A Guardian journalist, David Leigh, has violated a confidentiality agreement with WikiLeaks by disclosing top secret WikiLeaks’ decryption passwords to hundreds of thousands of unredacted unpublished US diplomatic cables.
Leigh, an editor at the Guardian and brother in law of its editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, disclosed the decryption passwords for over 100,000 yet unpublished US State Department diplomatic cables in a book published by the Guardian. The book was reportedly rushed to publication, with the rights then promptly sold to Hollywood.
The unapproved disclosure has disrupted the process WikiLeaks has developed of timing the publication of the cables in conjunction with their partners in media and human rights organizations who cooperate to redact information that could leave potentially innocent people vulnerable. It also led to an accelerated release of diplomatic cables, ahead of WikiLeaks schedule.
The potential for this to implicate WikiLeaks in irresponsible behavior is high, although it was the actions of Leigh and the Guardian which made the sensitive information immediately available. U.S. government officials have already criticized WikiLeaks for including in unredacted information about suspected militants and U.S. Embassy contacts.
WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have been in contact with the US State Department, reportedly talking on the phone with their legal advisor Cliff Johnson for 75 minutes.
WikiLeaks has begun pre-litigation action against the Guardian and an individual in Germany who was distributing the passwords “for personal gain,” as described in an editorial from the whistle-blowing website.
I wonder when the document will be released by Wikileaks implicating the USG of paying David Leigh to disclose the passwords…essentially setting Wikileaks up for prosecution. You know it's well within their bag of tricks and we all know the USG have absolutely zero scruples.
I facepalmed hard.
Well, at least it's not like the Graun will accuse Assange of being out to make a quick buck in the near future.
The CIA probably has placed people in all newspapers. Who is the CIA plant at the Guardian?
They are out to get Assange by Any and All means.
Obama the throttler.
This Julian Assange person is incompetent. First he reveals a sensitive password to someone outside his organization. Second he doesn't constantly update the password. Assange is the person to be blamed for this entire episode.
I wouldn't assign _all_ the blame to Assange and WL, but I agree that it's strange that they gave the password out. A more sensible security regime would be (obviously) differential levels of access.
You can't change the password once the file is out in the public (I'm assuming this is the encrypted insurance file released a while back). But I agree, he shouldn't have given it out, especially not to that hack.
Guardian David Leigh is the criminal her – published WikiLeaks passwords to hundreds of thousands with information [not taking names out] – and Guardian had nerve to betray Assange [no doubt with USG intimidation – which they have done to other nations Sweden, Australia, Iceland etc] for disclosing their War Crimes & Crimes against Humanity.
Put David Leigh on trial [NOT Julian Assange].
Julian Assange never put people in harms way – Assange discloses wrong doings of governments.
"Guardian journalist, David Leigh, has violated a confidentiality agreement with WikiLeaks by disclosing top secret WikiLeaks’ decryption passwords to hundreds of thousands of unredacted unpublished US diplomatic cables." [and all this information sent to Hollywood? these people are mentally deranged].
the gaurdian is a liar media just like msot of the english media who are pathological lairs. to trust gaurdian -was mnsitake. guardian was the most vociferous supporter of iraq war knwoing fully well that it wqas based on lies. sort out the english journalists.
The Guardian is worse than most. They are worst because they pretend to be left-ish. But then they always betray the left. They are the sort of paper that pretends to be against wars, but when push comes to shove they can be counted on to support a war.
At least with the Murdoch scum, you know they are not to be trusted, read, listened to or any way believed. The Guardian produces the fake facade of being more trustworthy, only to reveal in the end that they were just as bad as the Murdoch-scum all along.
I have to agree with those saying this was a critical blunder by WL. WL's enemies have, from the very beginning, made every effort to discredit WL as "not real journalism." This leak will only confirm that notion in the minds of many. No one should understand the importance of data security better than Asange and WL. This is a serious breach.
Unfortunately, WL has little or no margin for error when it comes to this kind of thing. I fear this could be very damaging for WL and possibly even the single event that brings about its demise.
I don't want to be hard on any of the posters here, but you've all been maneuvered towards a perspective that is all about promoting pro-Western propaganda and has no connection to reality.
You've been told so repeatedly — and accepted, apparently without sufficient examination or criticism — the Western narrative about what constitutes proper media and journalistic practices.
Have you not noticed the criminal complicity of the Western media in promoting the Iraq/Af-Pak/Libyan/Iranian wars and wars-to-be? Of course you have. Those are the "journalists" whose "standards" you are unwittingly legitimizing by engaging in this discussion without, from the first and pointedly, indicting the MSM for its criminal complicity. By not condemning these practices as the criminal tools they are, you enable "criminal journalism" to pose as the "accepted standard".
You have been tricked into supporting the Western wars by talking about the enabling criminal journalism as if it were the standard of journalistic integrity, passing off crime as "not-crime".
Get it? All those quisling informants, govt officials, "diplomatic" personnel, "contractors", soldiers, and Western media hirelings — all of them — DESERVE to be in mortal danger. They are the bad guys. They DESERVE to be outed. They DESERVE to be opposed, defeated, killed.
Of course the West puts out the view that it is the font of all wonderfulness, on a crusade to bring its wonderfulness to all the downtrodden and abused of the world: "Blah blah freedom, blah blah democracy." And that the other side is the font of all evil. Yeah, yeah, f*ck you. Don't help them! After ten years of that psychopathic drivel, everyone on the planet knows it is utter crap.
Now you're letting them further pollute "reality-based thinking" by carrying their water for them. by helping them infiltrate that propaganda back into public discourse.
Bad guys — which is to say the West and every one of its accomplices/enablers — DESERVE to be exposed, DESERVE to be defeated, DESERVE to be killed. Remember it. Repeat it mantra-like. Remind yourself daily. Stay vigilant against the propaganda that precedes mass murder.
Figure out who's right and who's wrong, pick a side and stick with it. Stop being a tool.
"Get it? All those quisling informants, govt officials, "diplomatic" personnel, "contractors", soldiers, and Western media hirelings — all of them — DESERVE to be in mortal danger. They are the bad guys. They DESERVE to be outed. They DESERVE to be opposed, defeated, killed."
It's been said before (by me, inter alia), but I think you've captured it more succinctly than I did. I wish I could give this more than one up-vote.
As you say: figure out who's right and who's wrong, pick a side an stick with it. To which I would add… if it takes more than fifteen seconds to figure out who the bad guys are, have someone throw a grenade into your own living room at 1am so you get a taste for how it feels to be an Iraqi or Afghan or Libyan or Yemeni or Pakistani.
jeff_davis, I think you're missing the point. Namely, WL can't afford to give its enemies any pretext for branding WL's mission as "non-journalism." Shouting "hypocrisy" or arguing that collaborators get what they deserve is useless. Too many people are happy to accept the "When they do it, it's bad. When we do it, it's ok," line of reasoning from the establishment. Trying to argue that the MSM is worse than WL is a waste of time. A lot of us are (rightly, I think) simply concerned that this leak will be effectively used to further discredit WL (in the eyes of the general public) and make their mission that much more difficult.
Someone does something horrible. Something they want to keep secret from the rest of the world. For obvious reasons that many will hate them and wish them ill if the secret of the horrible thing is exposed.
Then someone exposes the secret, putting the secret keeper at risk.
If harm comes to the original secret-keeper, is this the fault of the person who exposed the secret? Or is it the fault of the person who originally committed the horrible act that they then wanted to keep secret from the world?
We keep hearing of our secret agents and collaborators who may face harm if their secrets are revealed. And we are told that if these people are harmed, that it will be the fault of Mr. Assange and others who help to expose secrets. But, isn't it the original people who are doing things that they then want to keep secret who bare the blame? If they had not done the things they later wanted to keep secret, then no harm would have come to them.
We saw this at Abu Gharaib. We were told that if the torture and abuse that Americans committed there became public, then it would put people at risk. But, weren't the Americans who might be put at risk put into that state by the people who committed the torture and abuse. It wasn't the secret-exposer telling the world about this torture and abuse that put them at risk. It was the people who committed the torture and abuse. And its just the lies and manipulations of the torturers and the abusers and their facilitators and supporters that try to pin the blame on the person who revealed the secret, instead of placing it where it truly belongs, which is on their own head and shoulders.
Heck, the 'unredacted' versions should have been released all along. You are just following US gov/MSM bs in saying that this is somehow bad and somehow discredits wikileaks. wikileaks still apparently works just fine, as someone was able to send them these cables anonymously, and now the world is able to see them. That's what wikileaks was always supposed to do.
For those who support freedom and liberty, this is just fine. If you support the US government's desire to be able to operate horribly and in secret, and then to redact the names and acts of anything it doesn't want to reveal, then maybe you might not like this.
To any and all, try to act in such a way that if your secrets are revealed, you still have nothing to be ashamed of.