign
By Katharine Dawn
Noting how when there’s “one man in chains, none are free”, a friend comments: “Bradley represents the truth-sayer in us all – if we leave him there, we abandon our own inner calling for truth”.
http://www.countercurrents.org/dawn290710.htm |
| Quote: | Legal Fund Established To Fight Imprisonment of Accused WikiLeaks Whistleblower
By Bradley Manning Support Network
Bradley Manning Support Network is accepting online donations for the legal defense of Private First Class Bradley Manning. The Network, a grassroots initiative formed to defend and support accused whistleblower Pfc. Bradley Manning, has partnered with Courage to Resist, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting military objectors.
http://www.countercurrents.org/bmsn290710.htm
Related Link: http://www.bradleymanning.org/ |
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| WhistlingJack Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Total posts: 4297 Location: The Sewers of The Strand Age: 9 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 31-07-2010 17:36 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Wikileaks denies Tor hacker eavesdropping gave site its start
Perish the thought
By John Leyden
Posted in Enterprise Security, 2nd June 2010 14:08 GMT
Updated WikiLeaks has denied that eavesdropping on Chinese hackers played a key part in the early days of the whistle-blowing site.
Wired reports [1] that early WikiLeaks documents were siphoned off from Chinese hackers' activities via a node on the Tor anonymiser network, as an extensive interview [2] with WikiLeaks' founder Julian Paul Assange by the New Yorker explains in greater depth.
One of the WikiLeaks activists owned a server that was being used as a node for the Tor network. Millions of secret transmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that hackers from China were using the network to gather foreign governments’ information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction has ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site’s foundation, and Assange was able to say, “We have received over one million documents from thirteen countries.”
Only a very small number of the documents obtained were ever published. However, the first publication on WikiLeaks back in December 2006 was culled from just this Tor-harvested traffic, Wired reports. This tranche of documents referred to a “secret decision,” supposedly made by Somali rebel leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, to hire criminals as hit men in the assassination of government officials.
The documents were published in an attempt to verify their authenticity, alongside a commentary by Assange noting they might just as easily be a clever smear as the edicts of an Islamic militant with possible links to Al-Queda.
All this smoke and dagger intrigue received short shrift from WikiLeaks in an anonymous and sketchy denial, posted [3] on the site's official Twitter feed late on Tuesday.
Wired has a beatup on WL&Tor,with no new info,spinning "our" 2006 investigation into Chinese spying. Don't be fooled
The Register has asked WikiLeaks to explain what role, if any, Tor traffic snooping might have played in the foundation of the site.
Assange responded to our inquiries by saying the New Yorker and Wired had each presented a misleading picture, without shedding much light on WikiLeaks use of Tor exit node interception.
The imputation is incorrect. The facts concern a 2006 investigation into Chinese espionage one of our contacts were involved in. Somewhere between none and handful of those documents were ever released on WikiLeaks. Non-government targets of the Chinese espionage, such as Tibetan associations were informed (by us).
Traffic passing through the Tor (The Onion Router) anonymizing network is encrypted until it reaches the point when it leaves the network, where it is decrypted and forwarded to its final destination. Traffic leaving at a particular exit node can always be monitored, a point which Tor has always emphasised. This monitoring may be a criminal offence, depending on where it takes place, and is certainly ethically questionable.
Anyone using Tor should use SSH, SSL, or a VPN connection to encrypt traffic because Tor is only good for anonymity - certainly not end-to-end encryption. Users have no control over which exit nodes will be used, still less on the path traffic takes through the network, which is random by design.
The potential to extract sensitive data by eavesdropping on traffic flowing out of a Tor exit node is well known in security circles.
For example, in September 2007, Swedish security consultant Dan Egerstad ran a packet sniffer on five Tor exit nodes under his control, recovering the login credentials of about 1,000 email addresses, including at least 100 accounts belonging to foreign embassies in the process. One likely theory is that Egerstad had stumbled onto the surveillance of hacked accounts by unknown intelligence agencies, who were using Tor to disguise their identity. Egerstad was hauled in for questioning by the Swedish authorities over this exercise but never charged.
Egerstad was part of a team that also found TOR exit-nodes that only forwarded traffic association with ports used for unencrypted email protocols and IM traffic. ®
Additional reporting by Chris Williams.
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| WhistlingJack Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Total posts: 4297 Location: The Sewers of The Strand Age: 9 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 31-07-2010 17:44 Post subject: |
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| ramonmercado wrote: | | While media attention has been heaped upon Wiki-Leaks, one person has been largely forgotten: Bradley Manning. Private Bradley Manning has been accused of previously supplying information to Wikileaks and is under suspicion of providing the documents which have been released. Bradley is now held in isolation from the outside world, in military detention in Quantico Military Base. Bradley faces, for his alleged actions, up to 52 years imprisonment. |
Indeed.
| Quote: | U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe
By Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter
June 6, 2010 | 9:31 pm
Federal officials have arrested an Army intelligence analyst who boasted of giving classified U.S. combat video and hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records to whistleblower site Wikileaks, Wired.com has learned.
SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, where he was arrested nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. A family member says he’s being held in custody in Kuwait, and has not been formally charged.
Manning was turned in late last month by a former computer hacker with whom he spoke online. In the course of their chats, Manning took credit for leaking a headline-making video of a helicopter attack that Wikileaks posted online in April. The video showed a deadly 2007 U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.
He said he also leaked three other items to Wikileaks: a separate video showing the notorious 2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan that Wikileaks has previously acknowledged is in its possession; a classified Army document evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat, which the site posted in March; and a previously unreported breach consisting of 260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables that Manning described as exposing “almost criminal political back dealings.”
“Hillary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,” Manning wrote.
Wired.com could not confirm whether Wikileaks received the supposed 260,000 classified embassy dispatches. To date, a single classified diplomatic cable has appeared on the site: Released last February, it describes a U.S. embassy meeting with the government of Iceland. E-mail and a voicemail message left for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on Sunday were not answered by the time this article was published.
The State Department said it was not aware of the arrest or the allegedly leaked cables. The FBI was not prepared to comment when asked about Manning.
Army spokesman Gary Tallman was unaware of the investigation but said, “If you have a security clearance and wittingly or unwittingly provide classified info to anyone who doesn’t have security clearance or a need to know, you have violated security regulations and potentially the law.”
Manning’s arrest comes as Wikileaks has ratcheted up pressure against various governments over the years with embarrassing documents acquired through a global whistleblower network that is seemingly impervious to threats from adversaries. Its operations are hosted on servers in several countries, and it uses high-level encryption for its document-submission process, providing secure anonymity for its sources and a safe haven from legal repercussions for itself. Since its launch in 2006, it has never outed a source through its own actions, either voluntarily or involuntarily.
Manning came to the attention of the FBI and Army investigators after he contacted former hacker Adrian Lamo late last month over instant messenger and e-mail. Lamo had just been the subject of a Wired.com article. Very quickly in his exchange with the ex-hacker, Manning claimed to be the Wikileaks video leaker.
“If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?” Manning asked.
From the chat logs provided by Lamo, and examined by Wired.com, it appears Manning sensed a kindred spirit in the ex-hacker. He discussed personal issues that got him into trouble with his superiors and left him socially isolated, and said he had been demoted and was headed for an early discharge from the Army.
When Manning told Lamo that he leaked a quarter-million classified embassy cables, Lamo contacted the Army, and then met with Army CID investigators and the FBI at a Starbucks near his house in Carmichael, California, where he passed the agents a copy of the chat logs. At their second meeting with Lamo on May 27, FBI agents from the Oakland Field Office told the hacker that Manning had been arrested the day before in Iraq by Army CID investigators.
Lamo has contributed funds to Wikileaks in the past, and says he agonized over the decision to expose Manning — he says he’s frequently contacted by hackers who want to talk about their adventures, and he has never considered reporting anyone before. The supposed diplomatic cable leak, however, made him believe Manning’s actions were genuinely dangerous to U.S. national security.
“I wouldn’t have done this if lives weren’t in danger,” says Lamo, who discussed the details with Wired.com following Manning’s arrest. “He was in a war zone and basically trying to vacuum up as much classified information as he could, and just throwing it up into the air.”
Manning told Lamo that he enlisted in the Army in 2007 and held a Top Secret/SCI clearance, details confirmed by his friends and family members. He claimed to have been rummaging through classified military and government networks for more than a year and said that the networks contained “incredible things, awful things … that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC.”
He first contacted Wikileaks’ Julian Assange sometime around late November last year, he claimed, after Wikileaks posted 500,000 pager messages covering a 24-hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. ”I immediately recognized that they were from an NSA database, and I felt comfortable enough to come forward,” he wrote to Lamo. He said his role with Wikileaks was “a source, not quite a volunteer.”
Manning had already been sifting through the classified networks for months when he discovered the Iraq video in late 2009, he said. The video, later released by Wikileaks under the title “Collateral Murder,” shows a 2007 Army helicopter attack on a group of men, some of whom were armed, that the soldiers believed were insurgents. The attack killed two Reuters employees and an unarmed Baghdad man who stumbled on the scene afterward and tried to rescue one of the wounded by pulling him into his van. The man’s two children were in the van and suffered serious injuries in the hail of gunfire.
“At first glance it was just a bunch of guys getting shot up by a helicopter,” Manning wrote of the video. “No big deal … about two dozen more where that came from, right? But something struck me as odd with the van thing, and also the fact it was being stored in a JAG officer’s directory. So I looked into it.”
In January, while on leave in the United States, Manning visited a close friend in Boston and confessed he’d gotten his hands on unspecified sensitive information, and was weighing leaking it, according to the friend. “He wanted to do the right thing,” says 20-year-old Tyler Watkins. “That was something I think he was struggling with.”
Manning passed the video to Wikileaks in February, he told Lamo. After April 5 when the video was released and made headlines Manning contacted Watkins from Iraq asking him about the reaction in the United States.
“He would message me, Are people talking about it?… Are the media saying anything?” Watkins said. “That was one of his major concerns, that once he had done this, was it really going to make a difference?… He didn’t want to do this just to cause a stir…. He wanted people held accountable and wanted to see this didn’t happen again.”
Watkins doesn’t know what else Manning might have sent to Wikileaks. But in his chats with Lamo, Manning took credit for a number of other disclosures.
The second video he claimed to have leaked shows a May 2009 air strike near Garani village in Afghanistan that the local government says killed nearly 100 civilians, most of them children. The Pentagon released a report about the incident last year, but backed down from a plan to show video of the attack to reporters.
As described by Manning in his chats with Lamo, his purported leaking was made possible by lax security online and off.
Manning had access to two classified networks from two separate secured laptops: SIPRNET, the Secret-level network used by the Department of Defense and the State Department, and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System which serves both agencies at the Top Secret/SCI level.
The networks, he said, were both “air gapped” from unclassified networks, but the environment at the base made it easy to smuggle data out.
“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga,’ erase the music then write a compressed split file,” he wrote. “No one suspected a thing and, odds are, they never will.”
“[I] listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history,” he added later. ”Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis … a perfect storm.”
Manning told Lamo that the Garani video was left accessible in a directory on a U.S. Central Command server, centcom.smil.mil, by officers who investigated the incident. The video, he said, was an encrypted AES-256 ZIP file.
Manning’s aunt, with whom he lived in the United States, had heard nothing about his arrest when first contacted by Wired.com last week; Debra Van Alstyne said she last saw Manning during his leave in January and they had discussed his plans to enroll in college when his four-year stint in the Army was set to end in October 2011. She described him as smart and seemingly untroubled, with a natural talent for computers and a keen interest in global politics.
She said she became worried about her nephew recently after he disappeared from contact. Then Manning finally called Van Alstyne collect on Saturday. He told her that he was okay, but that he couldn’t discuss what was going on, Van Alstyne said. He then gave her his Facebook password and asked her to post a message on his behalf.
The message reads: “Some of you may have heard that I have been arrested for disclosure of classified information to unauthorized persons. See CollateralMurder.com.”
An Army defense attorney then phoned Van Alstyne on Sunday and said Manning is being held in protective custody in Kuwait. “He hasn’t seen the case file, but he does understand that it does have to do with that Collateral Murder video,” Van Alstyne said.
Manning’s father said Sunday that he’s shocked by his son’s arrest.
“I was in the military for five years,” said Brian Manning, of Oklahoma. “I had a Secret clearance, and I never divulged any information in 30 years since I got out about what I did. And Brad has always been very, very tight at adhering to the rules. Even talking to him after boot camp and stuff, he kept everything so close that he didn’t open up to anything.”
His son, he added, is “a good kid. Never been in trouble. Never been on
drugs, alcohol, nothing.”
Lamo says he felt he had no choice but to turn in Manning, but that he’s now concerned about the soldier’s status and well-being. The FBI hasn’t told Lamo what charges Manning may face, if any.
The agents did tell Lamo that he may be asked to testify against Manning. The Bureau was particularly interested in information that Manning gave Lamo about an apparently-sensitive military cybersecurity matter, Lamo said.
That seemed to be the least interesting information to Manning, however. What seemed to excite him most in his chats was his supposed leaking of the embassy cables. He anticipated returning to the states after his early discharge, and watching from the sidelines as his action bared the secret history of U.S. diplomacy around the world.
“Everywhere there’s a U.S. post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed,” Manning wrote. “It’s open diplomacy. World-wide anarchy in CSV format. It’s Climategate with a global scope, and breathtaking depth. It’s beautiful, and horrifying.”
Update: The Defense Department issued a statement Monday morning confirming Manning’s arrest and his detention in Kuwait for allegedly leaking classified information.
“United States Division-Center is currently conducting a joint investigation” says the statement, which notes that Manning is deployed with 2nd Brigade 10th Mountain Division in Baghdad. “The results of the investigation will be released upon completion of the investigation.”
Wired.com © 2010 |
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| WhistlingJack Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Total posts: 4297 Location: The Sewers of The Strand Age: 9 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 31-07-2010 17:49 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | 7 June 2010 Last updated at 13:46
Hacker explains why he reported 'Wikileaks source'
By Jonathan Fildes Technology reporter, BBC News
Hackers often pride themselves on their anti-authoritarian and counter culture stance.
So news that former high-profile hacker Adrian Lamo had turned over an Army intelligence analyst to authorities was met with derision by some.
"A lot of people have labelled me a snitch," Mr Lamo told BBC News. "I guess I deserve that on this one but not as a generality."
"This was a very hard decision for me."
Mr Lamo is a former hacker, who exposed security flaws at the New York Times, Yahoo and Microsoft. After a brief stint hiding from the FBI, Mr Lamo was imprisoned and fined. He now works as a journalist and security analyst.
Mr Lamo says that he was responsible for reporting Specialist (SPC) Brad Manning to the military authorities after the analyst boasted to him that he had handed over thousands of classified documents and classified military video to whistle-blower site Wikileaks.
One video posted to the site shows a US Apache helicopter killing up to 12 people - including two Reuters journalists - during an attack in Baghdad in 2007. Two children were also seriously injured in the attack. Some of the men were armed.
Mr Manning, 22, reportedly acquired the video during the course of his work at a US Military field base FOB Hammer, on the outskirts of Baghdad.
Mr Lamo said that he did not suspect anything unusual when Mr Manning contacted him over instant messenger and e-mail.
"I'm contacted on a daily basis by all kinds of people who confess to all kinds of federal crimes," he said.
"I have never once turned them in, even when the FBI offered me a deal."
However, after Mr Manning confessed to distributing the documents, Mr Lamo said that his stance changed and he "felt the need to contact investigators".
"At the moment he gave me the information, it was basically a suicide pact."
"I was worried for my family - that if I were obstructing justice that they could be caught up in any investigation," he said.
"I wanted to do this one by the book, by the numbers. I didn't want any more FBI agents knocking at the door."
Mr Lamo also said that he had decided to report Mr Manning for reasons of national security.
Instead of going straight to the authorities, Mr Lamo disclosed the information to "a friend" who had worked as an agent in the Army counter intelligence unit.
"He put me in touch with some of his former colleagues who he felt could handle the issue in a low key way," he said.
Four agents - from different federal and military agencies - turned up at his house to read the conversation logs - from his e-mail and instant messenger conversations with Mr Manning - "one by one", he added.
"I gave them conversation logs that implicated Special Agent Manning.
"They were particularly interested in a code word for a major operation."
Mr Lamo also described how Mr Manning had supposedly obtained the documents.
"He described the process of operational security in detail," said Mr Lamo.
"What he described was a culture of insecurity with poor attention to information.
"The field base didn't have significant security."
He said that Mr Manning would download the documents from a room that needed a unique security code to access it. However, security on the base had slipped, he said.
"He said you'd knock on the door and they'd let you in."
Mr Lamo said that Mr Manning would take a CD labelled Lady Gaga into the room which he would load into a computer.
"Basically he sat down and started burning data to the CD whilst pretending to be bopping along."
Mr Manning would then upload the documents to Wikileaks servers, which are held in various countries around the world and anonymise the source.
Wikileaks has not confirmed Mr Manning as the source of the video and has said it never collects personal information on sources. It said that it has not been sent 260,000 classified US embassy cables that Mr Manning reportedly leaked to the site.
Wikileaks also questions Mr Lamo's credibility.
However, the US military has confirmed that Mr Manning has been detained on suspicion of leaking classified documents and video. He is being held "in pre-trial confinement" in Kuwait.
"I want to be proud of it but I can't bring myself to be. I keep thinking about what it was like being 22, alone and not knowing about my future," said Mr Lamo.
"Knowing that I did that to somebody - it hurts. I feel like I should be talking to a priest."
He said he had been placed in a situation where "an impossible decision had to be made".
"I hope that Manning gets the same chance as I did - the same chance to take his punishment as I did and start a new life as I did."
"I like to think I prevented him from getting into more serious trouble."
BBC © MMX |
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| WhistlingJack Joined: 29 Oct 2003 Total posts: 4297 Location: The Sewers of The Strand Age: 9 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 31-07-2010 17:54 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | State Department Anxious About Possible Leak of Cables to Wikileaks
By Kim Zetter and Kevin Poulsen
June 8, 2010 | 8:39 pm
The State Department and personnel at U.S. embassies around the world are reportedly waiting anxiously to find out if an Army intelligence analyst was telling the truth when he boasted that he had supplied 260,000 classified State Department diplomatic cables to the whistleblower site Wikileaks.
If Wikileaks has the secret documents and publishes them, the leak could not only expose damaging information about U.S. foreign policy and national security issues, but also expose embarrassing information about backroom diplomatic deals and U.S. attitudes toward foreign leaders — such as the opinions of U.S. ambassadors about the honesty, integrity, and strength and longevity of those leaders.
The concerns are reported in a story published at the Daily Beast that appears to confirm that alleged leaker Bradley Manning had access to the kinds of cables he recently discussed with a former hacker who turned him in to authorities.
As previously reported, Manning told ex-hacker Adrian Lamo that he had recently given 260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables to Wikileaks, and said the documents exposed “almost-criminal political back dealings.”
“Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,” Manning told Lamo in an online chat session.
“If he really had access to these cables, we’ve got a terrible situation on our hands,” an anonymous American diplomat told the Daily Beast. “We’re still trying to figure out what he had access to. A lot of my colleagues overseas are sweating this out, given what those cables may contain.”
He said the cables could damage diplomatic efforts of the U.S. and its allies, and that the State Department and law enforcement agencies have been trying to determine whether, and how, to approach Wikileaks about not publishing the cables if it has them.
SPC Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was an Army intelligence analyst stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad. He was put under pre-trial confinement in Kuwait nearly two weeks ago by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. The Defense Department said in a statement this week that Manning has not been formally charged, but is being investigated for allegedly leaking classified information.
A U.S. military official told Wired.com that “everybody’s scattering in a thousand different directions, digging deep [for this investigation]. We don’t just do that for every story that pops up.”
He added that the public revelations about Manning’s alleged activities this week “alerted a lot of people that didn’t even know about this at the highest level.”
Manning was turned in late last month by Lamo, with whom he spoke online. In the course of their chats, Manning took credit for leaking the State Department cables to Wikileaks, as well as a headline-making video of a helicopter attack in Iraq that Wikileaks posted online April 5, another video showing the notorious 2009 Garani air strike in Afghanistan that Wikileaks has previously acknowledged is in its possession, and a classified Army document evaluating Wikileaks as a security threat.
Manning told Lamo he sent the Iraq video to Wikileaks in February. He doesn’t say when he allegedly transmitted the cables.
Wikileaks has not responded to calls and e-mails from Wired.com. A message published on the organization’s Twitter account Monday said that allegations “that we have been sent 260,000 classified U.S, embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect.”
The site has, however, posted one diplomatic cable that Manning mentions in his chat with Lamo. It was published by Wikileaks last February and describes a U.S. embassy meeting with the government of Iceland.
The State Department has suggested to the Daily Beast that even if Manning didn’t give thousands of cables to Wikileaks, he may still have downloaded a huge library of them and stored them for later transmission.
According to the Daily Beast, Manning apparently had “special access to cables prepared by diplomats and State Department officials throughout the Middle East regarding the workings of Arab governments and their leaders.”
The cables date back several years and traversed inter-agency computer networks that are available to the Army. They contain information about U.S. diplomatic and intelligence efforts in the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones, the diplomat said.
Manning enlisted in the Army in 2007 and was deployed with the 2nd Brigade 10th Mountain Division in Baghdad last November. Prior to this, he had been stationed at Fort Drum in New York, where his division is headquartered.
Manning was a 35F intelligence analyst with a Top Secret/SCI security clearance.
According to the Army’s web site, analysts in this position “use information derived from all intelligence disciplines to determine changes in enemy capabilities, vulnerabilities and probable courses of action.”
Duties include receiving and processing incoming intelligence reports and messages and maintaining intelligence records and files.
In chats with Lamo that Wired.com has examined, Manning said he had access to two classified networks from two separate secured laptops: SIPRnet, the Secret-level network used by the Department of Defense and the State Department, and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System which serves both agencies at the Top Secret/SCI level.
The networks, he said, were both “air-gapped” from unclassified networks, but the environment at the base made it easy to smuggle data out.
“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like ‘Lady Gaga,’ erase the music then write a compressed split file,” he wrote. “No one suspected a thing and, odds are, they never will.”
“[I] listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history,” he added later. ”Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis … a perfect storm.”
Regarding the State Department cables specifically, Manning told Lamo, “State dept fucked itself. Placed volumes and volumes of information in a single spot, with no security.”
Manning described personal issues that got him into trouble with his superiors and left him socially isolated. He said he had been demoted after he punched a colleague in the face during an argument, and was reassigned to a job in a supply office pending early discharge. He also told Lamo, “I’m restricted to SIPR now, because of the discharge proceedings.”
Army spokesman Lt. Col. Eric Bloom in Baghdad confirmed that in early May, Manning was demoted to private first class and was reassigned job duties. He did not know the reason behind the demotion but said Manning was not being discharged early and that his deployment in Iraq was supposed to last a year.
Bloom said the demotion was conducted under Article 15 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice in a non-judicial proceeding, and that Manning maintained his security clearance after the demotion. He did not know what access Manning would have had to classified networks following his job reassignment.
A State Department source told the Daily Beast that Pentagon investigators have been searching through Manning’s e-mail accounts and computer hard drives for evidence of the data he claims to have downloaded and transmitted to Wikileaks.
But in his chats with Lamo, Manning told the ex-hacker that all traces of evidence had been deleted from his work computers as part of the troop-withdrawal procedures that have started in Iraq.
“I had two computers. One connected to SIPRnet the other to JWICS,” he wrote. “They’ve been zero-filled. Because of the pullout, evidence was destroyed … by the system itself.”
He also told Lamo that network security monitoring and logging was ineffective or non-existent.
“There’s god-awful accountability of IP addresses,” he wrote. “The network was upgraded, and patched up so many times, and systems would go down, logs would be lost. And when moved or upgraded, hard drives were zeroed. It’s impossible to trace much on these field networks.”
Wired.com © 2010 |
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