{news} Fw: USGP-INT Afghanistan war logs: The story behind the biggest leak inintelligence history (Guardian)

[Justine McCabe]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Scott McLarty" <scottmclarty at yahoo.com>
To: <usgp-int at gp-us.org>
Sent: Monday, July 26, 2010 12:51 PM
Subject: USGP-INT Afghanistan war logs: The story behind the biggest leak 
inintelligence history (Guardian)


> Afghanistan war logs: Story behind biggest leak in intelligence history
>
> From US military computers to a cafe in Brussels, how thousands of 
> classified papers found their way to online activists
>
> Nick Davies
> The Guardian (UK), Sunday 25 July 2010
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/25/wikileaks-war-logs-back-story
>
>
> US authorities have known for weeks that they have suffered a haemorrhage 
> of secret information on a scale which makes even the leaking of the 
> Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam war look limited by comparison.
>
> The Afghan war logs, from which the Guardian reports today, consist of 
> 92,201 internal records of actions by the US military in Afghanistan 
> between January 2004 and December 2009 – threat reports from intelligence 
> agencies, plans and accounts of coalition operations, descriptions of 
> enemy attacks and roadside bombs, records of meetings with local 
> politicians, most of them classified secret.
>
> The Guardian's source for these is Wikileaks (http://wikileaks.org), the 
> website which specialises in publishing untraceable material from 
> whistleblowers, which is simultaneously publishing raw material from the 
> logs.
>
> Washington fears it may have lost even more highly sensitive material 
> including an archive of tens of thousands of cable messages sent by US 
> embassies around the world, reflecting arms deals, trade talks, secret 
> meetings and uncensored opinion of other governments.
>
> Wikileaks' founder, Julian Assange, says that in the last two months they 
> have received yet another huge batch of "high-quality material" from 
> military sources and that officers from the Pentagon's criminal 
> investigations department have asked him to meet them on neutral territory 
> to help them plug the sequence of leaks. He has not agreed to do so.
>
> Behind today's revelations lie two distinct stories: first, of the 
> Pentagon's attempts to trace the leaks with painful results for one young 
> soldier; and second, a unique collaboration between the Guardian, the New 
> York Times and Der Spiegel magazine in Germany to sift the huge trove of 
> data for material of public interest and to distribute globally this 
> secret record of the world's most powerful nation at war.
>
> The Pentagon was slow to engage. The evidence they have now collected 
> suggests it was last November that somebody working in a high-security 
> facility inside a US military base in Iraq started to copy secret 
> material. On 18 February Wikileaks posted a single document – a classified 
> cable from the US embassy in Reykjavik to Washington, recording the 
> complaints of Icelandic politicians that they were being bullied by the 
> British and Dutch over the collapse of the Icesave bank; and the tart 
> remark of an Icelandic diplomat who described his own president as 
> "unpredictable". Some Wikileaks workers in Iceland claimed they saw signs 
> that they were being followed after this disclosure.
>
> But the Americans evidently were nowhere nearer to discovering the source 
> when, on 5 April, Assange held a press conference in Washington to reveal 
> US military video of a group of civilians in Baghdad, including two 
> Reuters staff, being shot down in the street in 2007 by Apache 
> helicopters: their crew could be heard crowing about their "good shooting" 
> before destroying a van which had come to rescue a wounded man and which 
> turned out to be carrying two children on its front seat.
>
> It was not until late May that the Pentagon finally closed in on a 
> suspect, and that was only after a very strange sequence of events. On 21 
> May, a Californian computer hacker called Adrian Lamo was contacted by 
> somebody with the online name Bradass87 who started to swap instant 
> messages with him. He was immediately extraordinarily open: "hi... how are 
> you?… im an army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern bagdad … if you 
> had unprecedented access to classified networks, 14 hours a day, 7 days a 
> week for 8+ months, what would you do?"
>
> For five days, Bradass87 opened his heart to Lamo. He described how his 
> job gave him access to two secret networks: the Secret Internet Protocol 
> Router Network, SIPRNET, which carries US diplomatic and military 
> intelligence classified "secret"; and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence 
> Communications System which uses a different security system to carry 
> similar material classified up to "top secret". He said this had allowed 
> him to see "incredible things, awful things … that belong in the public 
> domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC … 
> almost criminal political backdealings … the non-PR version of world 
> events and crises."
>
> Bradass87 suggested that "someone I know intimately" had been downloading 
> and compressing and encrypting all this data and uploading it to someone 
> he identified as Julian Assange. At times, he claimed he himself had 
> leaked the material, suggesting that he had taken in blank CDs, labelled 
> as Lady Gaga's music, slotted them into his high-security laptop and 
> lip-synched to nonexistent music to cover his downloading: "i want people 
> to see the truth," he said.
>
> He dwelled on the abundance of the disclosure: "its open diplomacy … its 
> Climategate with a global scope and breathtaking depth … its beautiful and 
> horrifying … It's public data, it belongs in the public domain." At one 
> point, Bradass87 caught himself and said: "i can't believe what im 
> confessing to you." It was too late. Unknown to him, two days into their 
> exchange, on 23 May, Lamo had contacted the US military. On 25 May he met 
> officers from the Pentagon's criminal investigations department in a 
> Starbucks and gave them a printout of Bradass87's online chat.
>
> On 26 May, at US Forward Operating Base Hammer, 25 miles outside Baghdad, 
> a 22-year-old intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning was arrested, 
> shipped across the border to Kuwait and locked up in a military prison.
>
> News of the arrest leaked out slowly, primarily through Wired News, whose 
> senior editor, Kevin Poulsen, is a friend of Lamo's and who published 
> edited extracts from Bradass87's chatlogs. Pressure started to build on 
> Assange: the Pentagon said formally that it would like to find him; Daniel 
> Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, said he thought Assange could be 
> in some physical danger; Ellsberg and two other former whistleblowers 
> warned that US agencies would "do all possible to make an example" of the 
> Wikileaks founder. Assange cancelled a planned trip to Las Vegas and went 
> to ground.
>
> After several days trying to make contact through intermediaries, the 
> Guardian finally caught up with Assange in a café in Brussels where he had 
> surfaced to speak at the European parliament.
>
> Assange volunteered that Wikileaks was in possession of several million 
> files, which amounted to an untold history of American government activity 
> around the world, disclosing numerous important and controversial 
> activities. They were putting the finishing touches to an accessible 
> version of the data which they were preparing to post immediately on the 
> internet in order to pre-empt any attempt to censor it.
>
> But he also feared that the significance of the logs and some of the 
> important stories buried in them might be missed if they were simply 
> dumped raw on to the web. Instead he agreed that a small team of 
> specialist reporters from the Guardian could have access to the logs for a 
> few weeks before Wikileaks published, to decode them and establish what 
> they revealed about the conduct of the war.
>
> To reduce the risk of gagging by the authorities, the database would also 
> be made available to the New York Times and the German weekly, Der Spiegel 
> which, along with the Guardian, would publish simultaneously in three 
> different jurisdictions. Under the arrangement, Assange would have no 
> influence on the stories we wrote, but would have a voice in the timing of 
> publication.
>
> He would place the first tranche of data in encrypted form on a secret 
> website and the Guardian would access it with a user name and password 
> constructed from the commercial logo on the cafe's napkin.
>
> Today's stories are based on that batch of logs. Wikileaks has 
> simultaneously published much of the raw data. It says it has been careful 
> to weed out material which could jeopardise human sources.
>
> Since the release of the Apache helicopter video, there has been some 
> evidence of low-level attempts to smear Wikileaks. Online stories accuse 
> Assange of spending Wikileaks money on expensive hotels (at a follow-up 
> meeting in Stockholm, he slept on an office floor); of selling data to 
> mainstream media (the subject of money was never mentioned); or charging 
> for media interviews (also never mentioned).
>
> Earlier this year, Wikileaks published a US military document which 
> disclosed a plan to "destroy the centre of gravity" of Wikileaks by 
> attacking its trustworthiness.
>
> Meanwhile, somewhere in Kuwait, Manning has been charged under US miitary 
> law with improperly downloading and releasing information, including the 
> Icelandic cable and the video of Apache helicopters shooting civilians in 
> Baghdad. He faces trial by court martial with the promise of a heavy jail 
> sentence.
>
> Ellsberg has described Manning as "a new hero of mine". In his online 
> chat, Bradass87 looked into the future: "god knows what happens now … 
> hopefully, worldwide discussion, debates and reforms. if not … we're 
> doomed."
>
>
>
>
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