WikiLeaks releases nearly impossible to stop
Sen. Dianne Feinstein wants to prosecute Julian Assange for espionage.
The founder of WikiLeaks “intentionally harmed the U.S. government,” says Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. By releasing 250,000 State Department cables, he also violated the 1917 Espionage Act by transmitting “information which the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation,” Feinstein, D-Calif., charged in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece Tuesday.
To John Perry Barlow, co-founder of San Francisco’s Electronic Frontier Foundation, “The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks.” The Mill Valley resident (according to his Facebook profile) tweeted to followers: “You are the troops.”
If there’s any doubt which side Barlow is on, he helpfully provides a list of “mirror” sites that carry the material originally posted on the disabled WikiLeaks official site. “Let a thousand mirrors shine,” Barlow tweeted.
On the other hand, Larry Sanger, co-founder of San Francisco’s Wikipedia (no relation), says Assange is “an international outlaw,” and believes the New York Times and other papers that have taken feeds from WikiLeaks have “done something that could be really damaging to the United States.”
And so it goes.
Setting aside the debate on rights and wrongs, there is one thing of which we can be reasonably certain. Given what Rodric Braithwaite, a former British ambassador in Moscow, calls “the inherent openness of modern technology,” it’s difficult to see how the wave WikiLeaks represents can be stopped.
Indeed, the next tranche, Assange has promised, will hit U.S. corporations, beginning with a major bank. To follow: more from the financial industry, plus the energy and pharmaceutical sectors, he told Forbes.com this month. Based on his record, Assange probably isn’t just blowing smoke.
I’m not in a position to pontificate on the damage the leaks have supposedly done to U.S. foreign relations or to the practice of diplomacy as we know it. Nor, for example, whether information, contained in the cables, detailing potential terrorist targets around the world, endangers our war with al Qaeda. But I’m sure I’ve read about the Chinese government hacking into Google before.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has called the current batch “embarrassing” and “awkward,” but not a “game changer.” The diplomatic fallout, he believes, will be “fairly modest.”
However, Gates was considerably angrier about earlier releases on the Iraq and Afghan wars, and with good reason. As noted by Harold Evans, former editor of the Times of London, “reckless disclosures” contained in 76,000 military documents about Afghanistan “identified dozens of Afghans credited with providing intelligence to the U.S. and thereby exposed them to a Taliban beheading.”
Evans was probably referring to a recent London Times report, which found WikiLeaks had not only identified individuals, but also their villages and their fathers’ names.
An example from the current release relates to a Los Angeles dentist, Hossein Vahedi, whose daring escape on horseback from Iran was recounted in one of the released cables. Vahedi, 75, lost his passport while visiting his parents’ graves and some family members in Iran in 2008.
“To protect his family and friends from retribution by the (government of Iran) after his absence was noted, he spoke to none of them of his escape plans,” the cable from the U.S. Mission in Turkey stated.
Well, now the government of Iran knows. “This is very bad for my family,” Vahedi told the New York Daily News when he learned the cable had been leaked. “How could this be printed?”
In addition to Assange and his enablers, the question might also be asked of others, including U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, now in solitary confinement at a military base in Quantico, Va.
Manning, 23, a reportedly unhappy low-level intelligence analyst in Iraq, has admitted packaging on rewriteable CDs and sending along to WikiLeaks more than 350,000 classified documents to which he had access on Pentagon-run computer systems.
“If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 8-plus months, what would you do?” Manning said in an instant message to a U.S. computer hacker.
Braithwaite called Manning’s alleged feat “an embarrassing technical failure” on the part of the Pentagon. “It is the job of governments to keep their secrets secret,” he wrote in the Financial Times.
The hacker, Adrian Lamo, who had done time for breaking into a New York Times computer, turned Manning in to the authorities as “an act of conscience.”
Blogging at sfgate.com/columns/bottomline. Facebook page at sfg.ly/doACKM. Tweeting @andrewsross. E-mail bottomline [at] sfchronicle [dot] com.
This article appeared on page D – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle