Posted on 07/26/2010 9:42:49 AM PDT by lbryce
US authorities have known for weeks that they have suffered a haemorrhage of secret information on a scale which makes even the leaking of the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam war look limited by comparison.
The Afghan war logs, from which the Guardian reports today, consist of 92,201 internal records of actions by the US military in Afghanistan between January 2004 and December 2009 – threat reports from intelligence agencies, plans and accounts of coalition operations, descriptions of enemy attacks and roadside bombs, records of meetings with local politicians, most of them classified secret.
The Guardian's source for these is Wikileaks, the website which specialises in publishing untraceable material from whistleblowers, which is simultaneously publishing raw material from the logs.
Washington fears it may have lost even more highly sensitive material including an archive of tens of thousands of cable messages sent by US embassies around the world, reflecting arms deals, trade talks, secret meetings and uncensored opinion of other governments.
Wikileaks' founder, Julian Assange, says that in the last two months they have received yet another huge batch of "high-quality material" from military sources and that officers from the Pentagon's criminal investigations department have asked him to meet them on neutral territory to help them plug the sequence of leaks. He has not agreed to do so.
Behind today's revelations lie two distinct stories: first, of the Pentagon's attempts to trace the leaks with painful results for one young soldier; and second, a unique collaboration between the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel magazine in Germany to sift the huge trove of data for material of public interest and to distribute globally this secret record of the world's most powerful nation at war.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Treason? Against Australia? What are the Australian treason laws?
Also don't focus on Wikileaks. They were just the useful tool. Focus on who leaked this info.
What guy?
Until he exposes really dangerous men and regimes worldwide, he is a typical leftwing hack.
We don't have an extradition treaty with Oz?
Extradition. Black ops. Something. This cretin needs to pay for this.
Our friends in the Australian intelligence services need to take Julian waterboarding.
“This is disastrous.”
Maybe not. Maybe Assange has done the Amercian public a favor. And if he could get this stuff, then either it is not of much value to our real enemies, or it is already known to them.
“This cretin needs to pay for this.”
Maybe we should thank him instead. And concentrate on finding the security breach.
Is he in the USA?
if you have TS clearance, that means that someone with higher clearace/authority is allowed to share with you TS info that is neccesary for the performance of your job.
it does not mean you can go the TS-google an start surfing the secrets library.
There are buildings where the maintenance staff has TS clearance. Carpenters, electricians etc renovating a US embassy all must have Secret clearance (or TS depending on the project)
The Ozzies need to waterboard this little turd for us, or turn him over to us so we can do it.
“Extradition. Black ops. Something. This cretin needs to pay for this.”
Damage’s done already. Someone needs to go to jail, maybe this guy too, but after plenty of others do. Read this:
“Everywhere there’s a U.S. post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed,” Manning wrote. “It’s open diplomacy. World-wide anarchy in CSV format. It’s Climategate with a global scope, and breathtaking depth. It’s beautiful, and horrifying.”
“Manning told Lamo that the Garani video was left accessible in a directory on a U.S. Central Command server, centcom.smil.mil, by officers who investigated the incident. The video, he said, was an encrypted AES-256 ZIP file.”
“The networks, he said, were both “air gapped” from unclassified networks, but the environment at the base made it easy to smuggle data out.
“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga,’ erase the music then write a compressed split file,” he wrote. “No one suspected a thing and, odds are, they never will.”
“[I] listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history,” he added later. ”Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis … a perfect storm.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/leak/
“
WTF lets thousands of 20 year Army old kids access every single email, top secret cable and report from all over the world? he even burned them on a CD! Who trusts USA now with honest assessments?
If I am not mistaken, we do have Muslims serving in the military.
A 22 year old Army soldier about to be discharged:
“The networks, he said, were both “air gapped” from unclassified networks, but the environment at the base made it easy to smuggle data out.
“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga,’ erase the music then write a compressed split file,” he wrote. “No one suspected a thing and, odds are, they never will.”
“[I] listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history,” he added later. ”Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis … a perfect storm.”
Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/leak/
Firing squad.
Bradley Manning had visions of becoming the new darling of the left and living a life basking in the glowing admiration of the America Haters. Unfortunately for him, he is not Daniel Ellsberg, and is not a civilian who has the political connections to fashion a clean exit. He is a soldier who will be court martialed, found guilty, and sent to Leavenworth. It will be years before he sees the outside of a cell.
It is now. Most states haven’t the courage to carry out the penalty even when it is given. California has over 600 inmates waiting. Most will die of old age.
the leaker
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