Part 8 (2/2)

The US state department had already a.s.sembled a team of 120 people, to burn the midnight oil and sift through those cables likely to be disclosed. The department also issued a condemnatory statement. It said: ”We antic.i.p.ate the release of what are claimed to be several hundred thousand cla.s.sified state department cables on Sunday night that detail private diplomatic discussions with foreign governments. By its very nature, field reporting to Was.h.i.+ngton is candid and often incomplete information. It is not an expression of policy, nor does it always shape final policy decisions. Nevertheless, these cables could compromise private discussions with foreign governments and opposition leaders, and when the substance of private conversations is printed on the front pages of newspapers around the world, it can deeply impact not only on US foreign policy interests, but those of our allies and friends around the world.” The release of the cables was a ”reckless and dangerous action”. It had put lives at risk, the White House declared.

The statement was a damage limitation exercise. Even opponents of WikiLeaks had to acknowledge that some of the disclosures for example, that the US had spied on UN officials and sought to gather their credit card account numbers were overwhelmingly in the public interest. The White House, moreover, frequently expressed concern when other authoritarian regimes clamped down on freedom of speech. This testy response when the leak came from inside its own large governmental machinery would provoke the Russians, Chinese, and just about everyone else, to accuse Was.h.i.+ngton of double standards.

The Guardian Guardian posted its own riposte. It pointed out that the paper had carefully redacted many cables. This was done ”in order to protect a number of named sources and so as not to disclose certain details of special operations”. posted its own riposte. It pointed out that the paper had carefully redacted many cables. This was done ”in order to protect a number of named sources and so as not to disclose certain details of special operations”.

The New York Times New York Times also vigorously defended its decision to publish: ”The cables tell the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions, the decisions that cost the country most heavily in lives and money. They shed light on the motivations and, in some cases, the duplicity of allies on the receiving end of American courts.h.i.+p and foreign aid. They illuminate the diplomacy surrounding two current wars and several countries, like Pakistan and Yemen, where American military involvement is growing. As daunting as it is to publish such material over official objections, it would be presumptuous to conclude that Americans have no right to know what is being done in their name.” also vigorously defended its decision to publish: ”The cables tell the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions, the decisions that cost the country most heavily in lives and money. They shed light on the motivations and, in some cases, the duplicity of allies on the receiving end of American courts.h.i.+p and foreign aid. They illuminate the diplomacy surrounding two current wars and several countries, like Pakistan and Yemen, where American military involvement is growing. As daunting as it is to publish such material over official objections, it would be presumptuous to conclude that Americans have no right to know what is being done in their name.”

Franco Frattini, Italy's foreign minister, was one of the earliest politicians to grasp that the leak could not be undone, and was game-changing. ”It will be the 9/11 of world diplomacy,” he exclaimed. For once the comparison didn't look like hyperbole. ”It was being discussed in the White House, the Kremlin, the elysee, by Berlusconi and the UN, by Chavez, in Canberra, in every capital city of the world,” Rusbridger said. ”The ones where it wasn't being discussed, you knew they were bracing themselves. You just had this sense of mayhem being let loose. All these incredibly powerful people, the most powerful people in the world, were scrambling into emergency board meetings.”

At Kings Place, the following day's editorial conference was more crowded than usual. Morning conferences are a Guardian Guardian ritual: the heads of department home, foreign, city, sport, as well as features, comment and arts give a quick run-down of the day's offerings. All staff can attend and anybody can speak. The seating arrangement mirrors the ritual: the heads of department home, foreign, city, sport, as well as features, comment and arts give a quick run-down of the day's offerings. All staff can attend and anybody can speak. The seating arrangement mirrors the Guardian Guardian's unspoken hierarchy: Rusbridger sits in the middle of an elongated yellow sofa; junior staff perch uncomfortably on stools around the gla.s.s walls. After the news roundup the editor typically says: ”What else?” The words are often hard to hear. It is a brave, or foolish, person who opens the debate; sometimes the silence extends awkwardly for 10 seconds. This morning, however, there was no hesitation. The room was packed; the atmosphere one of excitement, and astonishment that the Guardian Guardian had managed, with a few glitches, to pull the story off. had managed, with a few glitches, to pull the story off.

One of the unfamiliar faces there was Luke Harding, the Guardian Guardian's Moscow correspondent, who had mined the cables for a series of hard-hitting stories about Russia and who, having just returned again from Moscow, stood unshaven and jet-lagged next to the door. Ian Katz recalled Sunday's dramatic events and explained the decision to bring forward publication when it became clear that Cablegate itself had sprung a leak. Katz described the Guardian Guardian's sitcom-style wranglings with its many Euro-partners: ”It was a cross between running a Brussels committee and an episode of 'Allo 'Allo!” He came up with a characteristically rococo a.n.a.logy ”like being a kind of air traffic controller, with several small aircraft cras.h.i.+ng at Stansted but managing to land a couple of big jets at Heathrow”.

The Guardian Guardian's website had gone ”absolutely tonto”, Janine Gibson reported. The story produced remarkable traffic the 4.1 million unique users clicking on it that day was the highest ever. Record numbers would continue, with 9.4 million browsers viewing WikiLeaks stories between 28 November and 14 December. Some 43% of them came from the US. The Guardian Guardian team had designed an interactive graphic allowing readers to carry out their own searches of the cable database. This feature became the most popular aspect of the team had designed an interactive graphic allowing readers to carry out their own searches of the cable database. This feature became the most popular aspect of the Guardian Guardian's coverage. People from around the world looked to see what US officials had privately written about their rulers. ”This was really pleasing,” says Gibson. ”People were looking for themselves and engaging with the cables and not just the a.s.sange-ness.”

As the cables rolled out day by day, an ugly, and in many ways deranged, backlash took place in the US. A vengeful chorus came mostly from Republicans. New York congressman Peter King, incoming chair of the homeland security committee, talked of ”treason” and proposed WikiLeaks should be designated as ”a foreign terrorist organisation”. Eschewing any risk of understatement, he said: ”WikiLeaks presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the US.”

Congressman Pete Hoekstra of Michigan was reported calling for executions. ”Clearly the person that leaked the information or hacked into our systems we can go after and we can probably go after them for espionage and maybe treason. If we go after them, and are able to convict them on treason, then the death penalty comes into play.”

His Michigan colleague, Mike Rogers, was not to be outdone. He told a local radio station: ”I argue the death penalty clearly should be considered here. He clearly aided the enemy to what may result in the death of US soldiers, or those co-operating. If that is not a capital offence, I don't know what is.”

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, darling of the unhinged right, denounced a.s.sange's ”sick, un-American espionage” and came close to inciting his a.s.sa.s.sination: ”Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaida and Taliban leaders? ... He is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.”

But it was Senator Joe Lieberman, Senate homeland security committee chairman, a foreign policy hawk and maverick Democrat, who was the most practical attack dog. Lieberman described the leak in apocalyptic terms as ”an outrageous, reckless and despicable action that will undermine the ability of our government and our partners to keep our people safe and to work together to defend our vital interests”. He stopped short of denouncing a.s.sange as a ”terrorist” but said: ”It's a terrible thing that WikiLeaks did. I hope we are doing everything we can to shut down their website.”

On the first day of publication of the cables, Sunday, WikiLeaks came under ma.s.sive hacker attack. The net traffic heading to WikiLeaks leapt from 13 gigabits (thousand million bits) per second to around 17Gbps. It peaked at 18Gbps. WikiLeaks was no stranger to DDOS or ”distributed denial of service” attacks. Someone controlling a ”botnet” of tens of thousands of compromised Windows PCs was apparently orchestrating them in an attempt to bring wikileaks.org cras.h.i.+ng down.

In a usual DDOS attack, the PCs try to communicate with the targeted site. A typical method is to send a ”ping” request with a few packets of data. It's a bit like ringing the site's front doorbell. The site generally responds by acknowledging that the data reached it. On its own, a ping request is easy for a site to deal with. But when a blizzard of them arrives from all over the world and continues and continues, it becomes impossible for the site to do anything useful: it's too busy answering the ping requests to deliver any useful data.

The DDOS attack that hit WikiLeaks that afternoon was eight times as large as any previous ones. The hacker behind it appeared to be a curious right-wing patriot called ”The Jester” or, in the argot he used, ”th3j35t3r”. The Jester described himself as a ”hacktivist for good”. His goal, as stated on his Twitter account, was to obstruct ”the lines of communication for terrorists, sympathisers, fixers, facilitators, oppressive regimes and general bad guys”. As the attacks continued to pummel WikiLeaks, he tweeted excitedly: ”mitted online group of underage libertarians and cyber-freaks. In this warfare, some would discern the beginnings of a decentralised global protest movement. Others would dismiss it as the antics of a handful of s.e.xually frustrated young men. But there was no doubt WikiLeaks was under siege.

To dodge the DDOS attacks, a.s.sange diverted the site's main WikiLeaks page though not the one with the diplomatic cables on it to run on Amazon's EC2 or ”Elastic Cloud Computing” service. The cablegate.wikileaks.org directory and its contents remained outside Amazon, on a server located in France. Amazon's commercial service was big enough to absorb DDOS attacks. On Tuesday 30 November there were more attacks against Amazon's main site and WikiLeaks' France-hosted cables site. Using machines in Russia, eastern Europe and Thailand, the a.s.saults were larger and more sophisticated. Nonetheless, WikiLeaks managed to weather the storm, aided by Amazon's powerful EC2 servers. a.s.sange publicised that he was hiring them.

Senator Lieberman upped his campaign. He called Amazon and urged them to stop hosting WikiLeaks. Lieberman's browbeating worked. Amazon removed WikiLeaks from its servers. Instead of admitting it had come under political pressure, the firm claimed in weasel tones that WikiLeaks had breached its ”terms of service”. ”It's clear that WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this cla.s.sified content,” Amazon said. ”Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 cla.s.sified doc.u.ments that WikiLeaks is publis.h.i.+ng could have been carefully redacted in such a way to ensure they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy.”

This was a statement Amazon had no factual basis to make. Only a tiny proportion of the 250,000 cables had been published, and each one was, in fact, being carefully redacted. It seemed plain that Amazon executives were regurgitating lines fed to them by politicians.

The senator hailed Amazon's ”right decision” and urged ”any other company or organisation that is hosting WikiLeaks to immediately terminate its relations.h.i.+p with them”. He went on: ”WikiLeaks' illegal, outrageous, and reckless acts have compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world. No responsible company whether American or foreign should a.s.sist WikiLeaks in its efforts to disseminate these stolen materials.”

The WikiLeaks team had used free software to generate a graphic display showing an overview of the cables' cla.s.sification, number and other general data. The small company that licensed it, Tableau Software, removed the graphic from its public site also feeling the pressure (though there was no direct contact) from Lieberman's office. The dominoes then started to fall. The company EveryDNS, which provides free routing services (translating human-readable addresses such as wikileaks.org into machine readable internet addresses such as 64.64.12.170) terminated the wikileaks.org domain name. It also deleted all email addresses a.s.sociated with it. Justifying the move, EveryDNS said the constant hacker attacks on WikiLeaks were inconveniencing other customers.

In effect, WikiLeaks had now vanished from the web for anyone who couldn't work out how to discover a numeric address for the site. WikiLeaks s.h.i.+fted to an alternative address, pany on 27 November the eve of the cables' launch declaring that WikiLeaks was deemed illegal in the US. On Monday 6 December, the credit card giant MasterCard followed suit, saying that WikiLeaks ”contravened rules”. On Tuesday, Visa Europe did the same. These were popular and easy methods of donating online; seeing both closed down shut off much of WikiLeaks' funding. (Critics pointed out that, while WikiLeaks was judged off-limits, the Ku Klux Klan's website still directed would-be donors to a site that takes both MasterCard and Visa.) It was a wounding blow and left a.s.sange struggling to pay his and WikiLeaks' growing legal bills.

These salvoes against WikiLeaks did not go unanswered: they triggered a backlash against the backlash. Fury raged online at such a demonstration of political pressure and US corporate self-interest. While polls suggested many Americans backed a shutdown of WikiLeaks, others were angered by the suppression of free speech; and far more outside the US thought the company cave-ins were a bad portent for free expression on the internet.

Into the arena stepped ”Anonymous”, a grouping of around 3,000 people. Some were expert hackers in control of small-scale botnets: others were net newbies seeking a cause to rally around. It was a loose collective, mainly of teenagers with time on their hands, and older people (almost all men) with more nous and technical skills. The Anonymous crowd was only a group in the loosest sense, the Guardian Guardian's technology editor Charles Arthur wrote: ”It's more like a stampeding herd, not sure quite what it wants but certain that it's not going to put up with any obstacles, until it reaches an obstacle which it can't hurdle, in which case it moves on to something else.”

Anonymous which grew out of the equally chaotic ”/b/” messageboard on the discussion site 4chan.org had in the past tormented the Scientologists, reposting videos and leaking secret doc.u.ments that the cult hoped to suppress. Anonymous's broad manifesto is to fight against the suppression of information but its members were not above childish actions simply to annoy and frustrate web users for their own amus.e.m.e.nt (known as ”doing it for the lulz”). Anonymous supporters turned up at demonstrations from time to time some of them wearing the same spooky Guy Fawkes mask that adorned the group's Anony_Ops Twitter page. ”It's complex, puerile, bizarre and chaotic,” one of them told Arthur.

Operation Payback had previously been directed against the websites of law firms that pursued online music pirates, as well as against the Recording Industry a.s.sociation of America (RIAA). Now it was the online payment firms' turn for ”payback”. Despite having no hierarchy or recognisable leader, on Wednesday 8 December Anonymous hackers forced the main website of MasterCard offline for several hours. They temporarily disrupted Sarah Palin's credit card account. Anonymous also claimed to have knocked out PostFinance's site and that of the Swedish prosecutor's office. Some Anonymous supporters posted a ”manifesto”. ”We support the free flow of information. Anonymous is actively campaigning for this goal everywhere in all forms. This necessitates the freedom of expression for the internet, for journalism and journalists, and citizens of the world. Though we recognise you may disagree, we believe that Anonymous is campaigning for you so that your voice may never be silenced.”

What effect the attack had on MasterCard's actual financial operations is unclear: the company did not say whether transactions (which would be carried out over secure lines to its main computers) were affected. It largely ignored the attack, hoping not to inflame the attackers. The tactic worked; Anonymous next considered turning its ire on Amazon and PayPal, but the disorganised nature of the group meant they could not muster enough firepower to knock either site offline; Amazon was too big, while PayPal withstood some attacks. The suggestion made privately was that the powerful hackers who had acted against MasterCard did not want to inconvenience themselves by taking out PayPal, which they used themselves all the time.

This event was something new the internet equivalent of a noisy political demonstration. What had begun with a couple of teenage nerds had morphed into a cyber-uprising against attempts to restrict information. As they put it in one portentous YouTube video, upon a soundtrack of thras.h.i.+ng guitars: ”We are everywhere.” They were certainly in the Netherlands, at least, where, in December, police arrested a 16-year-old and a 19-year-old. Some Anonymous supporters without sufficient computer skills had overlooked the fact that the software called LOIC being offered to them to run attacks would give away their internet location. Police could, given time, tie that to a physical user.

Behind all this online turbulence, however, a much more serious game was afoot. President Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, called a press conference to announce there was now an ”active, ongoing, criminal investigation” into the leaking of cla.s.sified information. He promised to hold those who broke US law ”accountable”, and said: ”To the extent that there are gaps in our laws, we will move to close those gaps, which is not to say that anybody at this point, because of their citizens.h.i.+p or residence, is not a target or a subject of an investigation that is ongoing.” In Alexandria, Virginia, just outside Was.h.i.+ngton, rumours began to spread that a secret grand jury had been empanelled, and many subpoenas were being prepared for issue. Bradley Manning, the young soldier who had by now spent seven months in virtual solitary confinement, would only see an end to his harsh treatment, his friends started to believe, if he was willing to implicate Julian a.s.sange and WikiLeaks in some serious crimes.

It seemed clear that prosecuting a.s.sange an Australian citizen now living in the UK for espionage or conspiracy was going to be an uphill affair, not least because of the old-fas.h.i.+oned nature of the US Espionage Act. But it was also clear that an exasperated White House wanted to be seen vigorously pursuing this option. Would the justice department try and winkle a.s.sange out of his hideaway in the English countryside? And was there not a still unresolved police investigation into his behaviour in Sweden? The threat of extradition and the possibility of several decades in a US supermax jail began to loom over a.s.sange, as the rest of the world sought to digest the significance of the cascade of doc.u.ments he had released.

CHAPTER 16.

The biggest leak in history

Cybers.p.a.ce 30 November 2010

”It is the historian's dream. It is the diplomat's nightmare”

TIMOTHY G GARTON A ASH, HISTORIAN.

What did we learn from WikiLeaks? The question, as with virtually everything else to do with the leaks, was polarising. There was, from the start, a metropolitan yawn from bien pensants bien pensants who felt they knew it all. Arabs don't like Iran? The Russian government is corrupt? Some African countries are kleptocracies? Go on, astonish us. You'll be telling us next that the pope is Catholic. who felt they knew it all. Arabs don't like Iran? The Russian government is corrupt? Some African countries are kleptocracies? Go on, astonish us. You'll be telling us next that the pope is Catholic.

According to this critique the disclosures stated the obvious, and amounted to no more than ”humdrum diplomatic pillow talk”. (This was from the London Review of Books London Review of Books. Academic Glen Newey said he was unimpressed by the revelation that French leader Nicolas Sarkozy ”is a short man with a Napoleon complex”.) Then there were the people who argued that the cables did not reveal enough bad behaviour by Americans. On the left this was a cause for disappointment and, sometimes, suspicion. A small cabal began poring over the cables for evidence of ideological editing or censors.h.i.+p. And why so little on Israel? On the right, and from government, this served as fuel for the argument that there was no public interest in publication. This was not the Pentagon papers, they reasoned. There was little malfeasance in American foreign policy revealed in the doc.u.ments, so where's the justification for revealing all? Then there was the US government's insistence that the leaks were endangering lives, wrecking Was.h.i.+ngton's ability to do business with its allies and partners, and helping terrorists.

What these arguments missed was the hunger for the cables in countries that didn't have fully functioning democracies or the sort of free expression enjoyed in London, Paris or New York. Within hours of the first cables being posted the Guardian Guardian started receiving a steady stream of pleading requests from editors and journalists around the world wanting to know what the cables revealed about their own countries and rulers. It was easier to call the revelations unstartling, dull even, if one lived in western Europe, rather than in Belarus, Tunisia, or in any other oppressive regime. started receiving a steady stream of pleading requests from editors and journalists around the world wanting to know what the cables revealed about their own countries and rulers. It was easier to call the revelations unstartling, dull even, if one lived in western Europe, rather than in Belarus, Tunisia, or in any other oppressive regime.

This was as powerful a case for the WikiLeaks disclosures as any. It was not particularly edifying to see western commentators and politicians decrying the public interest in the publication of information which was being avidly, even desperately, sought after by people in far off countries of which they doubtless knew little. Who was to say what effect these disclosures would have, even if, on one level, they were revealing things that were in some sense known? The very fact of publication often served as authentication and verification of things that were suspected.

In fact, far from being routine, the leak was unprecedented, if only in size. WikiLeaks called it, accurately, ”the largest set of confidential doc.u.ments ever to be released into the public domain”. There were 251,287 internal state department communiques, written by 280 emba.s.sies and consulates in 180 different countries. Among them were frank, and often unflattering, a.s.sessments of world leaders; a.n.a.lysis, much of it good quality; as well as comments, reports of meetings, summations, and gossip. There were accounts of vodka-fuelled dinners, meetings with oligarchs, encounters in Chinese restaurants and even that Saudi Arabian s.e.x party. Some cables were long essays, offering fresh thinking on historically knotty problems, such as Chechnya; others simple requests to Was.h.i.+ngton.

They highlighted the geopolitical interests and preoccupations of the US superpower: nuclear proliferation; the supposed threat from Iran; the hard-to-control military situation in Kabul and Islamabad. The American emba.s.sy cables came from established power centres (London and Paris) but also the far-off margins (Ashgabat, Yerevan and Bishkek). Boring they are not. On the contrary, they offer an incomparably detailed mosaic of life and politics in the early 21st century.

But more importantly than this, they included disclosures of things citizens are ent.i.tled to know. This is true for Americans and non-Americans. The cables discussed human rights abuses, corruption, and dubious financial ties between G8 leaders. They spoke of corporate espionage, dirty tricks and hidden bank accounts. In their private exchanges US diplomats dispense with the plat.i.tudes that characterise much of their public job; they give relatively frank, unmediated a.s.sessments, offering a window into the mental processes at the top of US power. The cables were, in a way, the truth.

The constant principle that underpinned the Guardian Guardian's selection what to print and what not was whether a cable contained material that was in the larger public interest. Nowhere was this more clear-cut than with a cla.s.sified directive from July 2009 that revealed the US government was spying on the United Nations, and its low-key South Korean secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. The cable began by requesting predictable diplomatic information about positions and views on hot topics such as Darfur, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea. But read more closely it clearly blurred the line between diplomacy and spying.

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