The Wikileaks collection

[gute]

I really don't know how serious these leaks are, but who cares - he only does it us it seems. Why is this prick still alive? Seems to me he is a threat to our national security. Same with the soldier that leaked the info - he should be shot for treason. Enough is enough.

[Fuchs]

Sounds to me more like he's producing embarrassments, not a degradation of national security.

Most of the info appears to be not confidential or at a low level. There's no top secret stuff among it.

Besides; would you want spies to be shot when caught? That would certainly kill scores of Americans world-wide.

Finally, Assange is not in the U.S.. An assassination in a foreign country could easily earn the CIA a status as a criminal organization in that country and possibly in others, too. The backlash could be enormous and very well exceed the benefits.
Oh, I forgot. There would likely be no benefits other than revenge. The Manning leak may prove to be a one-time event for Wikileaks, and they already uploaded all that they have (encrypted) months ago.

[JMA]

I really don't know how serious these leaks are, but who cares - he only does it us it seems. Why is this prick still alive? Seems to me he is a threat to our national security. Same with the soldier that leaked the info - he should be shot for treason. Enough is enough.

Wow.

I will be sure to take note of which released cables threaten US national security.

[JMA]

Sounds to me more like he's producing embarrassments, not a degradation of national security.

Most of the info appears to be not confidential or at a low level. There's no top secret stuff among it.

Besides; would you want spies to be shot when caught? That would certainly kill scores of Americans world-wide.

Finally, Assange is not in the U.S.. An assassination in a foreign country could easily earn the CIA a status as a criminal organization in that country and possibly in others, too. The backlash could be enormous and very well exceed the benefits.
Oh, I forgot. There would likely be no benefits other than revenge. The Manning leak may prove to be a one-time event for Wikileaks, and they already uploaded all that they have (encrypted) months ago.

It will take a little time for the average American to see the opportunity to clear out those in the State Department and the CIA who have behaved deplorably in the name of the people of the US.

The US is a great country with good, genuine and warm hearted people who have been served really badly by government for a long long time. I'm sure they will ensure that they will do whatever is necessary to clean out their house in the wake of this release of documents. I wish them well.

[JarodParker]

I would just like to know what ever happened to compartmentalizing this kind of info? How can one low level d-bag have access to so much stuff?

[Lionberger]

Assange/Wikileaks is a good example of a 4th (5th??) Gen Warfare transnational and non-state enemy of the US. They exploit their non-state status and conflicting national laws and priorities of law enforcement among the target nations (US/UK), host nations (Sweden?) and the nations in the middle who have an interest in the method (Internet) and the resulting political vulnerability this creates for the US.

Like any other transnational and non-state threat, Wikileaks should be targetable by the US and the UK. I would suggest that the only area of discussion should be how and to what extent.

I laugh when CNN reports that Wikileaks site has been the subject of a DDS attack today. Maybe they are currently being targeted........

[JMA]

Assange/Wikileaks is a good example of a 4th (5th??) Gen Warfare transnational and non-state enemy of the US. They exploit their non-state status and conflicting national laws and priorities of law enforcement among the target nations (US/UK), host nations (Sweden?) and the nations in the middle who have an interest in the method (Internet) and the resulting political vulnerability this creates for the US.

Like any other transnational and non-state threat, Wikileaks should be targetable by the US and the UK. I would suggest that the only area of discussion should be how and to what extent.

I laugh when CNN reports that Wikileaks site has been the subject of a DDS attack today. Maybe they are currently being targeted........

If you go to the WikiLeaks site and see what stories they have broken you will see that in the main it is not US related or targeted. To accuse Assange of targeting the US seems devoid of reality to me.

[Fuchs]

That's correct. It's just that Manning was their great coup.




There's btw a similar affair in Europe.

Ten thousands of wealthy Germans have long committed tax fraud with the help of banks in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

A single bank employee offered a CD full of tax fraud data to the German state and became a millionaire. Several other bank employees have followed this example since.
Liechtenstein and Switzerland were embarrassed (and Liechtenstein's economic model got shattered, for it's a mini state).
Many German fraudsters were either caught or turned themselves in.

There were some anti-German sentiments in Switzerland, but overall from a German taxpayer position it looks as if they were simply embarrassed that they were caught helping criminals.


Such leaks can be very, very useful - and trust me, some Swiss voices were about as harsh in this affair as are many U.S. voices about Assange.

[Fuchs]

I would just like to know what ever happened to compartmentalizing this kind of info? How can one low level d-bag have access to so much stuff?

Afaik the restrictions were loosened and checks were removed because they were impractical for those who were deployed to Iraq/AFG.

[RawIsRaw]

Its not just Assange who's behind wikileaks. Im pretty sure its a psy-op front run by a few secret services...all to discredit the US army, mostly. So which secret services? Not necessarily the usual suspects...after all, they do leak classified, US sensitive information so its a given that there are several collaborators within our own ranks. Some claim there are actually CIA elements that feed wikileaks. That could explain why the leaks keep going on, without consequences it seems (just yadda yadda). Yep, the spy business can be quite nasty...

[Lionberger]

If you go to the WikiLeaks site and see what stories they have broken you will see that in the main it is not US related or targeted. To accuse Assange of targeting the US seems devoid of reality to me.

JMA, your "devoid of reality" comment shows that you believe Wikileaks has had no motive in the repeated release of US and Coalition Confidential and Secret materials. Mr. Assange has described his motives (on behalf of Wikileaks) several times and made no secret of his desire to "expose" US, Coalition and Iraqi wrongdoing with the release of this information. Any reasonable adult will recognize that such release is intended to do harm to US interests and policy on the international stage and in the case of the diplomatic cables, direct some harm to our friends and allies. This is the essence of targeting in the arena of Information Operations.

If my country or our allies chose not to respond to this act, it sets a very dangerous precedent and would validate this overt attack by a non-state actor and subject the greater international community to similar attacks in the future.

This is a complex issue with as yet unforseen second-order effects and your one-liner was not very constructive or mature. Lets give it more of an adult effort next time, OK?

[JMA]

JMA, your "devoid of reality" comment shows that you believe Wikileaks has had no motive in the repeated release of US and Coalition Confidential and Secret materials. Mr. Assange has described his motives (on behalf of Wikileaks) several times and made no secret of his desire to "expose" US, Coalition and Iraqi wrongdoing with the release of this information. Any reasonable adult will recognize that such release is intended to do harm to US interests and policy on the international stage and in the case of the diplomatic cables, direct some harm to our friends and allies. This is the essence of targeting in the arena of Information Operations.

If my country or our allies chose not to respond to this act, it sets a very dangerous precedent and would validate this overt attack by a non-state actor and subject the greater international community to similar attacks in the future.

This is a complex issue with as yet unforseen second-order effects and your one-liner was not very constructive or mature. Lets give it more of an adult effort next time, OK?

For one who came out on this matter shooting from the hip your comment on "constructive" is hilarious. Thanks for the entertainment though.

[JMA]

According to an article in The Guardian Bradley Manning explained how he did it:

It was childishly easy, according to the published chatlog of a conversation Manning had with a fellow-hacker. "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. No one suspected a thing ... [I] listened and lip-synched to Lady Gaga's Telephone while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history." He said that he "had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day 7 days a week for 8+ months".

If it was this easy one wonders how much other stuff was lifted by other people and passed on to other agencies? At least now the US knows that everyone knows.

[Lionberger]

For one who came out on this matter shooting from the hip your comment on "constructive" is hilarious. Thanks for the entertainment though.

Well, it seems the Non-Aligned Movement has spoken. Still as irrelevant today as it was in the 1970s.

[JMA]

Well, it seems the Non-Aligned Movement has spoken. Still as irrelevant today as it was in the 1970s.

Yes the Non-Aligned Movement was a joke and irrelevant. Sadly that is not the issue today. The issue today is the opportunity the US people now have to assess what has been done in their name by the State Department and what information was received and how their government responded to that information. Hillary Clinton's career stone dead? A one term President?

[Fuchs]

Mr. Assange has described his motives (on behalf of Wikileaks) several times and made no secret of his desire to "expose" US, Coalition and Iraqi wrongdoing with the release of this information.

What you don't consider is thedfact that Assange and other Wikileaks people are fanatic anti-secrecy, pro-whistleblowing folks.

They would expose Chinese, French, Russian, Indian or Brazilian wrongdoings just as happily.

The U.S. is hyper-active, large, has an apparently lousy security for it slow and medium level secrets and as a consequence it was most likely that one or several large leaks would concern the U.S..

Wikileaks is not on a campaign again the U.S., but a campaign against state secrecy in general.

[Bob's World]

They say that "character" is how one acts when they think no one is looking. I've not seen the material in the wikileaks, but they are, by that definition, a window into America's character.

Such actions of leaking confidential material of a negative nature definitely erodes U.S. influence, which in turn makes the nation weaker. Less able to deter threats and rally allies through presence alone, but demanding more and more energy, wealth and compromise to accomplish the same tasks. Such leaks are serious.

More serious and of greater concern are the actions exposed. In the law, "truth" is an absolute defense in a slander case. Are the leaks a problem, or is the embarrassing nature of our national character the problem? We need to focus on the more important of the two if we are to move forward from this.

Like so many problems we face today, this is not one that can be simply "contained."

[J Wolfsberger]

' "I would come in with music on a CD-RW labelled with something like 'Lady Gaga' …" '

I realize there are differences between contractor and government procedures, but by any set of standards taking uncontrolled media into a secure facility, connecting it to a secure machine, and carrying it out of the facility is a serious breach of security. As in, "confiscate the badge, detain or escort off the premises and notify the FBI" serious. There needs to be a careeer ending shake up in the staff who permitted this.

[Rex Brynen]

A challenge posed by the latest leaks will be for the US to maintain coherent policy focus while dealing with the drip-drip-drip of leaked diplomatic cables. Even if the cables contain few startling revelations, diplomatic reporting--unlike SIGACTS from Iraq or Afghanistan--are much more likely to contain the sorts of political gossip that fuel media reporting. Moreover, because of the range of topics and countries covered, they can have this effect in scores of different ways in 180+ political and media environments.

At the moment, only 243 of 251,287 cables possessed by Wikileaks have been released on the Wikileaks website. At this rate, the drips could occur for months or years. If I were DoS, there would be no end to how pissed off I would be at US Army COMSEC at the moment.

[Joske]

Assange/Wikileaks is a good example of a 4th (5th??) Gen Warfare transnational and non-state enemy of the US. They exploit their non-state status and conflicting national laws and priorities of law enforcement among the target nations (US/UK), host nations (Sweden?) and the nations in the middle who have an interest in the method (Internet) and the resulting political vulnerability this creates for the US.

Like any other transnational and non-state threat, Wikileaks should be targetable by the US and the UK. I would suggest that the only area of discussion should be how and to what extent.

I laugh when CNN reports that Wikileaks site has been the subject of a DDS attack today. Maybe they are currently being targeted........

Wikileaks does not only release US or coalition "secret" materials, some of the leaks they released detailed corruption in kenya, scientology (the usual stuff), sarah palin's e-mail account, membership lists of the british far-right party BNP, "incriminating" e-mail correspondence by climate change scientists, telephone recordings about an oil spill in peru, an internal report about a nuclear accident in Iran, bank corruption... etc all the leaks in 2010 (the ones who got the most media attention) come from one source (Bradley Manning) and are thus all these documents originated from the US.
So if you claim that wikileaks is fighting a war against the US is besides a gross misinterpretation of the concept itself also quite foolish seeing the previous track record of the wikileaks organization.


On a different note every time i read that wikileaks released something new i always see the amazement of the media about certain facts, while most of the "secrets" are already known as a sort of public secret, and few actual unknown facts are released.