06 Dec 2010

Wikileaks: Blackmail and Information War

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A secret state department cable identifying US overseas vital interest locations was leaked by Wilkileaks, reports the Telegraph.

A February 2009 State Department cable asked embassies around the world to update a 2008 list of vital interests. Unlike most of the documents made available by WikiLeaks so far, it was marked “secret”. …

Among the British sites mentioned is a manufacturing facility run by BAE Systems in Lancashire, and the landing station for the transatlantic Apollo undersea cable at Bude in Cornwall.

Sites in the Middle East included the shipping lanes of Djibouti, an import terminal in Egypt, the Suez Canal and the oil terminal in Basra, Iraq.

Called the Critical Foreign Dependencies Initiative, the list divides the world into six regions. It makes clear how the US depends on a range of substances from smallpox vaccines in Denmark to bauxite in Guinea and liquefied natural gas in the Middle East.

Also listed is a facility making the rabies vaccines in France and typhoid vaccines in Switzerland.

It also includes the email and direct telephone numbers of two State Department officials compiling the information.

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With a Swedish warrant for sexual assault hanging over his head, Julian Assange is again making blackmail threats against the US Government, warns the New York Post.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has circulated across the internet an encrypted “poison pill” cache of uncensored documents suspected to include files on BP and Guantanamo Bay.

One of the files identified this weekend by The (London) Sunday Times — called the “insurance” file — has been downloaded from the WikiLeaks website by tens of thousands of supporters, from America to Australia.

Assange warns that any government that tries to curtail his activities risks triggering a new deluge of state and commercial secrets.

The military papers on Guantanamo Bay, yet to be published, believed to have been supplied by Bradley Manning, who was arrested in May. Other documents that Assange is confirmed to possess include an aerial video of a US airstrike in Afghanistan that killed civilians, BP files and Bank of America documents.

One of the key files available for download — named insurance.aes256 — appears to be encrypted with a 256-digit key. Experts said last week it was virtually unbreakable.

Assange has warned he can divulge the classified documents in the insurance file and similar backups if he is detained or the WikiLeaks website is permanently removed from the internet. He has suggested the contents are unredacted, posing a possible security risk for coalition partners around the world.

Assange warned: “We have over a long period of time distributed encrypted backups of material we have yet to release. All we have to do is release the password to that material, and it is instantly available.”

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What is Assange doing?

L.Gordon Crovitz explains that Julian Assange is a leftwing radical employing a new form of information warfare, using its own information against the United States and the capitalist system in order to create a defensive reaction leading to paralysis.

The irony is that WikiLeaks’ use of technology to post confidential U.S. government documents will certainly result in a less free flow of information. The outrage is that this is Mr. Assange’s express intention. …

Mr. Assange is misunderstood in the media and among digirati as an advocate of transparency. Instead, this battening down of the information hatches by the U.S. is precisely his goal. The reason he launched WikiLeaks is not that he’s a whistleblower—there’s no wrongdoing inherent in diplomatic cables—but because he hopes to hobble the U.S., which according to his underreported philosophy can best be done if officials lose access to a free flow of information.

In 2006, Mr. Assange wrote a pair of essays, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” and “Conspiracy as Governance.” He sees the U.S. as an authoritarian conspiracy. “To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed,” he writes. “Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate,” he writes, and “pass it around the conspirators and then act on the result.”

His central plan is that leaks will restrict the flow of information among officials—”conspirators” in his view—making government less effective. Or, as Mr. Assange puts it, “We can marginalize a conspiracy’s ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to its environment. . . . An authoritarian conspiracy that cannot think efficiently cannot act to preserve itself.”

Berkeley blogger Aaron Bady last week posted a useful translation of these essays. He explains Mr. Assange’s view this way: “While an organization structured by direct and open lines of communication will be much more vulnerable to outside penetration, the more opaque it becomes to itself (as a defense against the outside gaze), the less able it will be to ‘think’ as a system, to communicate with itself.” Mr. Assange’s idea is that with enough leaks, “the security state will then try to shrink its computational network in response, thereby making itself dumber and slower and smaller.”

Or as Mr. Assange told Time magazine last week, “It is not our goal to achieve a more transparent society; it’s our goal to achieve a more just society.” If leaks cause U.S. officials to “lock down internally and to balkanize,” they will “cease to be as efficient as they were.”

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Breaking News just tweeted:

WikiLeaks says its servers at Swedish ISP non-responsive.

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One Feedback on "Wikileaks: Blackmail and Information War"

ThomasS

Who side is he on again?

Every time Congress goes on vacation or government is deadlocked I feel a small ray of hope. Perhaps this an the law of unintended consequence. A Socialist showing the systemic limits of a gov-based society.



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