WikiLeaks Concepts

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire

by Wikileaks · 24 Aug 2015 · 708pp · 176,708 words

.11 While such religious hysteria seems laughable to those outside the US national security sector, it has resulted in a serious poverty of analysis of WikiLeaks publications in American international relations journals. However, scholars in disciplines as varied as law, linguistics, applied statistics, health, and economics have not been so

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not merely odd, but suspicious. These journals, which dominate the study of international relations globally, should be a natural home for the proper analysis of WikiLeaks’ two-billion-word diplomatic corpus. The US-based International Studies Quarterly (ISQ), a major international relations journal, adopted a policy against accepting manuscripts based on

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the worldwide promotion of neoliberal economic reform, providing American corporations with access to “global markets.” The chapter draws on State Department cables published by WikiLeaks, as well as WikiLeaks publications dating back to 2007 concerning the “private sector,” including material on banks and global multilateral treaty negotiations. The chapter provides luminous examples

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Israel, the crux of American power in the region was formed by Egypt, the Gulf regimes, and the North African dictatorships. This is where WikiLeaks comes in. WikiLeaks has justifiably gained much credit for helping to ignite the Middle East rebellion. One explanation for this was that, while the space of “civil

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transformed or replaced through neoliberal modernization. This transition is worthy of some consideration. US support for dictatorships in Latin America is vividly illustrated by the WikiLeaks cables relating to three countries in particular: Haiti, Chile, and Honduras. They enable an understanding of the historical context that has motivated changing US

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perfectly congruent with America’s international legal obligations.79 Once again, the power to classify is an immense, indispensable asset for the empire.80 The WikiLeaks cables tell us much about America’s torture programs, alongside the evidence from the Taguba Report, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and investigative journalism. The

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deliberately attacked. The logs identify perpetrators from every corner of the Iraqi security apparatus—soldiers, police officers, prison guards, border enforcement patrols.100 Surveying the WikiLeaks documents, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism noted that, for the 180,000 people held captive in Iraqi prisons from 2004 to 2009, the US military

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governments, discloses reams of documents about corporate corruption and the links between governments and business. EXPOSING BUSINESS “Be afraid,” the Economist warned in 2010 when WikiLeaks announced it would release five gigabytes of secret files from a prominent financial institution. Having gone after states, it would now be targeting corporations. In

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constitute some good old-fashioned muck-raking journalism, exposing corporate malpractice and its almost inevitable corollaries of political corruption and repression. Indeed, the ramifications of WikiLeaks for investigative reporting and the future of the Fourth Estate have been the source of much academic hair-splitting and journalistic soul-searching.8 But

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US trade representative, is pressing for the globalization of the most severe current interpretations of copyright law. The portion of the TPP draft leaked via WikiLeaks centrally involves a chapter on intellectual property rights, which demands laws punishing the circumvention of Digital Rights Management technology (DRM), lengthens copyright terms, and

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treats the breach of trade secrets as a criminal act (which could potentially penalize journalists). In addition to such measures, WikiLeaks highlighted the threat to healthcare, as the United States cited intellectual property rights to defend the creation in law of artificial monopolies in the production

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collection in PlusD was Cablegate, which was originally published in 2010 as part of a partnership of international newspapers and media organizations globally, coordinated by WikiLeaks. We designed and implemented a system that allowed us to coordinate a publication schedule between over a hundred global mainstream media partners. Whenever the media

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history. This information is frequently available only through the actions of courageous individuals within secretive organizations: whistleblowers. Commensurate with the risks taken by such individuals, WikiLeaks undertakes to protect our journalistic sources with the best, most advanced techniques available. We promise our sources that we will publish in such a way

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these measures waned during Bush’s second term, but not because the administration’s hostility toward international law had diminished. Rather, as documents published by WikiLeaks show, some US politicians and diplomats were worried that the sanctions were having “unintended negative effects” on US policy objectives—and were undermining US power

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at first blush appear banal. Beyond the bits of gossip embedded throughout the European cables, this chapter makes the case that the documents published by WikiLeaks also contain groundbreaking disclosures that, while not fundamentally changing our sense of US imperialism, provide valuable and unique insights into the nature of American power

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British environment secretary made clear the government’s position, arguing that criticisms of genetically modified products were “complete nonsense.”8 According to cables published by WikiLeaks, the State Department’s efforts on behalf of Monsanto and other biotech firms took a number of different forms in Europe. Washington looked to soften

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wing parties largely hostile to Palestinian rights, from the beginning he evinced little interest in negotiating the creation of a real Palestinian state. Instead, the WikiLeaks cables reveal an Israeli prime minister more concerned with pacifying the West Bank through a combination of repression, economic development, and security cooperation with the

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version of US policy in the Middle East concealed US motives and strategies, as well as objective political-diplomatic realities contradicting the approved narrative. The WikiLeaks cables excerpted and quoted above show how the Bush and Obama administrations subordinated US diplomatic freedom and impartiality on the crucial issue of Israeli-Palestinian

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of the standard operating procedures by military intelligence personnel to obtain confessions and extract information.” Amnesty International released similar findings.22 The majority of the WikiLeaks cables concerning torture in US military detention facilities were focused more on the media backlash against the release of the infamous photographs from Abu Ghraib

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acknowledged truth is that Japan is Washington’s most important ally anywhere on the globe.” The Obama administration wanted to keep it that way. The WikiLeaks diplomatic cables examined in this chapter underscore the deep continuity in policy between the supposedly progressive Obama Democrats and the utterly reactionary neoconservatives of the

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agreement designed to empower (American) multinational corporations at the expense of the welfare of consumers, especially those in the developing world. On November 13, 2013, WikiLeaks released the TPP’s secret negotiated draft text of the chapter on intellectual property rights. Interestingly, the draft even shows the negotiating position of individual

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the extent of quasi-espionage conducted by American diplomats, who were instructed to gather confidential information from their counterparts in the United Nations,42 the WikiLeaks documents caused unprecedented embarrassment for Washington. Among Southeast Asian leaders, Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was angered by US diplomatic cables—which implicated his wife

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entities generally aligned with US interests through the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and para-governmental organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). WikiLeaks’ cables for Latin America and the Caribbean show how US diplomatic missions coordinate closely with USAID country offices to pursue a desired course of political

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intelligence and targeting fusion exercise led by the United States, which posits an insurgent challenge to occupying Anglophone forces, is called “Operation Empire Challenge.” (https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Anglo_spy_fusion:_Operation_Empire_Challenge_-_87_documents,_2008). 3“The United States may conduct some ARSOF [Army Special Operations Forces] UW [Unconventional

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from leaked diplomatic cables to elucidate the bilateral free trade agreement negotiations between the United States and Jordan.” Gabriel J. Michael, “Who’s Afraid of Wikileaks? Missed Opportunities in Political Science Research,” Review of Policy Research, December 22, 2014 (forthcoming). 13An example of political censorship by the New York Times

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also O’Malley and Craig, The Cyprus Conspiracy. 98PINOCHET REACTS TO UN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION CABLE, 1974 March 7, 21:15 (Thursday), availalbe at https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1976SANTIA01734_b.html. 99Quoted in Mark Ensalaco, Chile Under Pinochet: Recovering the Truth (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), p.

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December 17, 2010, at spiegel.de. 8Jeremy Scahill, “The (Not So) Secret (Anymore) US War in Pakistan,” Nation, December 1, 2010. 9See https://wikileaks.org/gitmo. 10Jeremy Scahill, “WikiLeaks and War Crimes,” Nation, August 12, 2010. 11Philippe Sands, Lawless World: Making and Breaking Global Rules (London: Penguin, 2006); Philippe Sands, Torture Team

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that the US military suppressed the killings—which were subsequently exposed by human rights organizations—instead clinically recording an IED attack and escape: https://www.wikileaks.org/afg/event/2007/03/AFG20070304n586.html. 45Naomi Klein, “Iraq is not America’s to sell,” Guardian, November 7, 2003. 46Ahmed Janabi, “Iraqi Unemployment

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Austerity: The New York City Financial Crisis (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1986). 17Dianna Melrose, Nicaragua: The Threat of a Good Example? (London: Oxfam, 1989). 18https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/01HANOI686_a.html; “Vietnam: Progress on Reform under World Bank and IMF Poverty Reduction Loans,” November 20, 2000, [01HANOI3054_a]; https://www

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20The best overall guide to postwar Vietnam and its economic policies is Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a Peace (London/New York: Routledge, 1997). 21https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06QUITO1157_a.html. 22On “dollar diplomacy,” see Eric Helleiner, “Dollarization Diplomacy: US Policy Toward Latin America Coming Full Circle?,” Review of International

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/cables/08QUITO191_a.html. 44Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001). 45https://wikileaks.org/tisa-financial. 46https://wikileaks.org/tpp-ip2. 47An insightful critique of intellectual property is Christopher May, The Global Political Economy of Intellectual Property Rights: The New Enclosures

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? (London/New York: Routledge, 2000). See also Debora J. Halpert, Resisting Intellectual Property (London/New York: Routledge, 2003). 48https://wikileaks.org/tpp-ip2/attack-on-affordable-cancer-treatments.html. 49Ibid. 50“No Party may prevent a service supplier of another Party from transferring, accessing, processing

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, where such activity is carried out in connection with the conduct of the service supplier’s business.” This passage from TISA was released through the WikiLeaks-like organization the Associated Whistleblowing Press. “Proposal of New Provisions Applicable to All Services of the Secret TISA Negotiations,” Associated Whistleblowing Press, December 17,

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Thin-skinned and Authoritarian,” Guardian, November 30, 2010. 2“Internal Source Kept US Informed of Merkel Coalition Negotiations,” Der Spiegel, November 28, 2010. 3Annalisa Piras, “WikiLeaks Cables Portrait of Silvio Berlusconi Is a Worry Beyond Italy,” Guardian, December 3, 2010. 4Eric Lipton, Nicola Clark, and Andrew Lehren, “Diplomats Help Push Sales

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February 5, 2014. 9Murat Yetkin, “Kurdish and German Angles of Erdoğan-Gülen Rift,” Daily News, February 4, 2014. CHAPTER 9: ISRAEL 1Jill Lawless/Associated Press, “WikiLeaks Release: US Briefs Allies About Upcoming Revelations,” Huffington Post, November 26, 2010, at huffingtonpost.com. 2Ross Colvin, “‘Cut Off Head of Snake’ Saudis Told US

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12, 2014, at thediplomat.com. 36Robert Kaplan, Asia’s Cauldron. 37See Kaplan, Asia’s Cauldron. 38Heydarian, “Obama’s Free Trade Strategy Falters in Asia.” 39https://wikileaks.org/tpp. 40Henry Farrell, “US Isolated in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Negotiations,” Washington Post, November 18, 2013. 41Heydarian, “Obama’s Free Trade Strategy Falters in

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Asia”; “Japan, America and the Trans-Pacific Partnership: Stalemate.” 42Toby Harnden, “WikiLeaks: US diplomats ‘have been spying on UN leadership,” Daily Telegraph, November 28, 2010. 43“Cables ‘Character Assassination’: SBY,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 14, 2011. 44Kaplan

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Haiti Fund VP Green Lighted Assault on Slum Despite ‘Inevitable …civilian casualties,’” Haiti Relief and Reconstruction Watch, August 31, 2011, at cepr.net. 42Kim Ives, “WikiLeaks points to US meddling in Haiti,” Guardian, January 21, 2011. 43Haiti Information Project, “US Embassy in Haiti Acknowledges Excessive Force by UN,” January 24, 2007

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, “SOUTHCOM Faces Threats to Peace in Latin America, Caribbean,” US Department of Defense, American Forces Press Service, March 31, 2004, at defense.gov. 23https://www.WikiLeaks.org/plusd/cables/07TEGUCIGALPA1828_a.htm. 24Tim Padgett, “Is US Opposition to the Honduran Coup Lessening?,” Time, October 16, 2009. 25See, for example, [09GUATEMALA977]

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regionally focused publications like the Asia Times and Informed Comment. Conn Hallinan can be read at dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com. Sarah Harrison is a journalist, and WikiLeaks’ investigations editor. In June 2013, Harrison accompanied Edward Snowden when he left Hong Kong to seek asylum, ensuring he could leave Hong Kong safely and

The End of Secrecy: The Rise and Fall of WikiLeaks

by The "Guardian", David Leigh and Luke Harding · 1 Feb 2011 · 322pp · 99,066 words

Investigative Journalism Heather Brooke – London-based American journalist and freedom of information activist Bradley Manning Bradley Manning – 23-year-old US army private and alleged WikiLeaks source Rick McCombs – former principal at Crescent high school, Crescent, Oklahoma Brian, Susan, Casey Manning – parents and sister Tom Dyer – school friend Kord Campbell –

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UK government special representative to Afghanistan and former ambassador to Kabul INTRODUCTION Alan Rusbridger Back in the days when almost no one had heard about WikiLeaks, regular emails started arriving in my inbox from someone called Julian Assange. It was a memorable kind of name. All editors receive a daily

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hackers. An agreement was struck. And so a unique collaboration was born between (initially) three newspapers, the mysterious Australian nomad – and whatever his elusive organisation, WikiLeaks, actually was. That much never became very clear. Assange was, at the best of times, difficult to contact, switching mobile phones, email addresses and encrypted

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, by comparison, stretched to two and a half million words). Once redacted, the documents were shared among the (eventually) five newspapers and sent to WikiLeaks, who adopted all our redactions. The extent of the redaction process and the relatively limited extent of publication of actual cables were apparently overlooked by

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had been sent. It provided an extraordinary picture of an extraordinary day. Manning was even more impressed, because with his specialist knowledge he knew that WikiLeaks must have somehow obtained the messages anonymously from a National Security Agency database. And that made him feel comfortable that he, too, could come

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a crowded student house in Melbourne, dreaming up a scheme for an idealistic information insurgency which was eventually to become celebrated – and execrated – worldwide as WikiLeaks. Assange had a striking and, some critics would say, damaged personality. It was on peacock display in this dating profile, but probably rooted deep

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website that will use Wikipedia’s open-editing format is hoping to become a place where whistleblowers can post documents without fear of being traced. WikiLeaks, according to the group’s website, will be ‘an uncensorable version of Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our primary interests are

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attention to this news. For hackers, who had long lamented the inadequacies of the MSM, that came as no surprise. CHAPTER 4 The rise of WikiLeaks Annual congress of the Chaos Computer Club, Alexanderplatz, Berlin December 2007 “How do you reveal things about powerful people without getting your arse kicked?”

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about to become a key lieutenant. Domscheit-Berg eventually gave up his full-time job with US computer giant EDS, and devoted himself to perfecting WikiLeaks’ technical architecture, adopting the underground nom de guerre “Daniel Schmitt”. Domscheit-Berg’s friendship with Assange was to end in bitter recriminations, but the

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Wau” Holland-Moritz, whose friends set up the Wau Holland Foundation after his death. This charity was to become a crucial channel to receive worldwide WikiLeaks donations. Chaos Computer Club members at the Berlin congress such as Domscheit-Berg, along with his Dutch hacker colleague Rop Gonggrijp, had mature talents that

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drive, can encrypt it and send it on, and only later reveal the encryption key. The Jabber encrypted chat service is popular with WikiLeakers. “Tor’s importance to WikiLeaks cannot be overstated,” Assange told Rolling Stone, when they profiled Appelbaum, his west coast US hacker associate. But Tor has an interesting

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not as a traditional journalistic enterprise, but as a piece of opportunistic underground computer hacking. In other words: eavesdropping. On the verge of his debut WikiLeaks publication, at the beginning of 2007, Assange excitedly messaged the veteran curator of the Cryptome leaking site, John Young, to explain where his trove of

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is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites.’” Assange would often pronounce to those around him: “Courage is infectious.” It was Kenya that gave WikiLeaks its first journalistic coup. A massive report about the alleged corruption of former president Daniel Arap Moi had been commissioned from the private inquiry firm

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a book not banned by any African government, not a secret document. It left me feeling pretty jaundiced.” She wrote protesting: “I was delighted when WikiLeaks was launched, and benefited personally from its fearlessness in publishing leaked documents exposing venality in countries like Kenya. This strikes me as a totally different

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to ‘invest’ in analysis without additional incentives. The economics are counter-intuitive – temporarily restrict supply to increase uptake … a known paradox in economics. Given that WikiLeaks needs to restrict supply for a period to increase perceived value to the point that journalists will invest time to produce quality stories, the question

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elsewhere; many “mirror sites” sprang up carrying the offending documents; and the court ruling was reversed as a stream of US organisations rallied behind WikiLeaks in the name of free speech. They included the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as a journalistic alliance which

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royal family. Today, however, Davies’s attention was caught by the Guardian’s foreign pages: “American officials are searching for Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, in an attempt to pressure him not to publish thousands of confidential and potentially hugely embarrassing diplomatic cables that offer unfiltered assessments of Middle East

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to have given the whistleblower website a classified video of American troops killing civilians in Baghdad. The soldier, Bradley Manning, also claimed to have given WikiLeaks 260,000 pages of confidential diplomatic cables and intelligence assessments. The US authorities fear their release could ‘do serious damage to national security’.” Davies was

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a haven for dodgy oligarchs and other dubious “libel tourists”. What was needed, Davies felt, was a multi-jurisdictional alliance between traditional media outlets and WikiLeaks, possibly encompassing non-governmental organisations and others. If the material from the cables were published simultaneously in several countries, would this get round the threat

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.” He added: “Politicians? NGOs? Other interested parties?” Maybe the Guardian could preview the leaked cables and select the best story angles. The Guardian and WikiLeaks would then pass these “media missiles” to other friendly publications. He liked that plan. But would Assange buy it? Over in Brussels, Traynor was discovering

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“This is one hell of a spreadsheet,” he said. After working on those spreadsheets, he concluded: “Sometimes people talk about the internet killing journalism. The WikiLeaks story was a combination of the two: traditional journalistic skills and the power of the technology, harnessed to tell an amazing story. In future, data

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redactions. The papers planned only to publish a relatively small number of significant stories, and with them the text of the handful of relevant logs. WikiLeaks, on the other hand, intended simultaneously to unleash the lot. But many of the entries, particularly the “threat reports” derived from intelligence, mentioned the

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about the impact of a tactic which is inherently likely to kill, injure and alienate the innocent bystanders whose support the coalition craves.” The Guardian/WikiLeaks publication smoked out profound divisions about these tactics among the occupying coalition. “The war logs confirm the impression that this is a military campaign

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GMT on Sunday evening, a White House spokesman emailed newspapers’ Washington correspondents a note not intended for publication under the subject line: “Thoughts on WikiLeaks”. They even attached some handy quotes from senior officials highlighting concerns about the ISI and safe havens in Afghanistan. “This is now out in the

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employees shot in Baghdad in 2007 by an Apache helicopter gunship – the episode captured on a gun-camera video, and subsequently discovered and leaked to WikiLeaks – were registered. As so often, further journalistic investigation was needed to improve these raw and statistically dirty figures. Iraq Body Count, an NGO offshoot

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an on-the-record interview to Mark Hosenball of Newsweek, betraying in advance the entire top-secret plan to publish the Iraq war logs. “Exclusive: WikiLeaks Collaborating With Media Outlets on Release of Iraq Documents”, ran the headline above the article, which opened: “A London-based journalism nonprofit is working

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to have described her. In Weiss’s witness statement, she explained that some weeks earlier she had seen Assange on television and had followed the WikiLeaks news avidly thereafter. She thought Assange “interesting, brave and admirable”, had been Googling his name, and excitedly discovered he was actually coming to speak

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, although the US has threatened repeatedly that it will seek to bring its own indictment against Assange for information crimes. The claim certainly muddied the WikiLeaks waters, as conspiracy theories began to rage up and down the internet. That summer, contemplating the imbroglio in Sweden from afar, the Guardian’s

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acutely aware that to ignore the fresh controversy that had erupted around their new collaborator could only increase the risk that it might taint the WikiLeaks enterprise as a whole. CHAPTER 13 Uneasy partners Editor’s office, the Guardian, Kings Place, London 1 November 2010 “I’m a combative person”

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claiming “the people were happy, fully employed, and satisfied with their government.” Assange himself subsequently maintained that he had only a “brief interaction” with Shamir: “WikiLeaks works with hundreds of journalists from different regions of the world. All are required to sign non-disclosure agreements and are generally only given limited

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published cables that described it as a “virtual mafia state”. He did not disclose, however, details of the relationship he had privately struck up with WikiLeaks’ new “Russian representative”, the bizarre figure of Israel Shamir. How much did the US administration know of this planned challenge to their secrets? The

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since the summer, when Private Bradley Manning had been specifically indicted for purloining them. But the Obama administration appeared remarkably unaware of just which cables WikiLeaks and its media partners now had in their possession. In the week before publication, the state department warned many of its allies about the

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Assange invited the US government to “privately nominate” examples where publication of a cable could put an individual “at significant risk of harm”. He promised WikiLeaks would quickly consider any US government submissions ahead of publication. The state department’s legal adviser Harold Koh sent an uncompromising letter back. It stated

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to obstruct “the lines of communication for terrorists, sympathisers, fixers, facilitators, oppressive regimes and general bad guys”. As the attacks continued to pummel WikiLeaks, he tweeted excitedly: “www.wikileaks.org – TANGO DOWN – for attempting to endanger the lives of our troops, ‘other assets’ & foreign relations.” Normally, The Jester preferred to disrupt

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served as authentication and verification of things that were suspected. In fact, far from being routine, the leak was unprecedented, if only in size. WikiLeaks called it, accurately, “the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain”. There were 251,287 internal state department communiqués

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the plot given his “attention to detail”. The Russians were behaving with “increasing self-confidence to the point of arrogance”, Fried noted. The Guardian published WikiLeaks’ Russia disclosures on 2 December 2010, over five pages and under the striking headline: “Inside Putin’s ‘mafia state’”. The front-page photo showed

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ambassador’s comments were prescient. Within a month of the cable’s publication, Tunisia was in the grip of what some were calling the first WikiLeaks revolution. CHAPTER 17 The ballad of Wandsworth jail City of Westminster magistrates court, Horseferry Road, London 7 December 2010 “I walked, with other souls

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human rights lawyer and Assange’s newly hired Australian-born barrister. Standing to address the judge, Robertson began seductively. In melodious tones he described the WikiLeaks founder as a “free-speech philosopher and lecturer”. The idea that he would try and escape was preposterous, he said. Robertson announced that Vaughan

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Sir John Sulston; former Labour minister and chairman of Faber & Faber publishing house Lord Matthew Evans; and Professor Patricia David, a retired educationalist. The WikiLeaks team spilled out of the Gothic architecture of the British court in high spirits. Vaughan Smith promised Assange a rustic dinner of stew and dumplings

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sense of living for the moment. But, above all, there was uncertainty. Nobody quite knew what would happen next. CHAPTER 18 The future of WikiLeaks Ellingham Hall, Norfolk, England Christmas 2010 “Julian is a spectacular showman for the youngsters of the internet era who are disgusted with the seniors” JOHN

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own spokesmen to deal with the torrent of media demands. In January he advertised for some novel vacancies: “Four graduates wanted to staff newly established WikiLeaks press office. Appropriate remuneration. Successful candidates will be disciplined, articulate, quick-witted, capable of multi-tasking and accustomed to lack of sleep. Ability to

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the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers. “I think they want to present the toughest front they can muster,” the officials said. The tacit

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traditional media partners like us – have we helped to create, as it were, a brand which people will go to in place of traditional media?” WikiLeaks had also spawned a host of clone sites which were not so much competitors as admiring tributes: IndoLeaks, BrusselsLeaks, BalkanLeaks, ThaiLeaks, PinoyLeaks. Some were

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sending leaked cables to journalists in an ever-widening range of countries. One of the most interesting – and subtle – immediate positive outcomes of the WikiLeaks saga was in one of those normally obscure countries. Following the publication of excoriating leaked cables from the US mission in Tunisia, about the corruption

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unwittingly helped restore American influence in a place where it had lost credibility. It was ironic. By increasing the amount of information in the system, WikiLeaks had generated unpredictable effects. For all the ironies and ambiguities of his campaign, and for all the problematic nature of his personality, Assange himself

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency

by Micah L. Sifry · 19 Feb 2011 · 212pp · 49,544 words

citizens are the ultimate authority requires the best, most timely, and most accurate information. Interestingly, that’s the same reason Julian Assange says he created WikiLeaks in the ﬁrst place. 12 MICAH L. SIFRY INTRODUCTION All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose oﬃcials smoke the same hashish

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advocates. But everyone seemed slightly awed by Assange and Domscheit-Berg, who were already known then among the digerati for what they had achieved with WikiLeaks. Since its founding in late 2006, the nonproﬁt online media organization had published hundreds of exposés and critical documents, including more than 6,500 Congressional

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Guantánamo Bay prison procedures manual that the American Civil Liberties Union had been unable to obtain under the Freedom of Information Act. Amnesty International gave WikiLeaks an award for its reporting on Kenya, and the British organization Index on Censorship honored it for having stared down the Swiss bank Julian

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base east of Baghdad, on suspicion of having given classiﬁed military documents and videos, along with hundreds of thousands of secret State Department cables, to WikiLeaks. According to Wired.com, which broke the news, the authorities learned of Manning’s alleged activities from a former computer hacker named Adrian Lamo,

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the peaceful relations between nations.”22 And Senator Joe Lieberman, the chairman of the Senate committee on homeland security, started threatening companies providing services to WikiLeaks, starting with Amazon, whose resilient servers were helping keep the site online. Within days, a host of name-brand companies, from Amazon and PayPal

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political arena, even among members of the so-called “progressive community.” And unlike my comrades from the political world, open source developers were embracing 43 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY change. Their systems went through a literal reboot every few years. I was intrigued. In early 2004, on assignment

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with a big screen on stage behind our panelists. But what happened next was magic. During a panel on “Money, Votes, and Community,” 45 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY Republican lobbyist David Metzner said something to the eﬀect of the Internet having democratized campaign fundraising and shifted politics away

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the Capitol, rather than posting them online in searchable, downloadable form, is seen as being ridiculously secretive.3 Charging exorbitant fees to access public 51 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY information, or preventing people from contributing their own knowledge, is seen as hopelessly behind the times. And a government body

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s chairman, Arthur Levitt, as well as public oﬃcials like then House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Vice President Al Gore, both of whom were 67 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY themselves advocating making more government information available online. Soon the agency capitulated, took over from Malamud, and started making this

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it.”13 Marshall and Co.’s distributed digging eventually led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The grassroots government-transparency movement has 77 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY branched in many directions in recent years. In 2007, in a ﬁrst for courtroom transparency, a rotating team of

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Thousands of bloggers zeroed in on the extraneous earmarks in the bill, like a reduction in taxes on wooden arrow manufacturers. Others focused on 81 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY members who voted for the bill, analyzing their campaign contributors and arguing that Wall Street donations inﬂuenced their vote.18

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of transparency projects, because the software itself is open source and designed to be relatively easy to customize for other projects. These include eﬀorts 93 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY to monitor elections in Bolivia, Brazil, Burundi, Colombia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Kyrgyzstan, India, Mexico, the Philippines, and Tanzania;

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biannual ones), online posting of earmark requests, and electronic ﬁling of ﬁnancial disclosure statements and lobbyist reports. Pelosi and her Republican counterpart, Rep. John 107 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY Boehner, also announced that they were interested in improving how the House of Representatives made use of the Internet. In

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of citizen-to-citizen information sharing and collaboration. They recommended a strategy in which government: y welcomes and engages with users and operators of 121 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY user-generated sites in pursuit of common social and economic objectives; y supplies innovators that are re-using government-held

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steam on other fronts and politicians like Watson were caught up in Labour Party inﬁghting as the Parliament expenses scandal broke and general elections 123 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY approached. The idea of government websites enabling public collaboration is also probably still ahead of its time. As Steinberg

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like Washington, have begun making their own public reports available directly in structured form. Since 2006, all the raw data the District of Columbia 127 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY has collected on government operations, education, health care, crime, and dozens of other topics has been available for free

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Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir, Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp, and American anticensorship hacker Jacob Appelbaum. This is an extremely worrisome development. For there is nothing that WikiLeaks has done that is diﬀerent from any other newspaper or media outlet that has received leaked government documents, veriﬁed their authenticity, and then published their

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contents and analysis. If WikiLeaks can be prosecuted and convicted for its acts of journalism, then the foundations of freedom of the press in America are in serious trouble. No

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electronic barriers that prevent their people from accessing portions of the world’s networks. They’ve expunged words, names, and phrases from search engine 141 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY results. They have violated the privacy of citizens who engage in nonviolent political speech. Realigning our policies and our priorities

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they actually do. Compounding this challenge, today when a crisis strikes, information moves faster than the “authorities” can know using their own, slower methods. WikiLeaks, and other channels for the unauthorized release and spread of information, are symptoms of this change, not its cause. Two years ago, all of this

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claimed only seven people were killed; a subsequent investigation found at least ﬁft y-ﬁve people died). But, writes Gowing, “The ‘courtiers [in government 147 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY systems] like behavior that masks the truth’ was how one former senior government ﬁgure described institutional reactions to the new

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government felt needed to be kept out of public view. “Subject to the general objective of ensuring maximum disclosure of information in the public interest, WikiLeaks would be grateful for the United States government to privately nominate any speciﬁc instances (record numbers or names) where it considers the publication of information

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“go after anyone who provides them with any help or contributions or assistance whatsoever.”22 But other authorities have been much calmer in their 151 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY response. Most notably, Defense Secretary Robert Gates (reportedly a close ally of Hillary Clinton), said on November 30, 2010:

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26 There are also signs that the government is deliberately overstating the seriousness of the leaks in order to intimidate Internet service providers and push WikiLeaks oﬀ the Internet without a criminal conviction. Reuters’s Mark Hosenball reported in mid-January 2011 that State Department oﬃcials were privately telling Congress that

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early February 2011 only about 3,900 cables had been released, and nearly all of those through a process of collaboration, redaction, and editing with WikiLeaks’ major newspaper partners. For example, Senator Dianne Feinstein started a Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for Assange’s prosecution under the Espionage Act

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with these words, “When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released his latest document trove— more than 250,000 secret State Department cables—he intentionally harmed the U.S. government.”29 Dozens

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within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work,” The Washington Post recently reported.34 Schneier adds: This has little to do with WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is just a website. The real story is that “least trusted person” who decided to violate his security clearance and make these cables public.

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Fourteen years ago, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan led a bipartisan Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. Its recommendations are worth revisiting in light of WikiLeaks. “It is time for a new way of thinking about secrecy,” the commission’s report began. “Secrecy is a form of government regulation. Americans

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was necessary.2 Instead, Jonsdottir left the organization and focused her energies on the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, an eﬀort 168 MICAH L. SIFRY that WikiLeaks helped inspire to make Iceland into a safe haven for the most robust investigative journalism possible worldwide. Jonsdottir wasn’t the only person raising concerns

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about Assange’s autocratic management of WikiLeaks or his personal life. Her public comments appeared a few days after Newsweek had reported on dissension within the group. According to reporter Mark Hosenball

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, many WikiLeaks activists in Europe “were privately concerned that Assange has continued to spread allegations of dirty tricks and hint at conspiracies against him without justiﬁcation. Insiders

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and indeed that message was received. PayPal,17 Visa, MasterCard, Bank of America, and a small company called Tableau Software all stopped providing services to WikiLeaks in rapid succession. And all of them were acting within their rights as private companies. The First Amendment says “Congress shall make no law . . .

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abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” not that private corporations must also embrace free speech. But what happened to WikiLeaks in America shows how easily government can pressure private companies, merely by threatening a criminal investigation of one of their clients and breathing heavily down

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their necks. 177 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY As the editors of the Honolulu Civil Beat, a small nonproﬁt investigative site, wrote in reaction: Alas, the Internet

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Google to remove videos produced by Islamist terrorist organizations from YouTube. The company took down some that breached its rules against hate speech or 179 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY promoting violence, but it left many of them up. Eric Schmidt, the company’s CEO, told Lieberman, “YouTube encourages

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a virtual ﬂash mob, though at times its “members” have gathered physically, as when they organized protests against Scientology in 2008. In response to anti-WikiLeaks actions by various companies and governmental actors, Anonymous went into action, primarily by directing distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks at the oﬀending parties websites

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Muckrakers,” The New York Times, March 17, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/ us/18wiki.html. The Army counterintelligence report, written in 2008, described WikiLeaks as “a potential force protection, counterintelligence, OPSEC and INFOSEC threat to the U.S. Army.” Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter, “U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested

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6411. A resulting visualization, http://votereport.us/TimeView/applet/index. html, shows how those reports rolled in across the country, time-stamped and geo-located. WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 196 Nancy Scola, “Collaborative, Citizen-Driven Election Monitoring Reaches India,” techPresident.com, April

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unnamed Pentagon oﬃcial who was interview by Nancy Youssef of McClatchy Newspapers for her November 28, 2010, report, “Oﬃcials may be overstating the danger from WikiLeaks,” www. mcclatchydc.com/2010/11/28/104404/oﬃcials-may-be-overstating-the. html#ixzz1AsY5oCjo. Javier Moreno, “Why El País chose to publish the leaks,”

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by the failure of most of the media to accurately describe the Cablegate disclosures. Writing in his introduction to The Guardian’s new book on WikiLeaks, he noted, “The extent of the redaction process and the relatively limited extent of publication of actual cables were apparently overlooked by many commentators

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,” The Guardian, January 25, 2011, www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/ jan/25/net-activism-delusion. Chapter 8 1 Philip Shenon, “Civil War at WikiLeaks,” The Daily Beast, September 3, 2010, www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-03/wikileaksorganizers-demand-julian-assange-step-aside. 2 Marina Jimenez, “Q

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01/11/1168105082315.html. 9 Julian Assange, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies,” November 10, 2006, and “Conspiracy as Governance,” December 3, 2006. 10 http://twitter.com/#!/wikileaks/status/9697336829677568. 11 Mark Pesce, “The Blueprint,” The Human Network, December 5, 2010, http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=446. 12 Mark Hosenball, “The Next Generation

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Part of Ongoing Cyber Investigation,” Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington D.C., January 27, 2011, http://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/ press-releases/warrants_012711. “WikiLeaks and Internet Freedom,” Personal Democracy Forum, December 11, 2010, http://personaldemocracy.com/pdﬂeaks. See also Douglas Rushkoﬀ, “The Next Net,” Shareable, January 3, 2011,

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, visualization and interactive mapping and builds tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories. Its team 209 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY of paid and volunteer developers are based primarily in Africa, but also Europe, South America and the U.S. ––

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ﬁshers, and others working in those industries across Europe. See also VoteWatch.eu, which collects and displays the full records of the European Parliament. WikiLeaks resources: –– WikiLeaks (WikiLeaks.ch). A non-proﬁt media organization dedicated to bringing important news and information to the public that provides an innovative, secure and anonymous way for

The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control

by Jacob Siegel · 24 Mar 2026 · 348pp · 103,246 words

. The two later cowrote a book published in 2013 titled The New Digital Age that received a withering review in The New York Times from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who dismissed it as a collection of banalities adding up to a “blueprint for technocratic imperialism.” Originally, Cohen and Schmidt had intended

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to give the book a different title: “The Empire of the Mind.” Assange would later publish his own book, When Google Met WikiLeaks, where he embellished his description of Cohen and Schmidt’s work, calling it “a love song from Google to official Washington” in which the “burgeoning

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-be-evil.html. “a love song from Google to official Washington” Julian Assange, “Google Is Not What It Seems,” in When Google Met Wikileaks (OR Books, 2014), https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/. “GOOGLE is getting WH” Fred Burton, “GOOGLE & Iran,” email, February 27, 2011, in “The Global Intelligence

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Files,” WikiLeaks, released March 14, 2012, https://search.wikileaks.org/gifiles/?viewemailid=1121800#searchresult. “There isn’t a phone” Michael Hirsh and National Journal, “Silicon Valley Doesn’t Just Help the

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Wheeler, John Archibald White, Adam J. white supremacism Whole Earth Catalog Whole Earth Software Catalog Whole Earth Software Review whole-of-society approach Wiener, Norbert WikiLeaks Wilson, Woodrow First World War and legacy of Obama administration compared with presidential election of 1916 propaganda and succeeded by Harding Wojcicki, Susan Wolfram, Stephen

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers

by Andy Greenberg · 12 Sep 2012 · 461pp · 125,845 words

CHAPTER 7 THE ENGINEERS CONCLUSION THE MACHINE SOURCES ACKNOWLEDGMENTS THE PUZZLE CONTAINED IN THIS BOOK INDEX CHARACTERS (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE) JULIAN ASSANGE Founder of WikiLeaks, former hacker, cypherpunk, and activist who demonstrated the power of digital, anonymous leaking by publishing record-breaking collections of secret corporate and government material.

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newspapers. BRADLEY MANNING Army private who, at the age of twenty-two, allegedly leaked a trove of secret military and State Department documents to WikiLeaks that would become the largest-ever public disclosure of classified materials. ADRIAN LAMO A former hacker and homeless wanderer to whom Manning confessed his leak

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, untraceable, and crowd-funded contract killings. JACOB APPELBAUM Activist, hacker, and developer for the Tor anonymity network who befriended Julian Assange and became the WikiLeaks’ primary American associate. PAUL SYVERSON Logician and cryptographer in the Naval Research Laboratory who is credited with inventing the anonymous communications protocol known as “onion

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with a reporter regarding alleged financial fraud and waste at the agency. BIRGITTA JÓNSDÓTTIR Icelandic member of parliament, poet, and activist who worked with WikiLeaks and is pushing a collection of radical transparency bills through Iceland’s legislature known as the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative. DANIEL DOMSCHEIT-BERG German former

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whistleblower group known as OpenLeaks. ATANAS TCHOBANOV AND ASSEN YORDANOV Two Bulgarian investigative reporters who founded the independent media outlet Bivol and were inspired by WikiLeaks to create the Bulgaria-focused leak site BalkanLeaks. ANDY MÜLLER-MAGUHN Former member of the board of the German hacker group the Chaos Computer

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Club. Müller-Maguhn worked with WikiLeaks and served as an intermediary in the dispute between Assange and Domscheit-Berg. THE ARCHITECT Secretive and pseudonymous engineer who worked with Assange and Domscheit

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-Berg to set up a revamped submission system for WikiLeaks in late 2009 and 2010. After a falling-out with Assange, he joined Domscheit-Berg at OpenLeaks. PROLOGUE THE MEGALEAK On a rainy November

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“Everything started slipping after that. . . . I saw things differently.” Manning dug deeper, browsing the State Department database he would later be accused of spilling to WikiLeaks: 251,000 memoranda describing the intimate dealings of the world’s leaders in candid terms. He described “crazy, almost criminal political back dealings, the non

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Hello Puzzle Hunters. I am looking for good people, courageous people, intelligent people to help develop and run an international leaked document analysis & essay competition. Wikileaks is only new, but we have already broken major stories in the international press that have achieved significant reforms likely to save tens of thousands

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and technological means: BaltiLeaks, BritiLeaks, BrusselsLeaks, Corporate Leaks, CrowdLeaks, EnviroLeaks, FrenchLeaks, GlobaLeaks, Indoleaks, IrishLeaks, IsraeliLeaks, Jumbo Leaks, KHLeaks, LeakyMails, Localeaks, MapleLeaks, MurdochLeaks, Office Leaks, Porn WikiLeaks, PinoyLeaks, PirateLeaks, QuebecLeaks, RuLeaks, ScienceLeaks, TradeLeaks, UniLeaks. Mainstream media outlets like The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, and Sweden’s public radio service set up

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Guðmundsson brothers nor the Tchenguiz brothers were indicted, but Ólafsson, the Elton John fan, faces charges of money laundering, and his prosecution is ongoing. WikiLeaks immediately became a household name in Iceland. And just three months later, Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg arrived in Reykjavík, conquering heroes from abroad

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simply typed “anonymous submissions” into Google. Soon he began to discover the cypherpunks’ many gifts to journalists: PGP, Off-The-Record messaging, Tor. And WikiLeaks. The Bulgarian technophile was immediately fascinated by the site’s technical methods and utter fearlessness. He began to monitor its leaks closely, and even experimented

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most technically tricky and crucial link in the leaking chain: untraceable anonymous uploads. Domscheit-Berg believes he has all the ingredients to build a new WikiLeaks that’s more efficient, more democratically organized, and perhaps most important, more legal. He wants to incorporate as a nonprofit, a steadfast, permanent institution

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and avoided all payment forms other than cash. Berg believed that Assange simply had a flair for spy-novel sensationalism that served as marketing for WikiLeaks. His greatest mistake, in retrospect, may have been underestimating Assange’s capacity for true paranoia, both justified and not. Personal differences aside, they

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the group’s sand-colored military tent. OpenLeaks’ temporary headquarters has filled with a dozen hackers who are volunteering to probe a handful of willing WikiLeaks copycats for security flaws—StateLeaks, KHLeaks, FrenchLeaks, QuebecLeaks, and OpenLeaks itself, among others. The OpenLeaker is laying down some ground rules: “Be responsible. Break,

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as much. The Architect wasn’t the only one turning against Assange. Reporters Without Borders and Amnesty International both issued open letters to Assange criticizing WikiLeaks for failing to more completely redact sources’ names from the Afghan War Diaries. “Indiscriminately publishing 92,000 classified reports reflects a real problem of

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with three thousand unpublished submissions represented the first major breach of the organization’s security. In the months that followed, the spillages continued: Rogue WikiLeaks partner Israel Shamir allegedly gave unredacted cables to the repressive government of Belarus, including information that may have been used against the Belarusian political opposition

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government customers.) But regardless of their motives, as Müller-Maguhn tells the story, Domscheit-Berg and the Architect seemed determined to make the handover of WikiLeaks’ files as difficult as possible. Müller-Maguhn had been asked by Assange to retrieve three items from the OpenLeakers: the archive of already-published

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. So they deleted their keys, rendering the files permanently, irrevocably encrypted. When the news emerged that the OpenLeakers had essentially destroyed three thousand submissions, WikiLeaks sent out a stream of angry comments on Twitter, listing the contents of files it claimed were lost to history: internal communications of twenty neo

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Assange must have jumped off the page with horrifying significance: “AcollectionOfDiplomaticHistorySince_1966_ToThePresentDay#—Julian Assange’s 58-character password.” It was the full passphrase to WikiLeaks’ copy of the encrypted, unredacted cables. To a technological muggle like Leigh, the PGP password must have seemed like a harmless historical detail to

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are worse models for changing the world. Fabio Pietrosanti and Arturo Filastò, the cofounders of GlobaLeaks, say they aim to create the BitTorrent to WikiLeaks’ Napster. Where WikiLeaks was a single, vulnerable target, GlobaLeaks aims to create what they’ve called a “worldwide, distributed leak amplification network.” Pietrosanti is a thirty

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touch their life, they touch my life again . . . full circle” Ibid. Only a life sentence in a military prison “Court martial sought for suspected WikiLeaks leaker.” Reuters, published on MSNBC.com, January 12, 2012. protesting Manning’s inhumane confinement in a Quantico, Virginia, military prison Video available on YouTube: http

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://cryptome.org/cia-2619.htm “. . . Will you be that person?” E-mail from Julian Assange to John Young, October 4, 2006, http://cryptome.org/wikileaks/wikileaks-leak.htm Then he unsubscribed John Young from the list All the above quotes from ibid. Jim Bell was scheduled for release from prison on

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noticed Chinese hackers using the relay to hide their tracks Khatchadourian. “Somewhere between none and a handful of those documents were ever released on WikiLeaks” John Leyden. “Wikileaks denies Tor hacker eavesdropping gave site its start.” TheRegister.co.uk, June 2, 2010. “When they pull, so do we” E-mail from

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Julian Assange to John Young, January 7, 2007, available at http://cryptome.org/wikileaks/wikileaks-leak2.htm thirty times the size of every text article stored on Wikipedia Wikipedia: Database download, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database

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_download “let it flower into something new” Julian Assange to John Young, January 7, 2007, available at http://cryptome.org/wikileaks/wikileaks-leak2.htm spreading free software like a hacker Johnny Appleseed Jacob Appelbaum. “Personal experiences bringing technology and new media to disaster areas.” Speech at the

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‘blood’ on his hands.” CNN.com, July 29, 2010. said that the exposure hadn’t led to any documented casualties Ellen Nakashima. “Pentagon: Undisclosed Wikileaks documents ‘potentially more explosive.’” Washingtonpost.com, August 11, 2011. another fifteen thousand civilian deaths that hadn’t been previously documented “Iraq War Logs: What the

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Stoned Afghan Cops” John Nova Lomax. HoustonPress.com, December 7, 2010. “China ‘ready to abandon North Korea’” Simon Tisdall. The Guardian. November 29, 2010. “WikiLeaks cables on Afghanistan show monumental corruption” Tim Lister. CNN.com, December 2, 2010. “Iraqi Children in U.S. Raid Shot In Head” Matthew Schofield. McClatchy

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the church’s addresses “‘Anonymous’ stalks Church of Scientology.” UPI, February 5, 2008. “The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.” Sitara Nieves. “Morning Wrap: Mastercard and ‘Anonymous’ Hacker Group—Technological Warfare?” The Takeaway, WNYC, December 8, 2010. www.thetakeaway.org

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. ScienceLeaks, TradeLeaks, UniLeaks All the leaking sites listed at Leakdirectory.org threatened legal action against each other over the rights to the name Claudia Parsons. “WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks, GreenLeaks and more leaks.” Reuters, January 28, 2011. only one thing was missing from this newborn leaking movement. Leaks. Greg Mitchell writing on

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between the intelligence agencies Clay Shirky, speaking at the Personal Democracy Forum Conference, January 24, 2011, available here: http://personal democracy.com/pdf-presents-symposium-wikileaks-and-internet-freedom-ii they traded off Ibid. “obviously superior from the point of view of the leaker to any previous system” Ibid. “that

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September 22, 2011. CHAPTER 7: THE ENGINEERS “dangerous, malicious conman” “Julian Assange live,” L’Espresso, March 30, 2011. “raised by wolves” Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Inside WikiLeaks (New York: Crown, 2011), p. 64. “Leaking Sky Prevents OpenLeaks Launch” Anna Sauerbrey. Die Zeit, August 12, 2011. “Still interested in a job?” Domscheit-Berg

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, September 1, 2011. inexperienced leader in the sway of corrupt president Robert Mugabe’s political party Alex Bell. “Army generals face possible treason charge after WikiLeaks revelations.” The Zimbabwean, September 13, 2011. with some calling for manhunts and violence against them Mark Mackinnon. “Leaked cables spark witch-hunt for Chinese

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s computer, 39 influence of, 3 information leaked by, 28, 176 Pentagon Papers compared to, 14–15 responses to, 176–77, 189 security breach at WikiLeaks, 300, 305–9, 321 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 91 Chaos Computer Club Appelbaum’s participation in, 162–63 Camp of, 272–74, 276, 277

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Church of Scientology Anonymous’ attacks on, 185–86 and Assange, 114 and Helsingius’s Penet remailer, 116, 125–26 and Suburbia ISP, 113, 114 and WikiLeaks, 166, 186 CINDER (Cyber Insider Threat) initiative, 173–74, 187–88, 190–91, 216–17, 218–20 Citizens’ Movement, 251–52 Clarke, Richard, 206

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Domscheit-Berg’s memoir on, 297 information leaked by, 100–101, 129–30 model of, 131 news featured on, 122, 125 security of, 101–2 WikiLeaks’ communications leaked on, 157–58, 159–60, 285 cybersecurity industry, 187–91 Cypherpunk Mailing List and Appelbaum, 154 archives of, 92 Assange’s participation

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Chaos Communication Camp, 273 and Collateral Murder video, 258 and IMMI legislation, 228, 236, 240, 255 investigation of, 266–67 and OpenLeaks, 279, 282 and WikiLeaks, 296, 321 Kapor, Mitch, 255 Karlung, Jon, 237–38 Karn, Phil, 86–87 Kaupthing Bank, 256 Kehler, Randy, 26 Kenyan leaks, 165 Kissinger, Henry,

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profile, 26–27, 45 on military security, 37–39 motivation of, 27–29 prosecution of, 224 Tor used by, 39, 139 upload of documents to WikiLeaks, 39 Markov, Georgi, 234 Marshall, Róbert, 251 Mathewson, Nick, 135–36, 147–48, 149, 155 Mati, Mwalimu, 165–66 May, Tim background of, 55

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, 189 network forensics, 189 Newsweek, 37, 225, 266, 296 The New Yorker, 159 The New York Times on AOL users’ data, 266 citing of WikiLeaks documents, 176 on helicopter airstrike, 29 Jónsdóttir quoted in, 296 Kiriakou’s leak to, 224 Lamo’s hacking of, 32–33 on NSA wiretapping program

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and satellite modems, 135–37 security of, 141–42 and unencrypted files, 158–59 uses of, 140–41 and U.S. government, 139–43 and WikiLeaks, 138, 157, 158–60, 168 Trailblazer, 221–24 Trax, 107, 112 Tryggvadóttir, Margrét, 252 Trynor, Mark, 192–94 Tsonev, Tsoni, 231 Twitter, 138–39,

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315–16 Vietnam War, 21–26, 36, 54. See also Pentagon Papers Wall Street Journal, 230 WarGames (1983), 196–97 Weinmann, Ralf-Philipp, 126, 163 WikiLeaks anonymity of, 6, 157–58 and Anonymous, 184–85 and Appelbaum, 138–39, 151–52 and the Architect, 287, 292–98, 300 archives of, 164

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency

by Parmy Olson · 5 Jun 2012 · 478pp · 149,810 words

a large and mysterious group of hackers had started attacking the websites of MasterCard, PayPal, and Visa in retaliation for their having cut funding to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks had just released a cache of thousands of secret diplomatic cables, and its founder and editor in chief, Julian Assange, had been arrested in the

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He had no idea that, even though the anticopyright battle was dying, Operation Payback was about to explode with support for a little organization called WikiLeaks. Jake, now as Topiary, explored the AnonOps chat rooms while a former, widely-revered hacker from Australia named Julian Assange was getting ready to drop

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the American government. Earlier in 2010, a U.S. army private named Bradley Manning had allegedly reached out to Assange and given his whistleblower site, WikiLeaks, 250,000 internal messages, known as cables, that had been sent between American embassies. These diplomatic cables revealed American political maneuverings and confidential diplomatic reports

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. In exposing the documents, Assange would hugely embarrass American foreign policy makers. The WikiLeaks founder had struck deals with five major newspapers, including the New York Times and the U.K.’s Guardian, and on November 28, 2010, they

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started publishing the cables. Almost immediately, Assange became both a global pariah and a hero. Until then, WikiLeaks had been moderately well known for collecting leaked data pointing to things like government corruption in Kenya or the untimely deaths of Iraqi journalists. But

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a bitch.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the leaks “threatened national security,” and U.S. State Department staff were barred from visiting the WikiLeaks website. WikiLeaks.org quickly came under attack. An ex–military hacker nicknamed The Jester DDoS’d the site, taking it offline for more than twenty-four hours

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claiming it had violated its terms of service on copyright. The rebuffs kept coming: a hosting firm called EveryDNS yanked out its hosting services for WikiLeaks. On December 3, online payments giant PayPal announced it was cutting off donations to the site, saying on the official PayPal blog that it

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had “permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy.” Soon MasterCard and Visa cut funding services. It is doubtful that anyone from these

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, and protesting the Church of Scientology would suddenly team together to attack their servers. The people who had set up AnonOps were talking about the WikiLeaks controversy in their private #command channel. They were angry at PayPal, but, more than that, they saw an opportunity. With Anons no longer riled

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up about copyright, this could be the cause that brought them back in droves. The copyright companies had been bad, but PayPal snubbing WikiLeaks was even worse. That was an unholy infringement on free information in a world where, according to the slogan of technology activists, “information wants to

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be free” (even if it was secret diplomatic cables). The victimization of WikiLeaks, they figured, would strike a chord with Anonymous and brings hordes of users to their new network. It was great publicity. Who were these people

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doing more than just maintaining the chat network. They were organizing an attack on the PayPal blog, where the company had made its announcement about WikiLeaks. On Saturday morning, December 4, the day after PayPal said it would cut funding, the AnonOps organizers DDoS’d thepaypalblog.com. The blog went

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account @AnonyWatcher posted “TANGO DOWN—the paypalblog.com,” adding: “Close your #Paypal accounts in light of the blatant misuse of power to partially disable #Wikileaks funding. Join in the #DDoS if you’d like.” PayPal’s blog remained offline for the next eight hours. Anyone who visited it saw a

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website for AnonOps IRC, saying that Anonymous planned to attack “various targets related to censorship” and that Operation Payback had “come out in support of WikiLeaks.” At around the same time, a digital flyer was being circulated on image boards and IRC networks, with the title Operation Avenge Assange and a

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doors. Chapter 8 Weapons that Backfired When nearly eight thousand people had rushed into the main AnonOps IRC channel on December 8, eager to avenge WikiLeaks, the dozen or so operators in #command were stunned and then overwhelmed. Hundreds had been clamoring for direction, and the obvious one was to

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Often they were legal and coherent. One former operator called SnowyCloud helped start Operation Leakspin, an investigative op calling on people to trawl through the WikiLeaks cables and then post short summaries of them on YouTube videos that could be searched with misleading tags like Tea Party and Bieber. There was

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also Operation Leakflood, where Anons posted a digital flyer with the headquarters fax numbers of Amazon, Mastercard, PayPal, and others with directions to fax “random WikiLeaks cables, letters from Anonymous…” People were creating the flyers in #Propaganda, where Topiary was still spending much of his time. From #Propaganda a few spearheaded

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encouraged Anons to send them ink-draining black faxes. Soon, AnonOps was splintering into all sorts of side operations, often under agendas completely different from WikiLeaks, but always as “Anonymous.” In mid-December, a few Anons hit Sarah Palin’s official website and Conservatives4Palin with a DDoS attack, and a

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security glitch—to several iPhones that anyone could snoop on. They threw around ideas for future targets: Adrian Lamo, the hacker that had turned in WikiLeaks’s military mole Bradley Manning, or defected botmaster Switch. “If someone has his dox,” said Kayla, “I can pull his social security number and

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of revolution in his mind. Until now, Anonymous raids had reacted to circumstance: Chanology because of Tom Cruise; Operation Payback because a few companies snubbed WikiLeaks. But Sabu wanted Anonymous to be more than just kids playing hacker. He wanted Anonymous to change the world. Sabu was an old-time cyber

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home where his grandmother no longer lived. Monsegur was unemployed and drifting. Then in early December, out of nowhere, Anonymous burst onto the scene with WikiLeaks, offering a cause that Monsegur could be passionate about. He watched the first attack on PayPal unfold and saw echoes of his work with Hackweiser

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the #xenu channel was backed by the quiet planning in #marblecake. Discord grew in #operationpayback over who should feel the wrath of Anonymous next; the WikiLeaks controversy was receding from the headlines, and the hackers had grown bored with trying to attack Assange’s critics. Sabu, Kayla, and the others in

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for Palestine when he was younger. Now he and the others were seeing articles about demonstrations in Tunisia that had been sparked by documents that WikiLeaks had released. Tunisia’s government was known for aggressively censoring its citizens’ use of the Internet. Websites that were critical of the government were

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roll, but not just because she wanted to support the revolution. The hacker had struck a secret deal with someone who claimed to be with WikiLeaks. Chapter 10 Meeting the Ninja As Anonymous turned its attention to the Middle East in early January of 2011, Topiary continued organizing and writing deface

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and blog called Crowdleaks, an evolved version of Operation Leakspin. This was the project that had spun off Operation Payback and gotten Anons sifting through WikiLeaks cables. Laurelai had disliked Operation Payback because, like Kayla, she believed DDoSing things was pointless. She liked sifting through data and considered herself an

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morning. “Ahai,” said Marduk. “Welcome to where the shitstorm began.” Then he got down to business. “Laurelai, we can’t tie [HBGary Federal] to WikiLeaks for sure?” he asked. “I already have,” she answered. “We got enough to smear the shit out of them.” That confirmation pleased Marduk. “They are

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company,” said Marduk. “Actually I’m sure it’s a government coverup.” “The government uses these companies to do their dirty work,” Laurelai explained. The WikiLeaks connection Laurelai had found conveniently segued with the modus operandi of Operation Payback, making it look almost as if Anonymous had planned it all. “*Kayla

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,” Kayla wrote with her usual cheerfulness. “Haha,” Topiary said. “Women on the Internet.” “You hear about HBGary being contracted by Bank of America to attack WikiLeaks?” Kayla told a rare newcomer to the #HQ chat room, proud to provide the news. “Seriously?” the person answered. “Fuck this shit’s deep.” “

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“corruption and fraud” at Bank of America. Amazingly, the tweets were picked up by the media and taken seriously. “Anonymous, a hacker group sympathetic to WikiLeaks, plans to release e-mails obtained from Bank of America,” Reuters breathlessly reported on Sunday, March 13. Blogging sites like Gawker and Huffington Post echoed

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a botnet take down PayPal.com; from humiliating a federal security contractor and watching that turn into an international exposé involving a major bank and WikiLeaks to fronting a live-on-air hack of the Westboro Baptist Church. Though Topiary had learned and experienced so much, he was restless. Anonymous

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back to image boards. If someone was arrested, more would join. Almost nothing had happened with Anonymous for two years until #savethepiratebay suddenly snowballed into WikiLeaks and thousands of newcomers started seeing a solid infrastructure to Anonymous. Then the buzz on AnonOps IRC had nearly died until HBGary magically came along

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hackers had hit Barr’s company and hijacked his Twitter account “in response” to Bank of America hiring the security company to attack adversaries like WikiLeaks. Even NATO seemed to be inflating the abilities of Anonymous, seeing reason and connections where there were coincidences. The hackers hadn’t known about Barr

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’s plans with WikiLeaks until after they had attacked him. Even so, the news got everyone’s attention. “Did you read the NATO doc about anonymous?” asked Trollpoll

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combination of ‘that’ and ‘breath?’ Are you a 33rd degree Freemason also?” Besides, Topiary had other, bigger distractions. About three hundred miles away in London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had heard about LulzSec’s takedown of the CIA website, and he was chuckling to himself. For Assange, a simple DDoS attack

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his defense in December, he had spent the last few months fighting the threat of extradition to the United States and accusations of treason over WikiLeaks’s release of diplomatic cables. Swedish authorities had doubled his problems by charging him with attempted rape, which meant he was now fighting extradition to

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to know the answer to that. It was already starting to look like LulzSec was on the road to becoming a black hat version of WikiLeaks. If WikiLeaks was sitting on a pile of classified data that was simply too risky to leak, then it now had a darker, edgier cousin to

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from nothing to a nebulous, possibly dangerous entity with pockets of significant power and influence. Like some petulant teenager, it remained volatile and misunderstood. From WikiLeaks in December of 2010 to Tunisia in January of 2011 to Aaron Barr in February of 2011, operations had popped up almost randomly. There had

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posted on Anonops.net states that Anonymous plans to attack “various targets related to censorship” and that Operation Payback has “come out in support of WikiLeaks.” December 6, 2010—Organizers on AnonOps launch a DDoS attack on postFinance.ch, a Swiss e-payment company that has also blocked funding services to

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people have now joined the #operationpayback chat room. Later that day they hit MasterCard.com and Visa.com, which have also nixed funding services for WikiLeaks, taking both sites offline for about twelve hours. December 9, 2010—Botnet controllers who had previously helped take down PayPal.com, MasterCard.com, and

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#InternetFeds publishes Aaron Barr’s private e-mails on an e-mail viewer. Journalists and supporters discover Barr had been proposing controversial cyber attacks on WikiLeaks and opponents of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Barr resigns. February 24, 2011—Anonymous conducts a live hack and deface of a website

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the company along with the proposals he was making to Hunton & Williams. The article was entitled “Spy Games: Inside the Convoluted Plot to Bring Down WikiLeaks,” by contributor Nate Anderson. The Financial Times article in which Aaron Barr revealed his forthcoming research was entitled “Cyberactivists Warned of Arrest,” by San Francisco

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State University of New Jersey. Chapter 7: FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE The introductory paragraph, which suggests that Anonymous went quiet between Chanology in 2008 and WikiLeaks in late 2010, comes from interviews with various key players, including Jake Davis, Jennifer Emick, Laurelai Bailey, and conversations with other Anons, along with

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from Topiary about first “checking out” Operation Payback, and then hearing about the suicide of his father, come from interviews with Topiary himself. References to WikiLeaks and the leaking of 250,000 diplomatic cables come from a wealth of mainstream news reports that were published in November and December of 2010

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from testimony by Topiary and references in leaked chat logs. The account of the subsequent nixing of funding services by PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa to WikiLeaks comes from a range of mainstream news reports. Details throughout this chapter about the discussions that took place in the #command channel on AnonOps—e

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Those interviews were also the source for details about Barr’s controversial proposals to Hunton & Williams. In order to stumble upon Barr’s all-important WikiLeaks connection, Laurelai had to first port Barr’s published e-mails onto an e-mail client called Thunderbird, then transfer them to Gmail. This allowed

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targets is one of the crucial reasons why Operation Payback had dwindled to around fifty people in October of 2010 and nearly died out—until WikiLeaks came along by chance, and thousands of people suddenly jumped in. Chapter 14: Backtrace Strikes The opening paragraphs of this chapter are sourced from

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aka Jeremy Hammond, ahead of the Stratfor attack were sourced from Hector Monsegur’s criminal indictment, with further context, including details about his relations with WikiLeaks, taken from interviews with other hackers who took part in the Stratfor attack. The reference to the New York Times article in which the FBI

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous

by Gabriella Coleman · 4 Nov 2014 · 457pp · 126,996 words

, which disrupts access to webpages by flooding them with tidal waves of requests, was directed against financial institutions that had refused to process donations to WikiLeaks, including PayPal and MasterCard. With each operation Anonymous was further emboldened. And yet, even after Anonymous drifted away from ungovernable trolling pandemonium to engage

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spread across the globe, becoming Anonymous Everywhere. Let’s now turn to the unlikely events propelling these surprising permutations. chapter 3 Weapons of the Geek WikiLeaks: the Gift that Keeps on Giving It was July 2010 and I was attending a conference called Hackers on Planet Earth, also known as HOPE

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punch. They edited the video for maximum effect and added simple but powerful editorial commentary at the beginning. Julian Assange, the Australian hacker who founded WikiLeaks, was then known in the media as an “international man of mystery.” Now he broke with his previous disavowal of the spotlight. To coincide with

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nothing short of explosive. Media scholar Christian Christensen argues the video is “one of the best known and most widely recognized results of the ongoing WikiLeaks project,” because it provides “visual evidence of the gross abuse of state and military power.”2 The black-and-white footage shows the perspective of

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embattled organization. It was a bold move, given the tactics of silencing, prosecution, and intimidation leveled against the organization by US authorities. His talk contextualized WikiLeaks historically into what is now commonly called “the fifth estate”: the hackers, leakers, independent journalists, and bloggers who serve the critical role that once fell

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Assange, as founder and spokesperson, controlled—too tightly, many would come to say—most aspects, and his personality and identity became hopelessly intertwined with the WikiLeaks name. When his personal reputation was sullied, it tarnished the organization as a whole. On the other hand, the constitution of AnonOps was, like Project

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with in-depth analyses by the Guardian, the New York Times, El Pais, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel (each publication had received selected cables from WikiLeaks in advance). The US government was furious, and a trio of powerful companies—Amazon, MasterCard, and PayPal (among others)—bowed to its influence, refusing to

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process donations or host servers for WikiLeaks. Even though WikiLeaks had already released hundreds of thousands of military documents about the Afghan and Iraq wars, which brimmed with revelations of detention squads, civilian casualties

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of the Internet’s original patron saints, John Perry Barlow, cast the Anonymous campaign as “the shot heard round the world—this is Lexington.”8 WikiLeaks and Anonymous seemed like a perfect fit. Anonymous’s DDoS campaign solidified this alliance through a spectacular display of solidarity and support. But, as hinted

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of fact way, AnonOps’ involvement: “The organizers behind the anonymous group responsible for Operation: Payback are in the midst of refocusing their campaign to assist WikiLeaks in their quest to release classified government documents.”11 This was all news to Anonymous. As media reports continued to roll out, a convoluted and

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and blogger defended himself by characterizing what happened as being “nothing new.” He was well aware that the channel had already largely decided to support WikiLeaks, even if its commitment (to mirror the embattled site) had not yet been actualized. Recognizing that what was done was done, Radwaddie switched from

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embrace the momentum and push forward, hitting PayPal regardless of the strategy that had already been chosen: Radwaddie: since we all agree on that [helping WikiLeaks] Radwaddie: why aren’t we hitting paypal? Fred: because no one knew we were suppose ot [sic]? Radwaddie: i mean, shit hitting the fan

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Joe Leiberman, Governor Sarah Palin, MasterCard, Visa, EveryDNS (a domain name service provider) and others. Exacting vengeance against any party complicit in the smearing of WikiLeaks, AnonOps caused all of these sites to experience some amount of downtime, though the exact hours vary depending on who you ask. By December 8

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Amazon to withdraw service this week?”14 To illustrate the hypocrisy of it all, people pointed out that while MasterCard refused to process payments for WikiLeaks, racists around the world remained free to donate to their racist organization of choice, like the Klu Klux Klan. Internet scholar Zeynep Tufekci issued the

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looked something like this: (04:56:18 PM) The topic for #opb is: OPERATION PAYBACK Twitter: Hive: 91.121.92.84 | Target: See: #Setup #Target #WikiLeaks #Propaganda #RadioPayback #Protest #Lounge and /list for rest In conjunction, Anonymous was churning out a slew of well-reasoned manifestos, videos, and posters; Anonymous had

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Italy, Ireland, Venezuela, Brazil, Syria, Bahrain, Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, along with non–place-based operations like Operation Leakspin, an effort to comb through the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables in search of newsworthy information. Many of these endeavors were small but nevertheless gave birth to vibrant regional nodes, the most prominent being

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of 220 diplomatic cables, they made the shrewd decision to partner with local activist and media outfits around the globe. One was in Tunisia: Nawaat WikiLeaks provided them with Tunisia-specific cables. Three Nawaat members translated the cables into French and published them under the banner of TuniLeaks to coincide with

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an outrageous level of censorship, not only blocking the websites of dissident bloggers, but also sites like Flickr and any website or news source mentioning WikiLeaks. In a show of blatant disregard for the guaranteed right of free speech, over the past 24 hours Tunisian government officials have hacked e-

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all for evidence Anonymous9: It’s amazing the way they’re pursuing us all so thoroughly Anonymous9: Whilst the actual criminals named in the leaked wikileaks cables are being defended by their respective governments Anonymous9: There’s something so sick about that shitstorm: I agree Anonymous9: I mean whatever they say

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themselves from consequences. This dramatic exposé did not happen online; there were no Guy Fawkes masks, no boxes were popped, no mail spools Pastebined, and WikiLeaks played no role. But the concept is the same: cloak identity for protection and to deflect attention away from the messengers, and get the incriminating

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IRC, Anonymous hackers penetrated the HBGary computer system and downloaded seventy thousand company emails, along with other files that included a PowerPoint presentation entitled “The WikiLeaks Threat.” The tactics suggested therein are strikingly similar to those practiced and perfected during COINTELPRO. The presentation outlines a set of strategies the firm claimed

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now in Sweden and France putting a team together to get access is more straightforward. Media campaign to push the radical and reckless nature of wikileaks activities. Sustained pressure. Does nothing for the fanatics, but creates concern and doubt amongst moderates. Search for leaks. Use social media to profile and

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identify risky behavior of employees. In the same slide deck they proposed to identify and intimidate WikiLeaks donors and smear the reputation of supporters and journalists like Glenn Greenwald. They explained that these people were “established professionals that have a liberal bent

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a corporate firm that had concocted a plan for corporate clients. HBGary Federal, working with two other security companies, Palantir and Berico, was pitching the WikiLeaks sabotage proposal to Bank of America through their legal representatives at the Hunton and Williams law firm. Palantir and Berico, working together under the name

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carefully sifting through the emails procured by Anonymous and writing a dozen in-depth accounts (later compiled into a book), ultimately concluded that “[t]he WikiLeaks Threat attack capability wasn’t mere bluster.” HBGary was on the forefront of these types of services, having developed effective anti-malware software and custom

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with it for immediate publication. On February 4, 2011, Anons woke up to these lines: “An international investigation into cyberactivists who attacked businesses hostile to WikiLeaks is likely to yield arrests of senior members of the group after they left clues to their real identities on Facebook and in other electronic

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its actions. This was a further (and ironic) demonstration of the mainstream media’s proclivity for sensationalizing celebrity issues—the very behavior exhibited by the WikiLeaks documentary that prompted the operation in the first place. TUPAC STILL ALIVE IN NEW ZEALAND Prominent rapper Tupac has been found alive and well in

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an environmentalist … [he] was supporting the industrial beast with technology.” For a period he answered “yes,” and he backed away. But with the emergence of WikiLeaks, and the leaks provided by Chelsea Manning in particular, he saw the potential of technology “to expose crime.” At his sentencing, he would pay tribute

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. Many of AntiSec’s core members had been essential to past iterations of the Anonymous/AnonOps/LulzSec constellation. Their significance coincided with the fading of WikiLeaks, which suffered from internal frictions and legal troubles. AntiSec, it was hoped, might expand to more directly challenge the powers wielded by corporations and

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they could, releasing all the information they plundered reguardless [sic] to such things as consequence and public realtions [sic]. ha: Private data leaked faster then WikiLeaks brand condom. ha: They continued hacking away hoping to gain a pat on the back from Sabu. ha: Then the summer vacation ended. ha: They

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rules. He railed against Sony and AT&T, insisting that they were the criminals for the shitty state of their security. The conversation turned to WikiLeaks. He proclaimed it a “tragedy” that Assange had squandered an amazing opportunity, but ultimately expressed his love for Manning. Finally, I had to interrupt

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humorous responses on the public channels: “VOTING STILL GOING ON FOR LULZXMAS DONATION PICK; options are (in order of leading to losing); CANCER, TOR, AIDS, WIKILEAKS, SHELTERS, REDCROSS, ANONOPS.” Antisec replaced Stratfor’s webpage with The Coming Insurrecion, a revolutionary tract written by the radical, anonymous Invisible Committee. Its ostensibly French

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’s Kevin Poulsen broke a story about Q an Icelandic teenager Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson voluntarily became an FBI informant in August 2011, handing thousands of WikiLeaks chats and documents over to law enforcement. He did it, reportedly, for “the adventure.”)9 Sabu entered into “conversations with WL about getting some

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intuition: Anonymous had become an important and recognized component of the global political mix. “Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations” On February 27, WikiLeaks distributed the Stratfor emails, labeling them “The Global Intelligence Files.” Opinions over their political significance varied. A small cohort of journalists, security specialists, and even

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raised in Chapter 7 with the HBGary and HBGary Federal e-mails which, among other suggestions both creepy and invasive, contained a proposal to discredit WikiLeaks. Information about corporate espionage, even with these e-mails, is still scant. Still, between emerging examples of abuse and the difficulty in accessing corporate

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by various organizations and activists working with politicians, lawyers, journalists, and artists. Many emerged from the geeky quarters of the Internet. There is Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Chelsea Manning, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Sarah Harrison, the Tor Developers, Anonymous, Alec Empire, Risup, Edward Snowden, and many more. The last

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look forward to future exchanges. In 2010, when Anonymous broke into public consciousness with its direct-action digital campaign protesting the banking blockade leveled against WikiLeaks, I was fortuitously on sabbatical at a sanctuary—the Institute for Advanced Study. The punishing pace of activity that subsequently cascaded from the AnonOps network

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. At the time, statistics were available at http://irc.netsplit.de/networks/top10.php and http://searchirc.com/channel-stats. 6. Richard Stallman, “The Anonymous WikiLeaks Protests Are a Mass Demo Against Control,” theguardian.com, Dec. 17, 2010. 7. For precise figures, see Molly Sauter, The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions,

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Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). 8. Noam Cohen, “Web Attackers Find a Cause in WikiLeaks,” nytimes.com, Dec. 9, 2010. 9. Parmy Olson, We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency (New

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of California Press, 2011), xix. 14. Jon Snow, Twitter post, Dec. 9, 2010, 5:22 am, https://twitter.com/jonsnowC4/status/12814239458656256. 15. Zeynep Tufekci, “WikiLeaks Exposes Internet’s Dissent Tax, Not Nerd Supremacy,” theatlantic.com, Dec. 22, 2010. 16 Online interview with the author. 17. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination

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25, 2013. 2. See Carola Frediani, Inside Anonymous: A Journey into the World of Cyberactivism (Informant, 2013). 3. Lina Ben Mhenni, “Tunisia: Censorship Continues as WikiLeaks Cables Make the Rounds,” globalvoicesonline.org, Dec. 7, 2010. 4. Quinn Norton, “2011: The Year Anonymous Took On Cops, Dictators and Existential Dread,” wired.com

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Parmy Olson, “Victim of Anonymous Attack Speaks Out,” forbes.com, Feb. 7, 2011. 29. Nate Anderson, “Spy games: Inside the Convoluted Plot to Bring Down WikiLeaks,” arstechnica.com, Feb. 14, 2011. According to the plan, Palantir would provide its expensive link analysis software running on a hosted server, while Berico would

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151059108353683456. 8. “Press Release: Stratfor hack NOT Anonymous,” Dec. 25, 2011, last accessed June 30, 2014, available at http://pastebin.com/8yrwyNkt. 9. Kevin Poulsen, “WikiLeaks Volunteer Was a Paid Informant for the FBI,” wired.com, June 27, 2013. 10. See sopastrike.com for a full list of participating sites. 11

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Sandoval, “New Zealand PM Apologizes to Kim Dotcom; Case Unraveling,” cnet.com, Sept. 27, 2012. 14. Max Fisher, “Stratfor Is a Joke and So Is Wikileaks for Taking It Seriously,” theatlantic.com, Feb. 27, 2012. 15. “Re: Wiki Hackers Talk to the Economist,” Global Intelligence Files, March 28, 2013, last

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Ruskin, Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations, Center for Corporate Policy, 34. Available at http://www.corporatepolicy.org/spookybusiness.pdf. 19. “Stratfor Statement on Wikileaks,” digitaljournal.com, Feb. 27, 2012. 20. The Real Sabu, Twitter post, Feb. 3, 2012, 10:22 pm, https://twitter.com/anonymouSabu/status/165636278770077697. 21.

My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous: A Memoir

by Barrett Brown · 8 Jul 2024 · 332pp · 110,397 words

conflict between the world’s nation-states, led by the United States, and the world’s emerging anti-authoritarian net-based entities, chief among them WikiLeaks. From the fact that I’ve just had to coin the clunky term emerging anti-authoritarian net-based entities, one can probably gather that this

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that I could nonetheless confidently chalk up the broad outlines of far-future propaganda wars). When Julian Assange reported on Twitter that he and other WikiLeaks volunteers were being tailed by U.S. officials and that another had been detained, I saw it as one of the early shots in what

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would become a decades-long struggle that would come to define this century. By this point I was convinced that WikiLeaks, which was still largely unknown but already being targeted by the United States and other states for its tendency to publicize inconvenient documents, would serve

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been symbolically struck down so as to bring attention to the sudden and coordinated move by each of these firms to stop processing donations to WikiLeaks in the wake of the release of U.S. diplomatic cables. This de facto embargo, naturally, had been prompted by the U.S. government. “The

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live in a free society where the press has certain freedoms, journalists have certain freedoms. And from this side of the fence, it looks like WikiLeaks really is working as a journalistic organization. They’re working with The Guardian and all these other already existing journalistic organizations to do what they

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my team continued work. The conflict I’d been awaiting had materialized, and was in fact accelerating; in addition to Anonymous’s campaign against Australia, WikiLeaks released the cache of U.S. diplomatic cables, prompting calls for the assassination of founder Julian Assange by a range of U.S. political and

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over twenty years. But a series of reports stemming from the cables and covered by several of the newspapers that were working in conjunction with WikiLeaks painted an even starker picture, providing solid information by which to supplement the anecdotes and rumors upon which Tunisian nationals had previously relied in assessing

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their government. Tunisia being an internet-saturated country relative to other African and Middle Eastern nations, the regime felt compelled to respond by blocking WikiLeaks and other websites, which naturally brought further attention to the reports. Whereas these issues had existed in the hazy background of national life, they were

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vice presidents had flown him out to its offices just a few days ago to discuss the NSA-linked firm’s own unspecified project involving WikiLeaks and Anonymous. Although I didn’t have all this information yet, I knew enough from the circumstances of the Financial Times piece to deduce that

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itself, came up with a variety of despicable and in some cases illegal solutions, which they detailed in a series of emails and PowerPoint slides. WikiLeaks, it was written, could be brought down in part via “cyber attacks” against the organization’s servers in Sweden and France, with the object of

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obtaining “data on document submitters”—which is to say, whistleblowers. The plans also called for fake documents to be anonymously provided to WikiLeaks that they might thereafter be called out as fabrications, thus discrediting future releases, as well as operations by which to intimidate

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WikiLeaks’ key supporters. One document singled out the then Salon contributor Glenn Greenwald as someone who should be “pushed” and thereby forced to choose “professional preservation

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of this had been set in motion by the Department of Justice, whom Bank of America had approached to ask for help in going after WikiLeaks. Examining the initial findings, it was the “insider personas” concept that stood out to me in particular. Infiltrators had existed about as long as there

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mapped out. Meeting with Govies next week.” A separate email clarifies the focus further: “just a status [update]. I started to look more carefully for wikileaks ties within anonymous … there are many. BTW, anonymous is looking for its next effort to get involved in and is looking to resurrect operation payback

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in support of wikileaks.” This was written a few days after Barr was actually flown out to meet with the Booz VP at their office, apparently to discuss some

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to the Red Cross. Several of us opposed that move for a variety of reasons that I put forth in a statement, immediately redistributed by WikiLeaks, asking that the press focus on the revelations to come—especially given what we’d uncovered from the last raid. I was also concerned that

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, but by the time I noticed that the fellow in question, Fred Burton, had called back, the hackers had already decided to provide everything to WikiLeaks, which could then release it all in a more systematic way. The first round of revelations demonstrated, among other things, that the FBI had been

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further reparations for those maimed or orphaned in the Union Carbide disaster prove too successful. The bulk of the contents would later be published by WikiLeaks. On March 5, 2012, I received a communication from an unknown person telling me that the FBI was about to raid me. It was more

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and promising a surprise. This turned out to be the HBGary emails, restored and searchable once again after years of sporadic hosting, and now on WikiLeaks itself, along with the Stratfor emails that I’d never gotten around to reading before going to prison over them. * * * A few years prior, while

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Steckman and the HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr had planned to do to those who had been found to have made entirely legal donations to WikiLeaks or to have spoken out against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Remember that? Yeah, you remember! The DOJ’s real intent here was

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dangerous portion that was always present, and is now ascendant. * * * Central to each of these issues—cause and symptom, promise and peril—was WikiLeaks. My connection to WikiLeaks had always been rather indirect. I’d never communicated with Assange himself; during my incarceration, he released several statements in my defense, including one

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offense against his most ill-equipped detractors—Jonathan Franzen, for instance—in my column and the occasional phone interview. I’d had no problem with WikiLeaks’ release of the various Democratic email sets, regardless of how they’d been acquired, or by whom, or to what end; indeed, to have not

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released these plainly newsworthy materials would have been a betrayal of the organization’s original mission. That WikiLeaks was now most fiercely championed by a sordid array of right-wing figures from Trump on downward was, while disheartening, not necessarily a sin of

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as he was now openly doing, wasn’t a deal breaker. Given the degree of blatant persecution that Assange continued to endure, as well as WikiLeaks’ continued role as a clearinghouse for valuable leaks such as the series of CIA documents it put out in 2017, the urge to forgive Assange

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that come with credibility, and thus it ultimately loses anyway. This happened to the Democratic Party in 2016 and is happening to WikiLeaks now. It wasn’t just that WikiLeaks was no longer viable as a focal point of the sort of global reform coalition that I wanted to see established; in

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directly, but then seems to have changed his mind. Not long after that, The Atlantic published a series of Twitter direct messages between the official WikiLeaks account and Donald Trump Jr., beginning a few months before the election and proceeding well into his father’s term of office, indicating that

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WikiLeaks had actively aided the campaign despite its public claims of neutrality. I put out a brief statement explaining why this had not been the correct

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the public and his own supporters about a matter central to its operation and purpose; in a November 2016 “Ask Me Anything” forum on Reddit, “Wikileaks staff” responded to a question on the subject as follows: “The allegations that we have colluded with Trump, or any other candidate for that matter

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from offering anything other than broad explanations for the Trump Jr. communications, his defense fell largely to close supporters and associated social media accounts like WikiLeaks Task Force, who collectively maintained, chief among all, that this had been an entirely typical exchange between a journalistic outfit and a “source.” It was

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a plausible enough defense to the extent one avoided dealing with the actual content of the communications, which began with WikiLeaks providing Trump Jr. with the password to a soon-to-be-launched anti-Trump PAC; asking “you guys” to “push/comment on” a report that

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drone after Assange (an unsourced claim, probably based on some truth, that first appeared on the rather scurrilous website True Pundit); proposing that they provide WikiLeaks with Trump’s tax returns and laying out why this would be advantageous to both parties; suggesting that Trump should refuse to concede if he

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social engineering for the ultimate purpose of tricking the Trump people into transparency. Indeed, this is the tack that Assange himself settled on, stating that “WikiLeaks appears to beguile some people into transparency by convincing them that it is in their interest.” The problem with this scenario is that it doesn

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’t make any goddamn sense. Had Trump actually “leaked” his tax returns to WikiLeaks, as WikiLeaks proposed, and had WikiLeaks thereafter published them, they would have had to make clear that, contrary to all prior practice and the very point of

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WikiLeaks, this particular “leak” of material had actually been provided by the institution itself, rather than by an anonymous leaker intent on subjecting that institution to

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no defense whatsoever. Those who still wanted to believe Assange was speaking truthfully when he wrote, in a public statement released on Election Day, that WikiLeaks’ activities had not been influenced by “a personal desire to influence the outcome of the election” could still believe this if they really wanted to

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repair. The Freedom of the Press Foundation, founded in 2012 by Daniel Ellsberg and run by a board that would eventually include Snowden, had assisted WikiLeaks in receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations during the U.S. economic blockade that had begun in late 2010. Not long after

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WikiLeaks’ collaboration with the Trump campaign came out, the FPF announced that it would no longer be providing that support, though it cited the end of

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didn’t want him to talk about it lest he get in trouble. Later still, when the Rich-as-leaker hypothesis had become clearly unviable, WikiLeaks sought to insulate itself from charges of ghoulishness by claiming that neither Assange nor anyone else involved in the organization could have attempted to associate

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Rich with the leak because WikiLeaks has a policy of never identifying leakers. “Source identities never emerge from WikiLeaks and are not even shared within WikiLeaks. Nor does WikiLeaks give ‘hints’ as to sources,” wrote the official Twitter account in August 2018—the

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same account that had tweeted out, “We have strong reasons to believe, but cannot prove, that Aaron Swartz was a WikiLeaks source” in the days after Swartz’s death. Naturally my attacks on Assange led to some complications in the form of strained relationships with other

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was kick out Suzie Dawson—head of the Dotcom-funded New Zealand Internet Party—when it became clear that she was somewhat delusional. Later, a WikiLeaks volunteer released a huge cache of messages between Assange and some of his core supporters in which Assange himself had admitted concern over some of

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prevent her from discovering how the org had been taken over by its agents. As of this writing, she remains a major figure in the WikiLeaks orbit. But Assange’s dwindling retinue wasn’t all Dotcoms and Dawsons, and still included a few people of great worth, intent on helping to

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he interviewed me onstage at a conference in New York. The resulting article was headlined, “Julian Assange Went After a Former Ally. It Backfired Epically.” WikiLeaks declined to comment. A few weeks later, Colvin joined my project as a board member, where she serves alongside the former member of Iceland’s

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parliament and early WikiLeaks volunteer Birgitta Jónsdóttir. Julian Assange has done more than anyone else to clarify what is possible in an age such as ours, where any sufficiently

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clever person has the world at his or her fingertips and the levers of power may be reached from anywhere. WikiLeaks struck at institutions that have committed such vast crimes against such a preponderance of the world, with so little real debate among the citizens who

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pursued in partnership with traditional press outlets across the world. This is not the place to recount the array of crimes that were directed against WikiLeaks and its supporters by the federal government and its private-sector partners from at least 2010 onward—we have seen sufficient examples in previous chapters

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the carom, in which no opinion on any matter at all can be easily divorced from which faction could conceivably benefit from it. To criticize WikiLeaks is to support the NSA; to criticize Clinton is to support Trump; to declare that the Russians manipulate elections is to excuse the Americans for

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Sydell explains, “Russian state-supported hackers used some of the same tools as Anonymous—hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee and posting them on WikiLeaks to embarrass Hillary Clinton. I wondered, is there really any difference between a foreign agent and hacktivists like Anonymous? They both aim to circumvent our

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coverage, one can only guess. Perhaps the extensive correspondence between the national outlet’s staffers and Stratfor itself that anyone may view for themselves via WikiLeaks can yield some clues, along with the fact that Stratfor analysts had been regular guests on NPR programming for years, a practice that continues to

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know

by P. W. Singer and Allan Friedman · 3 Jan 2014 · 587pp · 117,894 words

What Are the Threats? One Phish, Two Phish, Red Phish, Cyber Phish: What Are Vulnerabilities? How Do We Trust in Cyberspace? Focus: What Happened in WikiLeaks? What Is an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)? How Do We Keep the Bad Guys Out? The Basics of Computer Defense Who Is the Weakest Link

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fight battles in the online domain. Alternatively, the problems can be conceptualized through the tough political issues that this “stuff” has already produced: scandals like WikiLeaks and NSA monitoring, new cyberweapons like Stuxnet, and the role that social networking plays in everything from the Arab Spring revolutions to your own concerns

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the Iranian nuclear program. Finally, it is useful to acknowledge when the danger comes from one of your own. As cases like Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks or Edward Snowden and the NSA scandal illustrate, the “insider threat” is particularly tough because the actor can search for vulnerabilities from within systems designed

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Failures of access control have been behind some of the more spectacular cyber-related scandals in recent years, like the case of Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks in 2010, which we explore next, and the 2013 Edward Snowden case (where a low-level contractor working as a systems administrator at the NSA

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trying to find a good medium. Overentitlements grant too much access to too many without a clear stake in the enterprise, leading to potentially catastrophic WikiLeaks-type breaches. In many business fields, such as finance and health care, this kind of overaccess even runs the risk of violating “conflict of

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, but the system that allowed him to enter a voting machine, and the consequences of that access, are all too human. Focus: What Happened in WikiLeaks? bradass87: hypothetical question: if you had free reign [sic] over classified networks for long periods of time … say, 8–9 months … and you saw

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PM) bradass87: in other words … ive made a huge mess. This exchange on AOL Instant Messenger launched one of the biggest incidents in cyber history. WikiLeaks not only changed the way the world thinks about diplomatic secrets, but also became a focal point for understanding how radically cyberspace has changed our

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relationship with data and access. In 2006, the website WikiLeaks was launched with the goal of “exposing corruption and abuse around the world.” With an agenda that scholars call “radical transparency,” the concept was to

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rights organizations. In turn, the dangers of radical transparency quickly became apparent to organizations that depended on secrecy. In a 2008 report, the Pentagon noted, “WikiLeaks.org represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, OPSEC and INFOSEC threat to the U.S. Army.” (Ironically, we only know about this classified assessment because

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WikiLeaks itself published it in 2010.) The Pentagon’s prescience was remarkable, as the website was poised to publish a massive cache of documents that ranged

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wrote, “I listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s Telephone while exfiltratrating [sic] possibly the largest data spillage in american history.” In April 2010, WikiLeaks published a provocatively titled video, “Collateral Murder,” depicting an edited, annotated video from a US Army Apache attack helicopter firing on civilians in Iraq, including

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two Reuters reporters. WikiLeaks followed this up in July and October 2010 by releasing immense troves of classified documents relating to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. While Manning

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had originally wanted to remain anonymous, as was the WikiLeaks model, his facilitator, Assange, instead sought to achieve maximum publicity. The video was first displayed at a news conference at the National Press Club

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officials condemned the release of these documents in strong language and began to hunt down the source of the leaks. Just a few months later, WikiLeaks dropped another virtual bomb. In what became known as “Cablegate,” Manning had also passed on 251,287 State Department cables written by 271 American embassies

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Department documents posted online, which the New York Times described as “a classic case of shutting the barn door after the horse has left.” Originally, WikiLeaks relied on media sources like the Guardian, El País, and Le Monde to publish the cables, which they did at a relative trickle. The media

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the password to the full data set was “accidentally” released (reporters from the Guardian and Assange each blame the other). With the site now accessible, WikiLeaks decided to publish the whole treasure trove of secret information, unredacted. The leaking of documents was roundly condemned, and

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groups began an “online witch hunt,” threatening violence against any Chinese dissident listed in the cables as meeting with the US embassy. At this point, WikiLeaks became more than just a nuisance to those in power. According to the US Director of National Intelligence, the leaks risked “major impacts on our

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also pressured via the online financial front. PayPal announced that it would no longer allow individuals to send money to WikiLeaks’s account, citing a letter from the US government declaring WikiLeaks’s engagement in illegal behavior. MasterCard and Visa followed suit, making it much harder for sympathizers around the world to

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contribute to the legal and technical defense of the website. Despite this pressure, the WikiLeaks organization survived. The leaked documents are still available around the Web on dozens of mirror websites to anyone who wants to see them (aside from

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the Syria Files, a release of over two million e-mails from the Syrian regime, including personal e-mails from Bashar al-Assad. More importantly, WikiLeaks’s model has proved powerful, inspiring copycat attempts like Local Leaks, a website associated with Anonymous. Local Leaks came to prominence in 2012, when it

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then display it to the world. Examples range from the hacking of former US vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account to WikiLeaks’ posting of internal memos from the Stratfor private intelligence firm, which showed that a firm charging others for supposedly super-sophisticated strategic analysis was actually

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onto the public Internet. All sorts of embarrassing laundry were aired, from the company’s offer to clients to target journalists and donors to the WikiLeaks organization (a business proposal that many considered not just a bad idea, but potentially illegal), to the CEO’s discussion of logging onto teen chat

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to broader political issues. Companies like PayPal, Bank of America, MasterCard, and Visa were targeted because they stopped processing payments to the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, following its controversial publication of US diplomatic cables. The Zimbabwe government’s websites were targeted after its president’s wife sued a newspaper for US

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$15 million for publishing a WikiLeaks cable that linked her to the blood diamond trade. The Tunisian government was targeted for censoring the WikiLeaks documents as well as news about uprisings in the country (in a poignant twist, a noted

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became a minister in the new regime that the effort helped put into power). The British government was threatened with similar attacks if it extradited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. As Anonymous went after bigger and more powerful targets, the group garnered more and more attention. This notoriety, however, has ironically rendered

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originally funded Tor, parts of the US military have described it as a threat, not least because of its use in several whistleblower cases like WikiLeaks. Meanwhile, because it has proved to be a thorn in the side of authoritarian governments, the US Congress and State Department have been supportive,

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their own borders, both legally and operationally. As a report from the Internet Governance Project described, “That’s why Bradley Manning is in jail and WikiLeaks is persecuted; that’s why China constructed the Great Firewall; that’s why South Korea censors Internet access to North Korea and vice versa; that

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resources can play a fairly long game of whack-a-mole with governments, even in the face of determined foes and international cooperation. Perhaps the WikiLeaks case best illustrates what governments can and can’t do. As we saw in Part II, American politicians reacted with horror to the documents released

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by the transparency website. Vice President Joe Biden labeled WikiLeaks head Julian Assange a “high-tech terrorist,” while others wanted him labeled an “enemy combatant,” to be jailed in Guantánamo Bay prison without traditional due

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process. Likewise, under pressure from the US government and its allies, a number of private companies began to sever ties with WikiLeaks, hampering its ability to operate. Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal, for instance, suspended payments, preventing their customers from supporting the organization through the traditional channels. These

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the United States, was not placed at Gitmo, and was not prosecuted for the supposed crimes the government was so angered by. Similarly, WikiLeaks quickly announced a new wikileaks.ch domain registered in Switzerland, resolving to an IP address in Sweden, which in turn redirected traffic to a server located in France

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’s Terrorism (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2010), PDF e-book, http://www.hoover.org/publications/books/8128, accessed April 2013. FOCUS: WHAT HAPPENED IN WIKILEAKS? “ive made a huge mess” Evan Hansen, “Manning-Lamo Chat Logs Revealed,” Threat Level (blog), Wired, July 13, 2011, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/

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2011/07/manning-lamo-logs/. “exposing corruption and abuse” Yochai Benkler, “A Free Irresponsible Press: Wikileaks and the Battle over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate,” Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review 46, no. 1 (2011): p. 315, http

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://harvardcrcl.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Benkler.pdf. evidence of their wrongdoing online Alasdair Roberts, “WikiLeaks: The Illusion of Transparency,” International Review of Administrative Sciences 78, no. 1 (March 2012): p. 116, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id

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wired.com/threatlevel/2011/01/army-warned-about-manning/. “everything that they were entitled to see” Marc Ambinder, “WikiLeaks: One Analyst, So Many Documents,” National Journal, November 29, 2010, http://www.nationaljournal.com/whitehouse/wikileaks-one-analyst-so-many-documents-20101129. “Information has to be free” Hansen, “Manning-Lamo Chat Logs Revealed

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.” overwrite the music with data Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter, “U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in WikiLeaks Video Probe,” Threat Level (blog), Wired, June 6, 2010, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/leak/. “american history” Hansen, “Manning-Lamo Chat Logs

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Revealed.” “shutting the barn door” Eric Lipton, “Don’t Look, Don’t Read: Government Warns Its Workers Away From WikiLeaks Documents,” New York Times, December 4, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/world/05restrict.html?_r=1&. dissident listed in the cables Mark

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2013/02/26/cyberwar-in-the-under-world-anonymous-versus-los-zetas-in-mexico/. “noisy political demonstration” “WikiLeaks Cyber Backlash All Bark, No Bite: Experts,” Vancouver Sun, December 11, 2010. “this is Lexington” Steven Swinford, “WikiLeaks Hackers Threaten British Government,” Daily Telegraph, December 10, 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews

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/wikileaks/8193210/WikiLeaks-hackers-threaten-British-Government.html. THE CRIMES O TOMORROW, TODAY: WHAT IS CYBERCRIME? “crime which may exist

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Briefing Room (blog), The Hill, December 5, 2010, http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/132037-gingrich-blames-obama-on-wikileaks-labels-assange-a-terrorist. traditional channels Ewen MacAskill, “WikiLeaks Website Pulled by Amazon after US Political Pressure,” Guardian, December 1, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/01

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/wikileaks-website-cables-servers-amazon. registered in Australia Hal Berghel, “WikiLeaks and the Matter of Private Manning,” Computer 45, no. 3 (March 2012): pp. 70–73. French national banking system Loek

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French Payment Gateway,” PCWorld, July 18, 2012, http://www.pcworld.com/article/259437/visa_and_mastercard_funding_returns_to_wikileaks_via_french_payment_gateway.html. 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square Stephen Jewkes, “Milan Prosecutor Wants Jail Terms Upheld for Google Autism Video,” Reuters, December 11,

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that community or occupation. whitelisting: A security practice that defines a set of acceptable software, e-mail senders, or other components, then bans everything else. WikiLeaks: An online organization formed in 2006 with the goal of “exposing corruption and abuse around the world.” It is also frequently used to refer to

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64 unmanned systems, 130, 150–151 Verizon, 95, 199 virus. See malware WANK, 77 watering hole, 144 Weizhan, Chen, 143 West, Darrell, 204 whitelisting, 241 WikiLeaks, 50–55, 79, 81, 83–84, 194–195 Wilkinson, Winston, 231 World War I, 6, 154 World War II, 69–70, 112, 122, 128, 132

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives

by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen · 22 Apr 2013 · 525pp · 116,295 words

that exemplified the very concepts and problems we were debating. The Chinese government launched sophisticated cyber attacks on Google and dozens of other American companies; WikiLeaks burst onto the scene, making hundreds of thousands of classified digital records universally accessible; major earthquakes in Haiti and Japan devastated cities but generated innovative

…

transparency in all things will bring about a more just, safe and free world. For a time, WikiLeaks’ cofounder Julian Assange was the world’s most visible ambassador for this cause, but supporters of WikiLeaks and the values it champions come in all stripes, including right-wing libertarians, far-left liberals and

…

will not revisit the ongoing debates of today (about which there are already many books and articles), which focus largely on the Western reaction to WikiLeaks, the contents of the cables that have been leaked, how destructive the leaks were and what punishments should await those involved in such activities. Instead

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is legal but still covering something up, is a much more difficult problem to solve than straightforward censorship. Unfortunately, people like Assange and organizations like WikiLeaks will be well placed to take advantage of some of the changes in the next decade. And even supporters of their work are faced with

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difficult questions about the methods and implications of online disclosures, particularly as we look beyond the case study of WikiLeaks and into the future. One of the most difficult is the question of discretionary power: Who gets to decide what information is suitable for release

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or technically sound the platforms are. Looking ahead, some people might assume that the growth of connectivity around the world will spur a proliferation of WikiLeaks-like platforms. With more users and more classified or confidential information online, the argument goes, dozens of smaller secret-publishing platforms will emerge to meet

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the field of whistle-blowing websites, including exogenous factors that limit the number of platforms that can successfully coexist. Regardless of what one thinks of WikiLeaks, consider all the things it needed in order to become a known, global brand: more than one geopolitically relevant large-scale leak to grab international

…

; a track record of leaks to show commitment to the cause, to generate public trust and to give incentives to other potential leakers by demonstrating WikiLeaks’ ability to protect them; a charismatic figurehead who could embody the organization and serve as its lightning rod, as Assange called himself; a constant upload

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a sophisticated platform without motivated leakers, or a set of valuable secrets without the system to discretely process and disseminate them?) The balance struck by WikiLeaks between public interest, private disclosure and technical protections took years to reach, so it is hard to imagine future upstarts, offshoots or rivals building an

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funding, slowly but surely atrophying in the process. Assange described this dynamic from his organization’s perspective as a positive one, providing a check on WikiLeaks as surely as it kept them in business. “Sources speak with their feet,” he said. “We’re disciplined by market forces.” Regionality may determine the

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most developing countries, and we can expect that as these populations come online in the next decade, some will experience their own version of the WikiLeaks phenomenon: sources with access to newly digitized records and the incentive to leak sensitive materials to cause a political impact. The ensuing storms may be

…

blockades and legal prosecution. Eventually, though, the technology used by these platforms will be so sophisticated that they will be effectively unblockable. When WikiLeaks lost its principal website URL, WikiLeaks.org, due to a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and the pullout of its Internet service provider (which hosted

…

supporters immediately set up more than a thousand “mirror” sites (copies of the original site hosted at remote locations), with URLs like WikiLeaks.fi (in Finland), WikiLeaks.ca (in Canada) and WikiLeaks.info. (In a DDoS attack, a large number of compromised computer systems attack a single target, overloading the system with information

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requests and causing it to shut down, denying service to legitimate users.) Because WikiLeaks was designed as a distributed system—meaning its operations were distributed across many different computers, instead of concentrated in one centralized hub—shutting down the

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directory is shut down, the files can be reassembled from those fragments. These platforms will develop new ways to ensure anonymous submission for potential leakers; WikiLeaks constantly updated its submission methods, warning users to avoid earlier cryptographic routes—among them SSL, or secure sockets layer, and hidden Tor service, using the

…

-peer file-sharing service—but in the future, if a centralized platform emerged that offered them WikiLeaks-level security and publicity, it would present a real problem. Redaction, verification and other precautionary measures taken by WikiLeaks and its media partners would surely not be performed on these unregulated sites (indeed, Assange told

…

nose at the entire system of secure information. But context matters, too. How different would the reaction have been, from Western governments in particular, if WikiLeaks had published stolen classified documents from the regimes in Venezuela, North Korea and Iran? If Bradley Manning, the alleged source of

…

WikiLeaks’ materials about the United States government and military, had been a North Korean border guard or a defector from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, how

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threats may come to be taken more seriously than one might expect judging from today’s activities, which mostly seem like stunts. The story of WikiLeaks, the secrets-publishing website we discussed earlier, and its sympathetic hacker allies is an illustrative example. The arrest of

…

WikiLeaks’ cofounder Julian Assange in December 2010 sparked flurries of outrage around the world, particularly among the many activists, hackers and computer experts who believed his

…

. Shortly thereafter, a series of cyber attacks crippled, among others, the websites for Amazon, which had revoked WikiLeaks’ use of its servers, and MasterCard and PayPal, which had both stopped processing donations for WikiLeaks. This campaign, officially titled Operation Avenge Assange, was coordinated by Anonymous, a loosely knit collective of hackers and

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Church of Scientology and other targets. During Operation Avenge Assange, the group vowed to take revenge on any organization that lined up against WikiLeaks: “While we don’t have much of an affiliation with WikiLeaks, we fight for the same reasons. We want transparency and we counter censorship. The attempts to silence

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WikiLeaks are long strides closer to a world where we cannot say what we think and are unable to express our opinions and ideas. We cannot

…

investigations followed, leading to the arrest of dozens of suspected participants in the Netherlands, Turkey, the United States, Spain and Switzerland, among other states. Neither WikiLeaks nor groups like Anonymous are terrorist organizations, although some might claim that hackers who engage in activities like stealing and publishing personal and classified information

…

online might as well be. The information released on WikiLeaks put lives at risk and inflicted serious diplomatic damage.3 And that’s the point: Whatever lines existed between the harmless hackers and the dangerous

…

strict policies regarding content and security, but also taking a public stand. Just as the capitulation of MasterCard and PayPal to political pressure in the WikiLeaks saga convinced many activists that the companies took sides, inaction on the part of technology companies will be considered indefensible to some. Fairly or otherwise

…

to use the Internet or a cell phone. He eventually fought the restriction through the legal system and won. 3 At a minimum, platforms like WikiLeaks and hacker collectives that traffic in stolen classified material from governments enable or encourage espionage. 4 Google, like many other companies, builds free tools that

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; the Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal; Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Chief of Army Staff of the Pakistan Army; Shaukat Aziz, former prime minister of Pakistan; WikiLeaks’ cofounder Julian Assange; Mongolia’s former prime minister Sukhbaatar Batbold; the Mexican businessman Carlos Slim Helú; Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali of Tunisia; the former DARPA

…

shared his two basic arguments on this subject: Julian Assange in discussion with the authors, June 2011. lightning rod, as Assange called himself: Atika Shubert, “WikiLeaks Editor Julian Assange Dismisses Reports of Internal Strife,” CNN, October 22, 2010, http://articles.cnn.com/2010-10-22/us

…

/wikileaks.interview_1_julian-assange-wikileaks-afghan-war-diary?_s=PM:US. “Sources speak with their feet”: Julian Assange in discussion with the authors, June 2011. WikiLeaks lost its principal website URL: James Cowie, “WikiLeaks: Moving Target,” Renesys (blog), December 7, 2010, http://www

…

.renesys.com/blog/2010/12/wikileaks-moving-target.shtml. “mirror” sites: Ravi

…

Somaiya, “Pro-Wikileaks Activists Abandon Amazon Cyber Attack,” BBC, December 9, 2010, http

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, April 25, 2011, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/apr/25/british-firm-offered-spy-software-to-egypt/?page=all#pagebreak. Chinese telecom was contacted: WikiLeaks cable, “Subject: STIFLED POTENTIAL: FIBER-OPTIC CABLE LANDS IN TANZANIA, Origin: Embassy Dar Es Salaam (Tanzania), Cable time: Fri. 4 Sep 2009 04:48 UTC

…

Correll, “Operation: Payback Broadens to Operation Avenge Assange.” Pandalabs (blog), December 6, 2010, http://pandalabs.pandasecurity.com/operationpayback-broadens-to-operation-avenge-assange/; Mathew Ingram, “WikiLeaks Gets Its Own ‘Axis of Evil’ Defense Network,” GigaOM (blog), December 8, 2010, http://gigaom.com/2010/12/08

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/wikileaks-gets-its-own-axis-of-evil-defence-network/. A string of global investigations followed: U.S. Department of Justice, “Sixteen Individuals Arrested in the United

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and, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6 for states and citizens states’ power enhanced by terrorism aided by and WikiLeaks-like platforms Constantine, Larry, n Constitutional Democratic Rally copper cables copyright, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1 Copyright Act (1987) Copyright Treaty (1996) corporations, coping

…

-blowing websites Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World (Goldsmith and Wu), 3.1n Whole Earth Catalog (Brand), 2.1n Wi-Fi networks WikiLeaks, itr.1, 2.1, 5.1, 5.2 Wikipedia, 1.1, 6.1 wikis Windows operating system Wingo, Harry Wired, 203 Wired for War: The

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