On November 30, 2010, an article appeared on 7iber.com criticizing the coverage of Wikileaks in the Jordan media:
It is arguably the biggest global story of the month, and quite possibly the year. Yet the biggest leak of confidential government cables in history has not been enough to elicit a proportionate reaction from the Jordanian media, even when Jordan plays an actual role in this bit of news. With the US embassy in Amman apparently being one of the top sources in the world when it comes to the leaks, and cables regarding Jordanian officials positions on Iran and the Middle East peace process being largely quoted in the international media, one is forced to wonder why the local media has initiated a self-imposed embargo on the story.
As the second day of the post-”cablegate” news cycle unfolds, local media in Jordan seems to have only stuck out its head enough to disseminate the government’s position in a slew of standardized articles in the major newspapers all reiterating the same denials and reaffirming the same positions.
Since then, 7iber.com has joined radio station and internet news provider AmmanNet, and Ammon News, all translating the US state cables from Wikileaks into Arabic.
7iber.com has eight cables so far, all mentioning Jordan. AmmanNet has three cables issued by the U.S. Embassy in Amman and eleven cables for Jordan and the Arab region.
For all those who felt that the world would never wade through 251,287 United States embassy cables, once more, they have underestimated the internet. Presenting, the US State Cables:
And to warm up:
So why is Wikileaks a good thing again?
Real-time Wikileaks Twitter search results set to the Beatles
It's going to be a great year.
Democracy Now spends an hour reviewing their interviews with Julian Assange in July in London after the release of the Afghan war logs, and in October, again in London, after WikiLeaks published some 390,000 classified U.S. documents on the war in Iraq.
2010 can be defined as the year of WikiLeaks. The whistleblowing website first made headlines around the world in April when it released a video of a U.S. helicopter gunship indiscriminately firing on Iraqi civilians, killing 12 people, including two Reuters news staff. In July, WikiLeaks created a bigger firestorm when it published more than 90,000 classified U.S. military war logs of the war in Afghanistan. Then in October, WikiLeaks published some 390,000 classified U.S. documents on the war in Iraq, the largest intelligence leak in U.S. history and the greatest internal account of any war on public record. In November, WikiLeaks began releasing a giant trove of confidential State Department cables that sent shockwaves through the global diplomatic establishment.
CBS News has compiled a substantial list of significant revelations made by WikiLeaks during the past year. Their links lead to many other sources and constitute a valuable reference tool and archive.
The distinguished blogger digby of Hullabaloo was moved to comment when she saw this list:
CBS News did something really, really unusual for a major news organization. It published an article about what Wikileaks has revealed. Evidently, CBS is not of the opinion that their job is to conceal these things from the public, which is fairly unique.
Ask yourself why it is that our governing institutions and major corporations believe they have a right to keep all this from you.
The World Will Become Better. 
Soft as filigree,
damming as ice;
we shudder now,
when we hear "nice"
Your day at the office,
forty minutes of it we viewed.
twenty-four hours later,
your corporate masters decried,
"the footage was skewed"
As if you hadn't killed,
Children, Journalists, Dads,
leaving their ruined bodies,
suffering in the Iraqi sands.
You said, "well it's their fault"
"for bringing their kids into a battle"
Secure in the sky,
safe from the child's death rattle.
The callousness of your action,
your eagerness to kill
the slight gratification in your voice,
haunts me still.
What was done, by you and then,
reminds me of another war,
another "them"
Untermensch "they" were called,
by those solders,
who seemed
to enjoy it all.
But that was a "good" war,
as if killing isn't anything but.
they too laughed it off
making jokes not meant to cut.
And if we hold up a mirror,
to compare the past and today,
what do you see?
are there any differences in play?
UK Information Commissioner Christopher Graham is interviewed by the Guardian:
We are strongly of the view that things should be published. Where you're open things will not be WikiLeaked. Whatever view you take about WikiLeaks – right or wrong – it means that things will now get out. It has changed things. I'm saying government and authorities need to factor it in. Be more proactive, [by] publishing more stuff, because quite a lot of this is only exciting because we didn't know it. You can't un-invent WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is part of the phenomenon of the online, empowered citizen ... these are facts that aren't going to go away. Government and authorities need to wise up to that. ...
One response is that they will clam up and not write anything down, which is nonsense, you can't run any organisation that way. The other is to be even more open. The best form of defence is transparency — much more proactive publication of what organisations do. It's an attitude of 'OK. You want to know? Here it is'.
Democracy Now interviews Robert Meeropol, the son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the only U.S. citizens to be executed under the Espionage Act. He states:
Now, but it’s not surprising that the government would use conspiracy, whether it’s against my parents or whether it’s against the WikiLeaks people, because if you’re anybody who engages in conversation or discussion, and the government can get one person to testify that that discussion was to leak classified material, or to transmit information to the Soviet Union, in my parents case, they could be swept up in the dragnet. And you could get people to rat out their friends in order to get more lenient sentences. It sows distrust among the community of support. It scares other people into silence.
And so, what we see here is, if there is a criminal indictment for conspiracy, not an attack on just Julian Assange himself, but on the entire community of support that is seeking to promote the very revolutionary idea that the people have the right to know what their government is doing, that’s what this ultimately is all about. And every left-wing, every progressive organizer, every organizer, in general—how can you engage in organizing, in getting groups of people to protest and coordinating activities, without engaging in what the government would term a conspiracy? And so, it is a threat to all of us. And that is really why I issued my call for us to recognize this. This Espionage Act of 1917 has been the sword of Damocles, sitting quietly, mostly unused, ready to spring out and attack dissenters. And when you have it in the context of the growing secrecy that we face today ... and an authoritarian-oriented Supreme Court, it is a danger to us all.
Iran has reportedly blocked access to El Pais, Jornal de Noticia and other secondary reporting sites in response to a cable released Thursday. According to Jornal de Noticia the cable in question refers to a confrontation between President Mahmud Ahmadinejad and the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
The telegram states that the head of the Revolutionary Guards, Mohammad Ali Jafari, slapped Ahmadinejad after a heated argument in the Supreme National Security Council in January 2010 on how to deal with the protests that followed the controversial elections June 2009.
Updated from the December 19th post.
BalkanLeaks "The Balkans are not keeping secrets anymore." According to an article in Sofia Echo this site is set up by a Paris-based Bulgarian, Atanas Chobanov and seeks confidential documents related to political, criminal or financial topics.
BrusselsLeaks This site is seeking corporation, consultancy, institution or NGO information in "Brussels – the European Capital and the place where decisions are made which impact the globe".
Many of these decisions happen behind closed doors and we have been working to make it more transparent for many years. Journalists, activists and communications professionals have now come together to form Brussels Leaks, a place to centralise intelligence gathered on the inner-workings of the EU.
IndoLeaks Jakarta Globe says this appeared on December 10.
israeliLeaks "Requesting information on WikiLeaks Organization, Events, and Content, WikiLeaks/Israel Connection, Palestine/Israel history and current events, Hacktivism. Nothing is off limits. Linkage between otherwise divergent topics / regions / organizations / movements is highly valued. Please send any and all information that would be of interest to the public, including journalism, education, and research."
OpenLeaks Started by ex-Wikileaks member Daniel Domscheit-Berg, this site is still "Coming Soon!" It will serve only as a conduit between whistleblowers and their media destinations without being involved in the publishing.
Pinoy Leaks is dedicated to exposing corruption in the Philippine national and local governments.
PinoyLeaks is similar to Wikileaks, except the mission is specifically focused on exposing corruption only, the scope is limited to the Philippines, and PinoyLeaks works with bloggers instead of traditional media. It is up to the bloggers whether to spread news about a leak.
This site is launching on Rizal Day, 2010. Our goal is to start publishing leaks by February 1, 2011. Please help us reach this goal by spreading the word about PinoyLeaks.
Pirate Leaks Started by the Czech Pirate Party to offer a service similar to Wikileaks but focusing on the Czech Republic and with transparent accounting, they want to tackle the network of political corruption and organized crime in the Czech Republic and are looking for classified materials related to crime or finance.
Rospil An extension of popular Russian blogger Alexei Navalny's website, he is actively seeking documentation of corruption in the higher echelons of the national government and economy.
thaicables is trying to combat the Thai government's censorship of over 300,000 websites.
We do not believe in censorship and think that everyone in Thailand should get access to any information available on the internet, which also includes Wikileaks. This is the reason for this blog.
Thaileaks makes all Thai-related content from the Wikileaks website available for direct download and provides magnet links to Wikileaks material.
TuniLeaks This seems, at least at present, to serve as a forum to post and discuss Wikileaks state cable releases as they relate to Tunisia, along with the Twitter hashtag #tunileaks . According to Global Voices Advocacy they have been under heavy censorship threats and actions since they were started.
For Fun:
Haïkuleaks provides Haïku poetry based on the US State Dept cables.
Leaky World is a Wikileaks based game.
Wikileaks: The Game is another.
Note: Listing a site on WL Central in no way constitutes a recommendation of the site by WL Central or Wikileaks.
Peninsula has an article based on a continuation of last week's interview with Julian Assange by Ahmed Mansour for Al Jazeera Arabic.
The interviewer, Ahmed Mansour, said at the start of the interview which was a continuation of last week’s interface, that Assange had even shown him the files that contained the names of some top Arab officials with alleged links with the CIA. ...
What is being published by the five media partners of WikiLeaks are only those details which they think are interesting for their readers. There are some Arab officials who are ‘stealing’ oil of their countries. “We need these media partners to focus more on this issue.”
The following Pirate Parties of Europe have issued a joint statement condemning all attacks on the infrastructure of Wikileaks and employees of Wikileaks.
- Pirate Party of Germany
- Pirate Party of France
- Pirate Party of Italy
- Pirate Party of Austria
- Pirate Party of Russia
- Pirate Party of Switzerland
- Pirate Party of Luxembourg
- Pirate Party of the United Kingdom
The Glenn Greenwald / Kevin Poulsen exchanges this week have centred around a dispute over the alleged Bradley Manning / Adrian Lamo chat logs that form the sole evidence currently implicating Manning in leaking classified information.
As a little more background into Lamo's reliability at the time the chat logs were published, here is a June 22, 2010 thread on Fairfax Underground where someone posted another leaked chat log involving Lamo's wife and Nadim, a person Lamo refers to as a "disgruntled fan".
The original poster also includes the portion of the chat logs which Lamo claims he leaked to Wikileaks, further claiming they then "outed" him as their source. This thread is discussed in an article in DailyTech which contains an update at the end when they discovered that Lamo had actually outed himself "in the form of a podcast interview Lamo gave to an Australian blog site".
All of the evidence into the mental state and reliability of the sole informant in this case raises the question of why chat logs, in the hands of a self proclaimed hacker, passed on to a journalist who professes great respect for the hacking skills of this source, are being treated as reliable legal evidence. In what format were they provided to Wired (and the DoJ)? Was there third party monitoring? Why did Wired believe these logs, knowing their source? Why should anyone?
El País: El jefe de la Guardia Revolucionaria abofeteó a Ahmadineyad, según EE UU (The Chief of the Revolutionary Guard slapped Ahmadineyad's face, according to the United States)
"El presidente de Irán sorprendió a los clérigos con una propuesta de apertura. La diplomacia estadounidense asegura que su fuente es de gran fiabilidad. (Iranian President surprised the clerics with an offer of openness. The American diplomacy affirms its source is completely reliable.)"
El País: EE UU sospecha que el Gobierno de Bolivia simuló una trama terrorista (The United States suspects the Bolivian government faked a terrorist threat)
"Un testigo asegura a la Embajada en La Paz que los servicios de inteligencia prepararon un falso compló para matar a Evo Morales y culpar a la oposición. (A witness assure to the American embassy in La Paz that the intelligence services prepared a fake complot to kill Evo Morales and actually blame his political opposition.)"
El País: EE UU consideró a Enríquez-Ominami un candidato "poco serio" para Chile (The United States believed Enríquez-Ominami was not "a serious enough" candidate for Chile)
""Sus aptitudes son su encanto, sus apellidos y su hermosa mujer", dice un informe. ("His talents are his charm, his family name and his beautiful wife", says a cable.)"
El País: Estambul, nido de espías sobre Irán (Istanbul, nest for spies on Iran)
"El Consulado de EE UU recaba valiosa información entre una diáspora iraní en Turquía amenazada por Teherán. (The American Consulate compiles valuable information between an Iranian diaspora in Turkey threatened by Tehran.)"
In response to today's correction from NPR of their Wikileaks coverage, Matthew L. Schafer at Lippmann Would Roll has compiled a list of other news outlets who should follow their example. While NPR's correction focused on the number of cables published, 1,942 instead of roughly 250,000, Schafer points out other errors that media outlets should avoid:
Moreover, many outlets used phrases similar to “document dump” to describe WikiLeaks’ publishing, which likely leads to the misconception that WikiLeaks did cavalierly publish all 250,000 cables. According to a LexisNexis search, on 397 separate occasions, newspapers around the world used the phrase “document dump.” ...
It’s worth mentioning that often the word “release” is not attributed. That is, the articles do not say to whom the release was made. A release by the website to the public? WikiLeaks’ release of the documents to the newspapers? Thus, a newspaper may say that it was referring to WikiLeaks release of all cables to its newspaper partners, but this is far from clear.
The Wired rebuttal to Glenn Greenwald's article yesterday is online. It is written by both Kevin Poulsen and Evan Hansen, each making their own points as follows.
The Case for Privacy
–Evan Hansen, Editor-in-Chief
A Litany of Errors
Rasch, who worked for the Justice Department in Washington D.C., left government service in 1991. I had two prosecutors in my phone-hacking case: David Schindler in Los Angeles and Robert Crowe in San Jose, California.
-Kevin Poulsen, Senior Editor
By my assessment, this very long, two author rebuttal has one newsworthy point, which is the last. This was the reference Greenwald used.
Update: Greenwald comes back here and provides more sources and dates for the Poulsen-Rasch connection here. He also states, and supports, that he was not aware of Jacob Appelbaum's association with WikiLeaks when he wrote the article in question.
Coverage in June 2009:
El País: El poder: la mejor manera de robar un banco en África (The power: best way of robbing a bank)
"Un confidente revela a EE UU el desvío de 28 millones de las reservas de seis países al clan del presidente de Gabón. (An informer reveals to the United States the skimming of 28 million from the reserves of six countries to the Gabon President's crew.)"
El País: Rania de Jordania es influyente y colabora en la gestión del reino (Rania of Jordan is influential and collaborates in the administration of the kingdom)
"La soberana no es una mera consorte, y su origen palestino divide a los jordanos. (The sovereign is not just a spouse and her palestinian origin divides the Jordan people.)"
El País: El futuro presidente de China es "elitista" y "muy ambicioso" (The next President of China is "elitist" and "very ambitious".)
"Los cables de la diplomacia norteamericana describen a Xi Jinping como un príncipe del régimen al que "solo puede corromper el poder". (The cables from the American diplomacy describe Xi Jinping as a prince of the regime to whom "power can only corrupt".)"
Dave Winer published an excerpt of a promotional email from Amazon today which he calls "the 800 pound gorilla in the room." It sheds more light on Amazon's officially
stated reason for denying service to Wikileaks.
"Government adoption of AWS grew significantly in 2010. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board became the first government-wide agency to migrate to a cloud-based environment when it moved Recovery.gov to AWS in March 2010. Today we have nearly 20 government agencies leveraging AWS, and the U.S. federal government continues to be one of our fastest growing customer segments. The U.S. General Services Administration awarded AWS the ability to provide government agencies with cloud services through the government's cloud storefront, Apps.gov. Additional AWS customers include Treasury.gov, the Federal Register 2.0 at the National Archives, the openEI.org project at DoE's National Renewable Energy Lab, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program at USDA, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA. The current AWS compliance framework covers FISMA, PCI DSS Level 1, ISO 27001, SAS70 type II, and HIPAA, and we continue to seek certifications and accreditations that make it easier for government agencies to benefit from AWS."
He also references a December 14 post in AppleInsider and points out that Apple banned a Wikileaks app from their store just one week after this article.
The U.S. Army is interested in giving each of its soldiers a smartphone, and may give them a choice between Apple's iPhone or one running Google Android.
The rise of WikiLeaks and the heat of the response from the US political leadership brought worldwide attention to a little known underground population that calls themselves Anonymous. Some think of it as an organization with certain identifiable members but as Sam, a member of the #WikiLeaks Forums pointed out, this is misunderstanding the nature of this open source action group. In anticipation of the Bank of America DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack that was planned by a section of Anonymous, some pundits were assuming that this was the same organization as Operation Payback, the Pay Pal/Amazon DDoS group.
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