inimalist
Last month, over 200 000 government cables that had been supplied to Wikileaks were made available to the public, unredacted, available through Wikileaks' own homepage.
The process through which all of this happened is somewhat convoluted, but a good summary is available here:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,783778,00.html
Basically, in the course of releasing the initial 20 000 government cables, Wikileaks worked hard with journalists to redact cables prior to posting them online. One Journalist, David Leigh, who writes for the British Guardian, who wrote a book on Assange, included the password he was given to access the diplomatic cables cache file in the book, for some entirely unknown reason... (I assume some type of ego stroking)
here is a reply David Leigh made to Glenn Greenwald, who had suggested Leigh had some culpability in these files being released to the public:
http://letters.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2011/09/02/wikileaks/permalink/712ee7caa21471f5f290e44d4b340bdd.html
Assange also had many internal problems at Wikileaks, leading to a somewhat chaotic atmosphere, where a file containing huge dumps of data, including the entire cache of diplomatic cables, was created. When Wikileaks started coming under attack from unknown hackers and had their funding shut down through major credit cards and paypal, a file was put online through torrent sites by someone at Wikileaks, containing the still password locked diplomatic cables.
It took a few months, but eventually the internet figured it out, and unlocked the documents. In the wake of this, Wikileaks decided that, instead of continuing to redact the files, they would post them online uncensored, because they wanted to maximize the impact of the documents:
http://wikileaks.org/Wikileaks-Statement-on-the-9-Month.html
Well, maximize impact they did!
http://www.cpj.org/2011/09/ethiopian-journalist-idd-in-wikileaks-cable-flees.php
In a reply, a Wikileaks spokesperson claimed:
http://www.cpj.org/blog/2011/09/in-ethiopia-case-a-response-to-wikileaks.php
Which seems mostly to just skirt the blame and admit no wrongdoing. CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon responded as follows:
http://www.cpj.org/blog/2011/09/in-ethiopia-case-a-response-to-wikileaks.php
The process through which all of this happened is somewhat convoluted, but a good summary is available here:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,783778,00.html
Basically, in the course of releasing the initial 20 000 government cables, Wikileaks worked hard with journalists to redact cables prior to posting them online. One Journalist, David Leigh, who writes for the British Guardian, who wrote a book on Assange, included the password he was given to access the diplomatic cables cache file in the book, for some entirely unknown reason... (I assume some type of ego stroking)
here is a reply David Leigh made to Glenn Greenwald, who had suggested Leigh had some culpability in these files being released to the public:
http://letters.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2011/09/02/wikileaks/permalink/712ee7caa21471f5f290e44d4b340bdd.html
Assange also had many internal problems at Wikileaks, leading to a somewhat chaotic atmosphere, where a file containing huge dumps of data, including the entire cache of diplomatic cables, was created. When Wikileaks started coming under attack from unknown hackers and had their funding shut down through major credit cards and paypal, a file was put online through torrent sites by someone at Wikileaks, containing the still password locked diplomatic cables.
It took a few months, but eventually the internet figured it out, and unlocked the documents. In the wake of this, Wikileaks decided that, instead of continuing to redact the files, they would post them online uncensored, because they wanted to maximize the impact of the documents:
http://wikileaks.org/Wikileaks-Statement-on-the-9-Month.html
Well, maximize impact they did!
http://www.cpj.org/2011/09/ethiopian-journalist-idd-in-wikileaks-cable-flees.php
In a reply, a Wikileaks spokesperson claimed:
http://www.cpj.org/blog/2011/09/in-ethiopia-case-a-response-to-wikileaks.php
Which seems mostly to just skirt the blame and admit no wrongdoing. CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon responded as follows:
http://www.cpj.org/blog/2011/09/in-ethiopia-case-a-response-to-wikileaks.php