[Infowarrior] - U.S. Army worried about Wikileaks in secret report

[Richard Forno]

  March 15, 2010 11:43 AM PDT
U.S. Army worried about Wikileaks in secret report
by Declan Mccullagh
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20000469-38.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

A leaked U.S. Army intelligence report, classified as secret, says the  
Wikileaks Web site poses a significant "operational security and  
information security" threat to military operations.

Classified U.S. military information appearing on Wikileaks could  
"influence operations against the U.S. Army by a variety of domestic  
and foreign actors," says the report, prepared in 2008 by the Army  
Counterintelligence Center and apparently disclosed in its entirety on  
Monday.

The embarrassing twist: It was Wikileaks that published the 32-page  
document, but not before editor Julian Assange prepended a critique  
saying that some details in the Army report were inaccurate and its  
recommendations flawed.

One section of the original document says that "criminal prosecution"  
of anyone leaking sensitive information could "deter others  
considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site."  
Another speculates that Wikileaks -- which boasts that it is  
"uncensorable" -- is "knowingly encouraging criminal activities"  
including violation of national security laws regarding sedition and  
espionage.

Lt. Col Lee Packnett, a spokesman for the U.S. Army on intelligence  
topics, said he was not familiar with the Wikileaks disclosure and  
would not immediately be able to comment. The National Ground  
Intelligence Center, which provides the Army with information about  
enemy weapons system and was mentioned in the report, did not  
immediately respond to a query from CNET.

Under the federal Espionage Act, it is a crime to disclose  
"information relating to the national defense which information the  
possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the  
United States" (18 USC 793(e)). Another section says that even  
indirect disclosures of national defense information to foreign  
citizens can be punished, in certain cases, by death (18 USC 794(a)).

Some First Amendment scholars have argued that those portions of the  
federal code cannot survive legal scrutiny -- otherwise, as a few  
conservative commentators have claimed, the New York Times' disclosure  
of Bush-era warrantless wiretapping would have been a crime. In a  
since-abandoned prosecution of two former pro-Israel lobbyists charged  
with disclosing classified U.S. defense information, however, a  
federal judge had ruled that the balance struck by the Espionage Act  
"is constitutionally permissible."

Wikileaks has disclosed classified U.S. Defense Department information  
before. A 2004 report about Fallujah also marked secret was  
highlighted repeatedly as an example of damaging disclosure in the  
document released Monday.

The document no longer appears to exist on Wikileaks' Web site. A  
previous location now returns the error message: "The resource you are  
looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily  
unavailable." (Wikileaks' Assange did not immediately reply when asked  
for an explanation.)

Wikileaks previously disclosed thousands of pages of pager logs from  
September 11, 2001 and won a case in federal court in San Francisco  
after a Swiss bank attempted to pull the plug on the entire Web site.  
It shut down briefly last month because of lack of funds.

"While we will not comment on whether this is, in fact, an official  
document, we do consider the deliberate release of what Wikileaks  
believes to be a classified document is irresponsible and, if valid,  
could put U.S. military personnel at risk," Rear Adm. Gregory J.  
Smith, a spokesman for American military command in Baghdad, told the  
New York Times after Wikileaks posted a classified 2005 document about  
rules of engagement in that country.