According to various media reports, WikiLeaks has shot the rest of their wad by publishing 251,287 diplomatic cables. And they did it without redacting the names of activists, informants, whistleblowers and victims of sex offenses.
This was apparently done after an almost Keystone Kops farce in which the password to the documents became public knowledge, and about 100,000 cables spread onto the web. WikiLeaks blamed The Guardian for it happening, and the Guardian denied WikiLeaks' allegations. So in response, WikiLeaks has basically dumped everything without any consideration as to the blowback.
All five of WikiLeaks' media partners (The Guardian, New York Times, El Pais, Le Monde and Der Spiegel) have issued a joint statement condemning WikiLeaks. Reporters Without Borders has revoked its support for the group, saying the move could put journalists in danger. And Australia's attorney general is saying that Assange may face arrest for what he's done.
From the Washington Post:
Four days after some 100,000 or more secret U.S. diplomatic cables found their way onto the Internet, either released by WikiLeaks by accident, or “recklessly” published by the Guardian, the secret-leaking organization has released its full archive of cables online — without redactions.
The move makes 251,000 secret cables public and could potentially expose and harm the lives of thousands of people who are named in the documents... The Guardian reports that the now-public and easily-searchable archive contains more than 1,000 cables identifying individual activists, more than 150 that specifically mention whistleblowers, and several thousands marked “STRICTLY PROTECT,” for sources who could be in danger.
The cables also identify the locations of government sensitive buildings and gives information about victims of sex offenses.
From
The Guardian:
The move has been strongly condemned by the five previous media partners – the Guardian, New York Times, El Pais, Der Spiegel and Le Monde – who have worked with WikiLeaks publishing carefully selected and redacted documents.
"We deplore the decision of WikiLeaks to publish the unredacted state department cables, which may put sources at risk," the organisations said in a joint statement.
"Our previous dealings with WikiLeaks were on the clear basis that we would only publish cables which had been subjected to a thorough joint editing and clearance process. We will continue to defend our previous collaborative publishing endeavour. We cannot defend the needless publication of the complete data – indeed, we are united in condemning it.
"The decision to publish by Julian Assange was his, and his alone."
Diplomats, governments, human rights charities and media organisations had urged WikiLeaks's founder, Assange, not to publish the full cache of cables without careful source protection.
The newly published archive contains more than 1,000 cables identifying individual activists; several thousand labelled with a tag used by the US to mark sources it believes could be placed in danger; and more than 150 specifically mentioning whistleblowers. The cables also contain references to people persecuted by their governments, victims of sex offences, and locations of sensitive government installations and infrastructure.
From
Der Spiegel:
In the end, all the efforts at confidentiality came to naught. Everyone who knows a bit about computers can now have a look into the 250,000 US diplomatic dispatches that WikiLeaks made available to select news outlets late last year. All of them. What's more, they are the unedited, unredacted versions complete with the names of US diplomats' informants -- sensitive names from Iran, China, Afghanistan, the Arab world and elsewhere.
SPIEGEL reported on the secrecy slip-up last weekend, but declined to go into detail. Now, however, the story has blown up. And is one that comes as a result of a series of mistakes made by several different people. Together, they add up to a catastrophe. And the series of events reads like the script for a B movie... The "Cablegate" cables are now completely public. For many people in totalitarian states this could prove life-threatening. For Wikileaks, OpenLeaks, Julian Assange, Daniel Domscheit-Berg and many others, it is nothing short of a catastrophe.
A chain of careless mistakes, coincidences, indiscretions and confusion now means that no potential whistleblower would feel comfortable turning to a leaking platform right now. They appear to be out of control.
This also comes at a time when WikiLeaks itself has been splintering, with charges being exchanged between current & former members about destruction of videos & files, as well as various media stories about how Julian Assange has essentially made himself irrelevant in this attempt to make himself relevant.
From Gawker:
Assange has long posed as secret-killer and martyr for transparency. This is a lie: For two years, he jealously guarded hundreds of thousands of State Department cables, taking great pains to prevent the public from accessing the vast majority as he dribbled out select ones in tiny increments. He refused for years to release detainee files from Guantanamo Bay, publishing them only when the New York Times forced his hand by obtaining and releasing its own copy—and even then, he insisted on a slow, one-by-one reveal. He has held back on a long-teased batch of internal Bank of America files. He declined to release cockpit video of a U.S. airstrike in Garani, Afghanistan, that killed civilians. And he held back 15,000 Aghanistan war logs that Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence officer who leaked most of Wikileaks' jewels, is rotting in jail for handing over.
The reason Assange held on to these prizes is clear: Without them, he is little more than a poorly groomed blowhard under house arrest. Wikileaks stopped functioning as a whistleblower site more than a year ago. If I had video of Dick Cheney personally torturing Pakistani children, I'd have no way to get it to Assange. The site has no submission system. The only leverage he had over the media, the only claim to his international-man-of-mystery schtick, are the undisclosed secrets lurking in his laptop.
And now his wad is blown. His crown jewels are available for download on Cryptome. The Garani video has apparently been destroyed by his archrival Daniel Domscheit-Berg. The 15,000 Afghan documents are presumably still in his possession, but then again they've been in the possession of the Guardian and New York Times, too, so any juicy tidbits have already been presumably extracted. He's got the B of A stuff, but its aging rapidly. And his bizarre behavior and series of idiotic screw-ups have more than ensured that no one in a sensitive position will ever risk their jobs or lives to leak information to him again. And he's just about worn out his welcome at his current digs.