US authorities have known for weeks that they have suffered a haemorrhage of secret information on a scale which makes even the leaking of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam war look limited by comparison.
The Afghan war logs consist of 92,201 internal records of actions by the US military in Afghanistan between January 2004 and December last year — threat reports from intelligence agencies, plans and accounts of coalition operations, descriptions of enemy attacks and roadside bombs, records of meetings with local politicians, most of them classified secret.
The source for these is WikiLeaks, the Web site which specializes in publishing untraceable material from whistleblowers, which is simultaneously publishing raw material from the logs.
Washington fears it may have lost even more highly sensitive material including an archive of tens of thousands of cable messages sent by US embassies around the world, reflecting arms deals, trade talks, secret meetings and uncensored opinion of other governments.
WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, says that in the last two months they have received yet another huge batch of “high-quality material” from military sources and that officers from the Pentagon’s criminal investigations department have asked him to meet them on neutral territory to help them plug the sequence of leaks. He has not agreed to do so.
Behind Monday’s revelations lie two distinct stories: first, of the Pentagon’s attempts to trace the leaks with painful results for one young soldier; and second, a unique collaboration between the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel magazine in Germany to sift the huge trove of data for material of public interest and to distribute globally this secret record of the world’s most powerful nation at war.
The Pentagon was slow to engage. The evidence they have now collected suggests it was November last year that somebody working in a high-security facility inside a US military base in Iraq started to copy secret material. On Feb. 18, WikiLeaks posted a single document — a classified cable from the US embassy in Reykjavik to Washington, recording the complaints of Icelandic politicians that they were being bullied by the British and Dutch over the collapse of the Icesave bank; and the tart remark of an Icelandic diplomat who described his own president as “unpredictable.” Some WikiLeaks workers in Iceland claimed they saw signs that they were being followed after this disclosure.
However, the US evidently was nowhere nearer to discovering the source when, on April 5, Assange held a press conference in Washington to reveal US military video of a group of civilians in Baghdad, including two Reuters staff, being shot down in the street in 2007 by Apache helicopters — their crew could be heard crowing about their “good shooting” before destroying a van which had come to rescue a wounded man and which turned out to be carrying two children on its front seat.
It was not until late May that the Pentagon finally closed in on a suspect, and that was only after a very strange sequence of events. On May 21, a Californian computer hacker called Adrian Lamo was contacted by somebody with the online name Bradass87 who started to swap instant messages with him. He was immediately extraordinarily open: “hi... how are you?... im an army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern bagdad ... if you had unprecedented access to classified networks, 14 hours a day, 7 days a week for 8+ months, what would you do?”
For five days, Bradass87 opened his heart to Lamo. He described how his job gave him access to two secret networks: the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, which carries US diplomatic and military intelligence classified “secret”; and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, which uses a different security system to carry similar material classified up to “top secret.”
He said this had allowed him to see “incredible things, awful things ... that belong in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC ... almost criminal political back-dealings ... the non-PR version of world events and crises.”
Bradass87 suggested that “someone I know intimately” had been downloading and compressing and encrypting all this data and uploading it to someone he identified as Julian Assange.
At times, he claimed he himself had leaked the material, suggesting that he had taken in blank CDs, labeled as Lady Gaga’s music, slotted them into his high-security laptop and lip-synched to nonexistent music to cover his downloading: “i want people to see the truth,” he said.
He dwelled on the abundance of the disclosure: “its open diplomacy ... its Climategate with a global scope and breathtaking depth ... its beautiful and horrifying ... It’s public data, it belongs in the public domain.”
At one point, Bradass87 caught himself and said: “i can’t believe what im confessing to you.”
It was too late. Unknown to him, two days into their exchange, on May 23, Lamo had contacted the US military. On May 25 he met officers from the Pentagon’s criminal investigations department in a Starbucks and gave them a printout of Bradass87’s online chat.
On May 26, at US Forward Operating Base Hammer, 40km outside Baghdad, a 22-year-old intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning was arrested, shipped across the border to Kuwait and locked up in a military prison.
News of the arrest leaked out slowly, primarily through the web site, Wired News, whose senior editor, Kevin Poulsen, is a friend of Lamo’s and who published edited extracts from Bradass87’s chatlogs. Pressure started to build on Assange: The Pentagon said formally that it would like to find him; Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, said he thought Assange could be in some physical danger; Ellsberg and two other former whistleblowers warned that US agencies would “do all possible to make an example” of the WikiLeaks founder. Assange cancelled a planned trip to Las Vegas and went to ground.
After several days trying to make contact through intermediaries, the Guardian finally caught up with Assange in a cafe in Brussels where he had surfaced to speak at the European parliament.
Assange volunteered that WikiLeaks was in possession of several million files, which amounted to an untold history of the US government’s activity around the world, disclosing numerous important and controversial activities. They were putting the finishing touches to an accessible version of the data which they were preparing to post immediately on the Internet in order to pre-empt any attempt to censor it.
However, he also feared that the significance of the logs and some of the important stories buried in them might be missed if they were simply dumped raw on to the Web. Instead he agreed that a small team of specialist reporters from the Guardian could have access to the logs for a few weeks before WikiLeaks published, to decode them and establish what they revealed about the conduct of the war.
To reduce the risk of gagging by the authorities, the database would also be made available to the New York Times and the German weekly, Der Spiegel which, along with the Guardian, would publish simultaneously in three different jurisdictions. Under the arrangement, Assange would have no influence on the stories that were written, but would have a voice in the timing of publication.
He would place the first tranche of data in encrypted form on a secret Web site and the Guardian would access it with a user name and password constructed from the commercial logo on the cafe’s napkin.
Monday’s stories are based on that batch of logs. WikiLeaks has simultaneously published much of the raw data. It says it has been careful to weed out material which could jeopardize human sources.
Since the release of the Apache helicopter video, there has been some evidence of low-level attempts to smear WikiLeaks. Online stories accuse Assange of spending WikiLeaks money on expensive hotels (at a follow-up meeting in Stockholm, he slept on an office floor); of selling data to mainstream media (the subject of money was never mentioned); or charging for media interviews (also never mentioned).
Earlier this year, WikiLeaks published a US military document which disclosed a plan to “destroy the center of gravity” of WikiLeaks by attacking its trustworthiness.
Meanwhile, somewhere in Kuwait, Manning has been charged under US military law with improperly downloading and releasing information, including the Icelandic cable and the video of Apache helicopters shooting civilians in Baghdad. He faces trial by court martial with the promise of a heavy jail sentence.
Ellsberg has described Manning as “a new hero of mine.”
In his online chat, Bradass87 looked into the future: “god knows what happens now ... hopefully, worldwide discussion, debates and reforms. if not ... we’re doomed.”
Trying to force a partnership between Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) and Intel Corp would be a wildly complex ordeal. Already, the reported request from the Trump administration for TSMC to take a controlling stake in Intel’s US factories is facing valid questions about feasibility from all sides. Washington would likely not support a foreign company operating Intel’s domestic factories, Reuters reported — just look at how that is going over in the steel sector. Meanwhile, many in Taiwan are concerned about the company being forced to transfer its bleeding-edge tech capabilities and give up its strategic advantage. This is especially
US President Donald Trump’s second administration has gotten off to a fast start with a blizzard of initiatives focused on domestic commitments made during his campaign. His tariff-based approach to re-ordering global trade in a manner more favorable to the United States appears to be in its infancy, but the significant scale and scope are undeniable. That said, while China looms largest on the list of national security challenges, to date we have heard little from the administration, bar the 10 percent tariffs directed at China, on specific priorities vis-a-vis China. The Congressional hearings for President Trump’s cabinet have, so far,
US political scientist Francis Fukuyama, during an interview with the UK’s Times Radio, reacted to US President Donald Trump’s overturning of decades of US foreign policy by saying that “the chance for serious instability is very great.” That is something of an understatement. Fukuyama said that Trump’s apparent moves to expand US territory and that he “seems to be actively siding with” authoritarian states is concerning, not just for Europe, but also for Taiwan. He said that “if I were China I would see this as a golden opportunity” to annex Taiwan, and that every European country needs to think
For years, the use of insecure smart home appliances and other Internet-connected devices has resulted in personal data leaks. Many smart devices require users’ location, contact details or access to cameras and microphones to set up, which expose people’s personal information, but are unnecessary to use the product. As a result, data breaches and security incidents continue to emerge worldwide through smartphone apps, smart speakers, TVs, air fryers and robot vacuums. Last week, another major data breach was added to the list: Mars Hydro, a Chinese company that makes Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as LED grow lights and the
RSS