[Infowarrior] - Spread of Leaked Cables on Web Prompts Dispute

[Richard Forno]

September 1, 2011
Spread of Leaked Cables on Web Prompts Dispute

By SCOTT SHANE

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/us/02wikileaks.html?pagewanted=print

WASHINGTON — All 251,287 diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks last year are now accessible in multiple locations on the Internet, a development that touched off a dispute on Thursday between the group and the British newspaper The Guardian about who was responsible for their release.

The full publication of the cables will hugely enlarge a window on American diplomacy that first opened in November when WikiLeaks and several news organizations, including The New York Times, started publishing selected cables. The process proceeded slowly, with fewer than 20,000 cables on the Web until last week, when WikiLeaks suddenly accelerated publication and placed nearly 134,000 additional cables on its site.

But the release of the unedited texts of all the cables will make meaningless past efforts by WikiLeaks and journalists to remove the names of vulnerable people in repressive countries, including activists, academics and journalists, who might face reprisals for speaking candidly to American diplomats. While no consequence more serious than dismissal from a job has been reported so far, both State Department officials and human rights advocates are concerned about the possibility that people named in the cables could face prison or worse.

The cable texts were in an encrypted file that was apparently released inadvertently by WikiLeaks and subsequently copied and posted in multiple locations on the Internet. The Times confirmed Thursday that the file can be opened using a password that was included in a book about WikiLeaks published this year by David Leigh and Luke Harding of The Guardian. By Thursday night, Web sites were posting the unencrypted  texts of all the cables along with tools to search the database.

The postings appeared to overtake WikiLeaks, which had asked for an online vote to achieve a “global consensus” on whether to post all the cables. The group suggested in a later Twitter message on Thursday that it was certain to post them. “Given that the full database file is downloadable from hundreds of sites there is only one internally rational action,” the message said.

A State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said WikiLeaks has “continued its well-established pattern of irresponsible, reckless and frankly dangerous actions.”

Human rights groups last year criticized WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, after it published Afghan war documents without removing the names of Afghan citizens who were identified as providing information about the Taliban to American forces. The Taliban vowed to punish such people, but the Defense Department said this week that it was not aware of any retribution.

WikiLeaks, founded in 2006 on the principle that government and corporate secrets should be disclosed, behaved far more cautiously in subsequent releases. It used software to remove proper names from Iraq war documents and worked with news organizations to redact the cables.

The possibility that diplomats’ sources could be harmed as a result of the release of all the unredacted cables touched off a bitter dispute over who was to blame. WikiLeaks, in a statement and Twitter messages, blamed Mr. Leigh, the investigations editor of The Guardian, who included the 58-character password as an epigraph of a chapter in his book, “WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy.”

But Mr. Leigh, in an e-mail and an article on The Guardian’s Web site, said Mr. Assange had assured him when he turned over the password that it would work for only a matter of hours, so he assumed it was long obsolete by the time his book was published. In fact, the file had been inadvertently copied by a WikiLeaks worker in December and eventually spread around the Web.

Jacob Harris contributed reporting from New York.