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[July 2010] WikiLeaks and the Afghan "war logs"

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French medias analysis

Intel sources exposed ? The WikiLeaks "insurance" : 1.7 Go of encrypted files. Open Source Tools Turn WikiLeaks Into Illustrated Afghan Meltdown (Updated) | Danger Room. It’s one thing to read about individual Taliban attacks in WikiLeaks’ trove of war logs. It’s something quite different to see the bombings and the shootings mount, and watch the insurgency metastasize. NYU political science grad student (and occasional Danger Room contributor) Drew Conway has done just that, using an open source statistical programming language called R and a graphical plotting software tool.

The results are unnerving, like stop-motion photography of a freeway wreck. Above is the latest example: a graph showing the spread of combat from 2004 to 2009. It’s exactly what you wouldn’t want to see as a war drags on. “The sheer volume of observations [in the WikiLeaks database] inhibit the majority of consumers from being able to gain knowledge from it. By providing graphical summaries of the data people can draw inferences quickly, which would have been very difficult to do by serially reading through the files,” Conway e-mails Danger Room.

See Also: Why the Pentagon's War on Wikileaks Is Like the Music Industry's War on Napster. The Story Behind the Publication of WikiLeaks’s Afghanistan Logs. You wouldn’t be reading the coverage of the so-called Afghanistan logs—in The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and The Guardian—if Nick Davies, a senior contributor to the British paper, hadn’t tracked down WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Brussels one month ago. Davies’s interest had been piqued in mid-June when Bradley Manning, a junior army intelligence analyst and the alleged source of several high-profile WikiLeaks disclosures, was quoted in chat transcripts claiming to have leaked a voluminous amount of yet-to-be disclosed diplomatic cables. Whatever Assange had, and whomever its source, Davies knew that WikiLeaks would publish again—and hoped to convince him to let The Guardian look at any future release before WikiLeaks splashed it on its own site. After e-mails to Assange’s listed accounts netted nothing, Davies contacted a half dozen people close to him, hoping to reach and woo Assange.

Davies thought it unwise from a security standpoint to share Assange’s offer via the phone. Why Wikileaks, and the newspapers, were right to publish | Media. The Wikileaks revelations about the conduct of the war in Afghanistan have been rightly hailed as a triumph of "data journalism. " There was, of course, a source of sorts, because someone leaked the 92,000 classified military documents. But the importance of placing the information in the public domain is that it enables us to obtain a clearer picture of what has been happening in Afghanistan. The detractors have attacked the leak from two contradictory positions. So we have the Pentagon/White House line that the material threatens national security and puts soldiers' lives at risk. And then there's the view that the material isn't up to much (example: The Spectator blog posting, Few smoking guns in these leaks).

They can't both be right. As for the latter claim that the material is without much value, the readers can decide. Do we believe factual reports by US soldiers about the killing of civilians is worthless? Sure, we could say we knew all that or, at least, suspected it. With World Watching, Wikileaks Falls Into Disrepair | Threat Level. Would-be whistle-blowers hoping to leak documents to Wikileaks face a potentially frustrating surprise. Wikileaks’ submission process, which had been degraded for months, completely collapsed more than two weeks ago and remains offline, in a little-noted breakdown at the world’s most prominent secret-spilling website. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Photo: Martina Haris/Wikimedia Commons Despite a surge in mostly laudatory media portraying Wikileaks as a fearless, unstoppable outlet for documents that embarrass corporations and overbearing governments, the site has published only 12 documents since the beginning of the year, the last one four months ago.

And on June 12, Wikileaks’ secure submission page stopped working after the site failed to renew its SSL certificate, a basic web protection that costs less than $30 a year and takes only hours to set up. Wikileaks still prominently displays a link on its homepage to a secure submission form for whistleblowers to upload documents.

Charging the WikiLeaks leaker with treason would be absurd. - By Fred Kaplan. Should Pvt. Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst charged with leaking troves of classified documents to WikiLeaks, be tried for treason? Fred Kaplan is the author of The Insurgents and the Edward R. Murrow press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Follow And what about Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks: Should he be locked up for something? Treason is a capital crime, and Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., a member of the House Intelligence Committee, says the death penalty is what Manning deserves. As for Assange, U.S. government lawyers are reportedly looking into whether it might be possible to charge him with espionage.

Manning, who is currently in detention at Quantico, is probably going to be tried under the U.S. But whatever one might think of their actions (and I'm sorry for Manning, very leery of Assange), it's way over the top to accuse Manning of treason and Assange of a crime. The U.S. So treason, like fascist or fire, is a word to be cried sparingly. If Pvt. Wikileaks editor Julian Assange says there is 'more to come' after Afghanistan leak. Assange claims Afghanistan documents could contain evidence of thousands of war crimes and reveals WikiLeaks is preparing an 'enormous backlog of disclosures' for release "We've only scratched the surface", WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange told a press conference today, following the website's massive release of classified military documents through international media. More than 92,000 documents relating to the war in Afghanistan were simultaneously published last night by WikiLeaks, the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel.

"We have built up an enormous backlog of whistleblower disclosures," said Assange. "After the Collateral Murder tape came out we received a substantial increase in the number of submissions (…) We have an enormous range of material we are trying to get through. "There is more to come. " Despite working in conjunction with teams from three newspapers, Assange admitted that as a team they had "only looked through 2000 documents properly".

Julien Assage WikiLeaks Press Conference on Afghan War Diaries. Frontline Club 07/26/10 04:31AM, Frontline Club 07/26/10 04:31AM frontlineclub on USTREAM. World News.