Wikileaks Founder on the "War logs": 'I Enjoy Crushing Bastards’

[jaythikay99]

WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange on the 'War Logs': 'I Enjoy Crushing Bastards'
Published on Monday, July 26, 2010 by Spiegel Online(Germany)

In a SPIEGEL interview, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, 39, discusses his decision to publish the Afghanistan war logs, the difficult balance between the public interest and the need for state secrets and why he believes people who wage war are more dangerous than him.

SPIEGEL: You are about to publish a vast amount of classified data on the war in Afghanistan. What is your motivation?

Assange: These files are the most comprehensive description of a war to be published during the course of a war -- in other words, at a time when they still have a chance of doing some good. They cover more than 90,000 different incidents, together with precise geographical locations. They cover the small and the large. A single body of information, they eclipse all that has been previously said about Afghanistan. They will change our perspective on not only the war in Afghanistan, but on all modern wars.

SPIEGEL: Do you think that the publication of this data will influence political decision-makers?

Assange: Yes. This material shines light on the everyday brutality and squalor of war. The archive will change public opinion and it will change the opinion of people in positions of political and diplomatic influence.

SPIEGEL: Aren't you expecting a little too much?

Assange: There is a mood to end the war in Afghanistan. This information won't do it alone, but it will shift political will in a significant manner.

SPIEGEL: The material contains military secrets and names of sources. By publishing it, aren't you endangering the lives of international troops and their informants in Afghanistan?

Assange: The Kabul files contain no information related to current troop movements. The source went through their own harm minimization process, and instructed us to conduct our usual review to make sure there was not a significant chance of innocents being negatively affected. We understand the importance of protecting confidential sources, and we understand why it is important to protect certain US and ISAF sources.

SPIEGEL: So what, specifically, did you do to minimize any possible harm?

Assange: We identified cases where there may be a reasonable chance of harm occurring to the innocent. Those records were identified and edited accordingly.

SPIEGEL: Is there anything that you consider to be a legitimate state secret?

Assange: There is a legitimate role for secrecy, and there is a legitimate role for openness. Unfortunately, those who commit abuses against humanity or against the law find abusing legitimate secrecy to conceal their abuse all too easy. People of good conscience have always revealed abuses by ignoring abusive strictures. It is not WikiLeaks that decides to reveal something. It is a whistleblower or a dissident who decides to reveal it. Our job is to make sure that these individuals are protected, the public is informed and the historical record is not denied.

SPIEGEL: But in the end somebody has to decide whether you publish or not. Who determines the criteria? WikiLeaks considers itself to be a trailblazer when it comes to freedom of information, but it lacks transparency in its own publishing decisions.

Assange: This is ridiculous. We are clear about what we will publish and what we will not. We do not have ad-hoc editorial decisions. We always release the full primary sources to our articles. What other press organization has such exacting standards? Everyone should try to follow our lead.

SPIEGEL: The problem is that it is difficult to hold WikiLeaks accountable. You operate your servers in countries that offer you broad protection. Does WikiLeaks consider itself to be above the law?

Assange: WikiLeaks does not exist in outer space. We are people who exist on Earth, in particular nations, each of which have a particular set of laws. We have been legally challenged in various countries. We have won every challenge. It is courts that decide the law, not corporations or generals. The law, as expressed by constitutions and courts, has been on our side.

SPIEGEL: You have said that there is a correlation between the transparency for which you are fighting and a just society. What do you mean by that?

Assange: Reform can only come about when injustice is exposed. To oppose an unjust plan before it reaches implementation is to stop injustice.

SPIEGEL: During the Vietnam War, US President Richard Nixon once called Daniel Elsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, the most dangerous man in America. Are you today's most dangerous man or the most endangered?

Assange: The most dangerous men are those who are in charge of war. And they need to be stopped. If that makes me dangerous in their eyes, so be it.

SPIEGEL: You could have started a company in Silicon Valley and lived in a home in Palo Alto with a swimming pool. Why did you decide to do the WikiLeaks project instead?

Assange: We all only live once. So we are obligated to make good use of the time that we have, and to do something that is meaningful and satisfying. This is something that I find meaningful and satisfying. That is my temperament. I enjoy creating systems on a grand scale, and I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable. And I enjoy crushing bastards. So it is enjoyable work.

Interview conducted by John Goetz and Marcel Rosenbach

SPIEGEL ONLINE

[Haroon]

More power to to this guy! He's doing great work!

[jaythikay99]

White House officials e-mailed select transcripts of an interview Mr. Assange conducted with Der Spiegel, underlining the quote the White House apparently found most offensive. Among them was Mr. Assange’s assertion, “I enjoy crushing bastards.” 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/world/asia/27wikileaks.html?_r=1

[Lost Philosopher]

This whole situation with Wikileaks disclosing classified information really leaves me distraught. I personally desire to join the US army as an Intelligence Officer, so I am upset that a soldier, and intelligence personnel on top of that, would betray his duty.

Yet, the information Ive read about it really opens up the whole situation in Afghanistan, and I do believe that the people have the right to know what their taxes are paying for. Large governments that keep secrets from its people are usually corrupt, and efforts should be made to reduce the harm they could do to citizens and civilians.

[jaythikay99]

This whole situation with Wikileaks disclosing classified information really leaves me distraught. I personally desire to join the US army as an Intelligence Officer, so I am upset that a soldier, and intelligence personnel on top of that, would betray his duty.

Yet, the information Ive read about it really opens up the whole situation in Afghanistan, and I do believe that the people have the right to know what their taxes are paying for. Large governments that keep secrets from its people are usually corrupt, and efforts should be made to reduce the harm they could do to citizens and civilians.

The duty is to serve the nation not a bunch of corrupt generals and politicians. infact, these are the generals and politicians who were betraying the nation not telling people the turth. so in my opinion, by revealing that info to wikileaks, he did a great job.

[afridi220]

WikiLeaks posts huge encrypted file to Web

At 1.4 gigabytes, the file is 20 times larger than the batch of 77,000 secret US military documents about Afghanistan that WikiLeaks dumped onto the Web last month

AP Published: 09:19 August 6, 2010
London: Online whistle-blower WikiLeaks has posted a huge encrypted file named "Insurance" to its website, sparking speculation that those behind the organization may be prepared to release more classified information if authorities interfere with them.

At 1.4 gigabytes, the file is 20 times larger than the batch of 77,000 secret US military documents about Afghanistan that WikiLeaks dumped onto the Web last month, and cryptographers say that the file is virtually impossible to crack - unless WikiLeaks releases the key used to encode the material.

"There's no way that anyone has any chance of figuring out what's in there," Paul Kocher, president of US-based Cryptography Research, said Thursday.

That hasn't stopped bloggers and journalists from speculating. Some say the files could be the 15,000 or so intelligence reports which WikiLeaks says it's held back for vetting. Others, pointing to its enormous size, say it could be a compilation of the 260,000 classified diplomatic cables allegedly accessed by Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley acknowledged Thursday that the government suspects that WikiLeaks is sitting on at least some of its message traffic. The organisation itself is keeping mum, at least in public.

"We do not discuss security procedures," WikiLeaks said in an e-mail response to questions about the file.

Editor-in-chief Julian Assange was a bit more expansive - if equally cryptic - in his response to the same line of questioning in a television interview with independent US news network Democracy Now! earlier this week.

"I think it's better that we don't comment on that," Assange said, according to the network's transcript of the interview. "But, you know, one could imagine in a similar situation that it might be worth ensuring that important parts of history do not disappear."

Cryptographers say that the file was likely made using a 256-bit encryption standard known as AES256, which the US government and others employ to mask some of their most sensitive data.

"It is widely viewed as extremely strong," said cryptography pioneer Whitfield Diffie, of Britain's Royal Holloway College. He said there were no known instances of anyone being able to beat the standard.

Kocher, of Cryptography Research, agreed, saying that the only conceivable way anyone outside of WikiLeaks could decode "Insurance" was if Assange and his colleagues had used a blatantly obvious password or experienced some kind of "catastrophic algorithm error."

"We're not going to find out what's in that file unless somebody reveals the key," Kocher said.

It's not clear when - if ever - that might happen. WikiLeaks has so far refused to discuss the file, its contents, or when they might be released. And while the group has boasted about sitting on a huge wealth of leaked data from all over the world, Assange has declined to answer questions about whether WikiLeaks has the State Department cables, and, if it does, whether and when it plans to publish them.

Manning, currently jailed on suspicion of leaking classified material to WikiLeaks in a previous case, has been quoted as saying that the cables would expose "almost criminal political back dealings" and that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton would "have a heart attack" when the files went public.

Both Diffie and Kocher said that the size of the file indicated that there was a huge amount of data being encrypted, although what the original file actually contains is anyone's guess.

"The question is," Kocher said, "is it a bluff or is it something more substantial?"
http://gulfnews.com/news/world/usa/wikileaks-posts-huge-encrypted-file-to-web-1.664642

[afridi220]

Secret CIA terrorism analysis published

WASHINGTON: WikiLeaks has released a CIA memo analysing the risks of terrorists operating from the United States.

The CIA paper - titled What if Foreigners See the United States as an ''Exporter of Terrorism''? - examines the implications of extremists recruiting US nationals and using the US as a base for attacks abroad.

The US has long been an exporter of terrorism, according to the analysis.

If that became a widely held perception it could damage relations with foreign allies and lessen their willingness to co-operate in ''extrajudicial'' activities, such as the abduction and interrogation of terrorism suspects, known as rendition.

The three-page secret paper was produced in February by the CIA's Red Cell, which was set up after the attacks of September 11, 2001 by the then-CIA director, George Tenet, to provide ''out-of-the-box'' analyses on ''a full range of analytic issues''.

It cites the Pakistani-American David Headley, among others, to make its case that America is a terrorism exporter. This year Headley pleaded guilty to conducting surveillance in support of the Lashkar-e-Taiba attacks in Mumbai in 2008, which killed more than 160 people.

In 1994 an American Jewish doctor, Baruch Goldstein, emigrated from New York to Israel, joined the extremist group Kach and killed 29 Palestinians praying at a mosque at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, it says.

This paper pales in comparison with its recent WikiLeaks releases. Last month it published 76,000 secret US military records and field reports on the war in Afghanistan.

That prompted criticism that the information put US soldiers and Afghan informants at risk.

WikiLeaks plans to release 15,000 more Afghan war records it has been reviewing to redact names and other information that could cause harm.

The CIA played down the latest release. ''These sorts of analytic products - clearly identified as coming from the agency's Red Cell - are designed simply to provoke thought and present different points of view,'' a CIA spokesman, George Little, said in an email.

On Wednesday a Swedish prosecutor ordered the police to question the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, about accusations of molesting made against him by two Swedish women.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/secret-cia-terrorism-analysis-published-20100826-13u8p.html

[Wootah]

Was it true that people in Afghanistan were killed because of his leaks?