Military Bans Disks, Threatens Courts-Martial to Stop New Leaks | Danger Room
It’s too late to stop WikiLeaks from publishing thousands more classified documents, nabbed from the Pentagon’s secret network. But the U.S. military is telling its troops to stop using CDs, DVDs, thumb drives and every other form of removable media — or risk a court martial. Maj. “Unauthorized data transfers routinely occur on classified networks using removable media and are a method the insider threat uses to exploit classified information. It’s one of a number of moves the Defense Department is making to prevent further disclosures of secret information in the wake of the WikiLeaks document dumps. To stop that from happening again, an August internal review suggested that the Pentagon disable all classified computers’ ability to write to removable media. One military source who works on these networks says it will make the job harder; classified computers are often disconnected from the network, or are in low-bandwidth areas. Photo: USAF See Also:
Ron Paul: Re: Wikileaks- In a free s...
WikiLeaks just made the world more repressive
I am an aid worker, the kind who rants about transparency, open governments and reforming the United Nations. But, I used to be a diplomat and I used to write secret cables, like the ones being released by WikiLeaks. And I said some very frank and nasty things in those cables. Why? Allow me to illustrate with an example. When we sent the reporting cables back to the Department of Foreign Affairs, they were secret for a reason. The third most common topic in the WikiLeaks cables is human rights, with American diplomats doing the same thing we were trying to do in Indonesia: Make the world a little better. That's hard to swallow for the cyber mob that is celebrating the embarrassment being inflicted on the U.S. government this week. It's not just the militant activist in Guelph, Ont., reading the cables. Ironically, WikiLeaks is inflicting the same collateral damage it so loudly abhors.
Wikileaks' struggle to stay online
7 December 2010Last updated at 19:51 By Jane Wakefield Technology reporter Julian Assange has now been arrested For rolling news outlets Wikileaks has been a dream come true with thousands of US embassy cables dribbling out titbits of sensitive information and providing new headlines on a daily and even hourly basis. But for the US government, the revelations are less welcome. The site has become its bete noire and after making its displeasure clear, US firms that have dealings with it have been quick to turn their backs. The troubles began for Wikileaks when Amazon which hosted its servers in the US, withdrew services saying the site was breaking its terms and conditions. They continued when EveryDNS, the domain name firm which allowed the Wikileaks.org address to be translated into an IP address, withdrew services. Without it, the .org site was effectively shut down. But despite losing many links in its supply chain, Wikileaks remains defiantly online. Continue reading the main story
The cables and the damage done
For people who value freedom and truth, what's not to applaud about WikiLeaks? Certainly in Australia, the cablegate saga – and its local offshoot – has unlocked a tide of libertarian righteousness. Throughout the media and much of civil society, there's a thrill of surprise at the unsaintly ways and words of diplomacy, a frisson of satisfaction at seeing the powerful humbled and exposed, and a current of outrage on behalf of Julian Assange. All this is muddled with some less noble impulses, including the voyeuristic buzz of reading a lot of other people's mail. And if your business is to sell newspapers, there is also the rare joy of finding a new lease on relevance and profit. But beyond the melodrama and moralising, what matters are the consequences. Bad for diplomacy and international cooperation: More than ever, most of the world's problems demand cooperative responses. Restrictions on providing sensitive information to the media and the public could well be tightened.
WikiLeaks: WikiLeaks,org domain kille...
U.S. Diplomats Aren't Stupid After All - By Joshua Kucera
As a journalist covering international affairs, I have long wondered: Are U.S. diplomats ignorant or lying? I have talked to countless numbers of them in dozens of countries in "on background" interviews, that staple of foreign reportage. Readers recognize a background interview by its citation of "a Western diplomat," and theoretically that anonymity frees the diplomat to talk frankly. But in practice, I've found that when that diplomat is American, the result is still often nothing more than warmed-over talking points, displaying a level of knowledge that suggests a cramming of the Wikipedia entry on the country in question. "Of course things could be better, but overall the situation is improving," they'll say blandly, while I scribble "BLAH BLAH BLAH" in my notebook, hoping they can't see it, to maintain the fiction that I'm interested in what they're saying. This is not the case with other countries' diplomats. These don't necessarily contradict what Hoagland told me.
WikiLeaks fights to stay online after US company withdraws domain name | Media
The US was today accused of opening up a dramatic new front against WikiLeaks, effectively "killing" its web address just days after Amazon pulled the site from its servers following political pressure. The whistleblowers' website went offline for the third time in a week this morning, in the biggest threat to its online presence yet. Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's committee on homeland security, earlier this week called for any organisation helping sustain WikiLeaks to "immediately terminate" its relationship with them. On Friday morning, WikiLeaks and the cache of secret diplomatic documents that have proved to be a scourge for governments around the world were only accessible through a string of digits known as a DNS address. The site later re-emerged with a Swiss domain, WikiLeaks.ch. Julian Assange this morning said the development is an example of the "privatisation of state censorship" in the US and is a "serious problem." Amazon said: It noted that:
