Crisis looms as WikiLeaks releases US cables
The US may face a diplomacy crisis on an unheard of scale after the website WikiLeaks made public some 250,000 US embassy cables.
After publishing two major leaks earlier this year, the whistle-blower website made its latest leak available yesterday evening to The Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel. The German magazine summed up the uncountable value of this latest release with the headline, “Revealed. How America sees the world”.
The latest leaks comprise of diplomatic cables entailed between US embassies around the world. WikiLeaks got its hands on more than 250,000 dispatches stretching from the 1960s – when the earliest cables were sent – to the first months of 2010. The majority of the documents have been sent in the last 10 years, with 50,000 sent during the current Obama administration.
Many world leaders are mentioned in the classified dispatches, often with negative and ridiculous remarks. Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is described as “Hitler”, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai is said to be “pushed by paranoia”, and Nicolas Sarkozy is seen as the “emperor without clothes”.
The leak of US embassy cables offers a unique and non-filtered insight on the core of US diplomacy at the highest level.
Last week, Philip Crowley, US Department of State spokesperson, described the documents that were expected to be released as “diplomacy in action”.
Criticism has now rained over the website from many sides, pointing the finger at its “carelessness” for making the cables public.
“We condemn in the strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information”, said US Defence Secretary Robert Gates.
“By releasing stolen and classified documents, WikiLeaks has put at risk not only the cause of human rights but also the lives and work of these individuals.”
Even though the cables are not an expression of US policy, said Mr Gates, they could still, “compromise private discussions with foreign governments and opposition leaders”.
“When the substance of private conversations is printed on the front pages of newspapers across the world, it can deeply impact not only US foreign policy interests, but those of our allies,” he added.
Speaking to The Fresh Outlook today, a Pentagon spokesperson said: “This leak threatens global engagement and national security, and puts lives at risk. We condemn it strongly.”
More colourful is the remark of the Italian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Franco Frattini, who said in a statement this morning: “WikiLeaks wants to destroy the world.”
Other world leaders mentioned in the cables are Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi.
According to the cables, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked the US embassies in Rome and Moscow information about the nature of the close relationship between Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi and his Russian counterpart. The answers contained details of “lavish gifts” between the two and a friendship based on the macho attitude of both men. Mr Berlusconi, wrote American diplomats in Rome, “appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin” in Europe.
The leaks have also the potential to destabilise the relationship between the UK and the US.
Commenting on the release, a spokesperson from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office told The Fresh Outlook: “We condemn any unauthorized release of this classified information just as we condemn leaks of classified material in the UK. They can damage national security and are not in the nation's interest and, as the US said, may put lives at risk.
“We have a strong relationship with the US government that will continue.”
But how did WikiLeaks get its hands on such protected information?
The US embassy cables are sent through, and stored in, the protected Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNnet). SIPRNet is the US military internet system used by the Department of Defence and the Department of State to deal with classified information, which ranges from “confidential” to “secret”.
Almost 100,000 of the cables obtained by WikiLeaks were classified by the US as “confidential”. More than 11,300 are “secret”, 75,700 are “unclassified” and over 58,000 “for office use only”.
A much smaller number of cables are marked as “confidential/NOFORN” and “secret/NOFORN”. NOFORN means that documents classified in this way are not to be seen by non-US citizens.
When a document is marked with one of these abbreviations, it is automatically made available on the embassy website to whoever can access the network, so that information can be shared between embassies and US officials.
Still, the SIPRNet network can be accessed by anyone who has a computer connected to it, and who knows the passwords. The Guardian writes that the number of people who can access it in the US amounts to three million.
SIPRNet is allegedly the same network from where US intelligence analyst Bradley Manning took the information and video recordings showing an Apache attack to a group of civilians in Iraq in 2007, including two Reuters reporters, who died in the attack.
The videos were leaked to WikiLeaks, which released it with the famous name Collateral Murder. Bradley Manning is now in prison, facing court martial.
During a previous interview with The Fresh Outlook, a spokesman from WikiLeaks pointed out that the website does not go and look for information. It is people who have information who contact it, if they feel the information ought to be public.
The website has announced today, via its Twitter page, that the entire bulk of cables will be released tonight, “even if WikiLeaks goes down”. The papers it contacted to coordinate the release will publish the cables if something were to prevent WikiLeaks from doing it, read the feed.
“We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack,” wrote WikiLeaks this morning.
The impact of the release of the cables is yet to be understood. For the moment, authorities around the world are playing down the consequence of the revelations, saying it will not affect diplomacy nor relationships between states.
Still, since WikiLeaks announced at the beginning of last week its intention to publish, the US has been in strict contact with the countries that were feared to be mentioned in the cables.
In an ultimate attempt to keep the attention on the leaks as low as possible, the US Department of Defence said last week that, even if WikiLeaks were to release it, the information would still be classified – implying that people who are not entitled to see it, should not go and read the leak.
In a statement prior to today's release, Pentagon spokesman Colonel David Lapan said that this kind of information may be dangerous in the hands of WikiLeaks, which does not know how to handle it: “There is lots of information that could be damaging, and they don't have the expertise to know what they are.”
(Read the full article on The Fresh Outlook)
23.10.2010
After publishing two major leaks earlier this year, the whistle-blower website made its latest leak available yesterday evening to The Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel. The German magazine summed up the uncountable value of this latest release with the headline, “Revealed. How America sees the world”.
The latest leaks comprise of diplomatic cables entailed between US embassies around the world. WikiLeaks got its hands on more than 250,000 dispatches stretching from the 1960s – when the earliest cables were sent – to the first months of 2010. The majority of the documents have been sent in the last 10 years, with 50,000 sent during the current Obama administration.
Many world leaders are mentioned in the classified dispatches, often with negative and ridiculous remarks. Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is described as “Hitler”, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai is said to be “pushed by paranoia”, and Nicolas Sarkozy is seen as the “emperor without clothes”.
The leak of US embassy cables offers a unique and non-filtered insight on the core of US diplomacy at the highest level.
Last week, Philip Crowley, US Department of State spokesperson, described the documents that were expected to be released as “diplomacy in action”.
Criticism has now rained over the website from many sides, pointing the finger at its “carelessness” for making the cables public.
“We condemn in the strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information”, said US Defence Secretary Robert Gates.
“By releasing stolen and classified documents, WikiLeaks has put at risk not only the cause of human rights but also the lives and work of these individuals.”
Even though the cables are not an expression of US policy, said Mr Gates, they could still, “compromise private discussions with foreign governments and opposition leaders”.
“When the substance of private conversations is printed on the front pages of newspapers across the world, it can deeply impact not only US foreign policy interests, but those of our allies,” he added.
Speaking to The Fresh Outlook today, a Pentagon spokesperson said: “This leak threatens global engagement and national security, and puts lives at risk. We condemn it strongly.”
More colourful is the remark of the Italian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Franco Frattini, who said in a statement this morning: “WikiLeaks wants to destroy the world.”
Other world leaders mentioned in the cables are Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi.
According to the cables, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked the US embassies in Rome and Moscow information about the nature of the close relationship between Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi and his Russian counterpart. The answers contained details of “lavish gifts” between the two and a friendship based on the macho attitude of both men. Mr Berlusconi, wrote American diplomats in Rome, “appears increasingly to be the mouthpiece of Putin” in Europe.
The leaks have also the potential to destabilise the relationship between the UK and the US.
Commenting on the release, a spokesperson from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office told The Fresh Outlook: “We condemn any unauthorized release of this classified information just as we condemn leaks of classified material in the UK. They can damage national security and are not in the nation's interest and, as the US said, may put lives at risk.
“We have a strong relationship with the US government that will continue.”
But how did WikiLeaks get its hands on such protected information?
The US embassy cables are sent through, and stored in, the protected Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNnet). SIPRNet is the US military internet system used by the Department of Defence and the Department of State to deal with classified information, which ranges from “confidential” to “secret”.
Almost 100,000 of the cables obtained by WikiLeaks were classified by the US as “confidential”. More than 11,300 are “secret”, 75,700 are “unclassified” and over 58,000 “for office use only”.
A much smaller number of cables are marked as “confidential/NOFORN” and “secret/NOFORN”. NOFORN means that documents classified in this way are not to be seen by non-US citizens.
When a document is marked with one of these abbreviations, it is automatically made available on the embassy website to whoever can access the network, so that information can be shared between embassies and US officials.
Still, the SIPRNet network can be accessed by anyone who has a computer connected to it, and who knows the passwords. The Guardian writes that the number of people who can access it in the US amounts to three million.
SIPRNet is allegedly the same network from where US intelligence analyst Bradley Manning took the information and video recordings showing an Apache attack to a group of civilians in Iraq in 2007, including two Reuters reporters, who died in the attack.
The videos were leaked to WikiLeaks, which released it with the famous name Collateral Murder. Bradley Manning is now in prison, facing court martial.
During a previous interview with The Fresh Outlook, a spokesman from WikiLeaks pointed out that the website does not go and look for information. It is people who have information who contact it, if they feel the information ought to be public.
The website has announced today, via its Twitter page, that the entire bulk of cables will be released tonight, “even if WikiLeaks goes down”. The papers it contacted to coordinate the release will publish the cables if something were to prevent WikiLeaks from doing it, read the feed.
“We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack,” wrote WikiLeaks this morning.
The impact of the release of the cables is yet to be understood. For the moment, authorities around the world are playing down the consequence of the revelations, saying it will not affect diplomacy nor relationships between states.
Still, since WikiLeaks announced at the beginning of last week its intention to publish, the US has been in strict contact with the countries that were feared to be mentioned in the cables.
In an ultimate attempt to keep the attention on the leaks as low as possible, the US Department of Defence said last week that, even if WikiLeaks were to release it, the information would still be classified – implying that people who are not entitled to see it, should not go and read the leak.
In a statement prior to today's release, Pentagon spokesman Colonel David Lapan said that this kind of information may be dangerous in the hands of WikiLeaks, which does not know how to handle it: “There is lots of information that could be damaging, and they don't have the expertise to know what they are.”
(Read the full article on The Fresh Outlook)
23.10.2010