Government Lies Make Leaks Explosive. Checkpoint Washington - Pentagon: undisclosed Wikileak documents 'potentially more explosive' Updated 10:06 p.m. Pentagon officials believe they have identified the 15,000 classified Afghanistan war documents that the online site WikiLeaks has obtained and not yet disclosed, and the military is now sifting through them for references that could harm troops or civilians. The records at issue contain material that is "potentially more explosive, more sensitive," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said, than the information in the 77,000 Afghanistan field reports and assessments WikiLeaks put online last month in an effort to shed light on the U.S. military's war in Afghanistan.
A task force of more than 100 intelligence analysts have been sifting "around the clock" through all 91,000 records, looking for hundreds of key words, including the names of Afghan citizens, mosques and allies, in an effort to evaluate the danger caused by exposure, Morrell said. WikiLeaks posted the Afghan War Diaries in a database 17 days ago. Financing WikiLeaks. Many comedians consider stand-up the purest form of comedy; Doug Stanhope considers it the freest. “Once you do stand-up, it spoils you for everything else,” he says. “You’re the director, performer, and producer.” Unlike most of his peers, however, Stanhope has designed his career around exploring that freedom, which means choosing a life on the road. Perhaps this is why, although he is extremely ambitious, prolific, and one of the best stand-ups performing, so many Americans haven’t heard of him. Many comedians approach the road as a means to an end: a way to develop their skills, start booking bigger venues, and, if they’re lucky, get themselves airlifted to Hollywood.
But life isn’t happening on a sit-com set or a sketch show — at least not the life that has interested Stanhope. Because of the present comedy boom, civilians are starting to hear about Doug Stanhope from other comedians like Ricky Gervais, Sarah Silverman, and Louis CK. Human Rights Groups Press WikiLeaks Over Data. Wikileaks not part of the Empire. A major military exercise involving US, Australian, British, New Zealand and other allied forces is underway in an inhospitable area of Arizona to test intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance technology before it is used against al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Empire Challenge, held at the Fort Huachuca US Army installation in south-east Arizona near the Mexican border, replicates situations and operations faced by allied forces in Afghanistan, including roadside bomb attacks and the identification and tracking of "high value individuals".
The scenarios test the flow of intelligence information between different segments of the US military, as well as from ally-to-ally to prevent hiccups in Afghanistan. The Australian military has representatives at Fort Huachuca as well as members at installations back in Australia receiving and monitoring data and surveillance footage from the live exercises.
Advertisement. Two Kinds of Classified Information - National. By Mark Kleiman The latest WikiLeaks flap raises, once again, the problem of revealing classified information. Some of the WikiLeaks Afghanistan material—the names of individual Afghans who are working against the Taliban, some of whom are now sure to die as a result—represents exactly the sort of stuff that any government would reasonably try to keep secret. The other classic examples are "order-of-battle" information, negotiating instructions, intelligence sources and methods, and technical details about the capacities and vulnerabilities of specific weapons and about how to create them. Of course attempts to keep such things secret are never perfectly successful, but—especially against a distributed set of enemies rather than a single unified enemy such as the USSR—just making some kinds of information harder to get can serve legitimate security interests.
But equally of course, most classified information is not of any of the above types. How WikiLeaks Is Affecting Journalism | Novel Copy. Now that the dust has settled after the immediate reaction to WikiLeak’s release of secret Afghan war logs, clearer lines can be drawn concerning the event’s significance. The most fundamental distinction to be drawn is between the technical and moral implications of the leak. Today I will look at the technical implications, on Wednesday, the moral ones.
From a technical standpoint, the event is a sign post for how news organizations function in the information age and how small non-state actors can hold governments accountable (governments whose resources are incomparable in scale). On the first point, how news producers work nowadays, a democratized media means that everything not behind a paywall is instantly copied and repeated on the Internet. As a result, a general economic rule holds: scarcity makes information much more precious.
This is why The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel made WikiLeak’s release of the war logs a big story—they had a guaranteed exclusive. Wikileaks Fiasco Exposes Gaping Holes in Cyber Domain. By Kevin Coleman Defense Tech Cyber Warfare Analyst Is the Wikileaks fiasco the first defeat for the United States in the cyber warfare domain? Exploring this question shows just how little we have planned for, created doctrine for, and are ready, able and willing to respond to threats to the United States in the cyber domain.
Interesting Data Points: • General Keith Alexander, the newly appointed head of Cyber Command and Director of the National Security Agency who is now responsible for all military information and communications security, traveled to Afghanistan just two days after the Wikileaks first dump of classified data on their web site. • We polled several security professional (several with active security clearances) as to the severity of this incident. . • Lt. . • Many people looking at this issue wonder why we just don’t hack and take down the site. Planning for and response to cyber threats is a complex international issue with little or no empirical information. WikiLeaks Claims No Lives at Risk with Exposing Gov’t Secrets on Afghan War, Code Pink Wants Gay Radical Bradley Manning Released (video) « Frugal Café Blog Zone.
Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on August 9, 2010 More on WikiLeaks exposing thousands of secret government documents on the Internet… WikiLeaks arrogantly claims no lives of our military or government agencies in war zones or overseas have been put at grave risk for them broadcasting across the world thousands of classified military intelligence documents — the “Afghan War Diary.”
Tell that to the Taliban… Hot Air: Report: Taliban seeking revenge against informants after Wikileaks doc dump Dangerous, delusional morons. And Pvt. Bradley Manning, a gay radical who is awaiting court martial for stealing and providing the classified documents, reportedly did this traitorous act because he was upset over a relationship breakup.
Code Pink, the radical, left-wing anti-military group, held a protest outside Quantico yesterday, demanding Manning’s release. From Associated Press: Wikileaks Denies Work Threatens U.S. From CNN’s AC360, Activists rally to ‘Free Bradley Manning’ in WikiLeaks case: My War, WikiLeaked: Why the Public (and the Military) Can’t Count on Those Battle Logs | Danger Room. Echo company got into a gunfight in August 2009 in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. You’ll learn that by reading the report found in WikiLeaks’ database. You’ll learn that, after a chase, the marines killed one insurgent. You’ll learn that the insurgents supposedly fled and that the troops — part of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines — decided to stay the night in the area, in case the militants returned.
What you won’t learn is that a marine sniper team sparked the shoot-out with a surprise assault on the insurgents; that every member of that team was nearly killed in the battle; that the incident would kick off a three-day siege in which the Taliban nearly had the Echo company squad surrounded; that this spot eventually became an Echo company base; or that, while this extended gun fight was going on, British and Afghan troops were nearby, waging a more gentle form of counterinsurgency as they sat cross-legged under shady patches of farmland and talked with village elders. See Also:
‘Afghan Insurgency Can Sustain Itself Indefinitely’: Top U.S. Intel Officer | Danger Room. The Taliban not only has the “momentum” after the most successful year in its campaign against the United States and the Kabul government. “The Afghan insurgency can sustain itself indefinitely,” according to a briefing from Major General Michael Flynn, the top U.S. intelligence officer in the country. “The Taliban retains [the] required partnerships to sustain support, fuel legitimacy and bolster capacity.” And if that isn’t enough, Flynn also warns that “time is running out” for the American-led International Security Assistance Force.
“Regional instability is rapidly increasing and getting worse,” the report says. Since General Stanley McChrystal took over as top commander in Afghanistan, there have been a series of dark appraisals about the state of the war. But Flynn’s December 23rd presentation on the “State of the Insurgency: Trends, Intentions and Objectives” may be the gloomiest public assessment of the war yet. Open Source Tools Turn WikiLeaks Into Illustrated Afghan Meltdown (Updated) | Danger Room. It’s one thing to read about individual Taliban attacks in WikiLeaks’ trove of war logs. It’s something quite different to see the bombings and the shootings mount, and watch the insurgency metastasize. NYU political science grad student (and occasional Danger Room contributor) Drew Conway has done just that, using an open source statistical programming language called R and a graphical plotting software tool.
The results are unnerving, like stop-motion photography of a freeway wreck. Above is the latest example: a graph showing the spread of combat from 2004 to 2009. It’s exactly what you wouldn’t want to see as a war drags on. “The sheer volume of observations [in the WikiLeaks database] inhibit the majority of consumers from being able to gain knowledge from it. By providing graphical summaries of the data people can draw inferences quickly, which would have been very difficult to do by serially reading through the files,” Conway e-mails Danger Room. See Also: Marc A. Thiessen - WikiLeaks' blow to the surge. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has made clear that his objective in releasing tens of thousands of classified documents was to "end the war in Afghanistan" and "oppose an unjust [war] plan before it reaches implementation. " He may well achieve his goal. Assange's illegal disclosures are helping the Taliban to undermine Gen.
David Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy before it has a chance to work. The documents Assange made public exposed the identities of at least 100 Afghans who were informing on the Taliban -- in some cases including the names of their villages, family members, the Taliban commanders on whom they were informing, and even GPS coordinates where they could be found. The Taliban quickly announced that it was combing the WikiLeaks Web site for information to use to punish these Afghans. Then, just four days after the WikiLeaks documents were published death threats began arriving at the homes of Afghan tribal leaders. Now the ball is in the Obama administration's court. Commentary: Pakistan: Turmoil to upheaval. George Soros Open Society Institute CIA Inquiry on Wikileaks.
10 August 2010 Subject: FW: Site Submission From Contact Us Form Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 09:31:36 -0400 From: "Amy P. Weil" <AWeil[at]sorosny.org> To: <cryptome[at]earthlink.net> Dear John Young, Thank you for your query. The Open Society Foundations do not support Wikileaks.org. Best regards, Amy Weil soros-osi-2006.zip George Soros OSI Foundation Tax Report 2006 August 10, 2010 (5.7MB) soros-osi-2007.zip George Soros OSI Foundation Tax Report 2007 August 10, 2010 (5.7MB) 9 August 2010. Soros-osi-2008.zip George Soros OSI Foundation Tax Report 2008 August 9, 2010 (6.7MB) No obvious mention of Wikileaks in the report. 9 August 2010 George Soros Open Society Institute Inquiry on Wikileaks A writes: I've been following coverage of Wikileaks' release of the Afghan Diaries closely, and have admired your skepticism.
Thank you for taking the time to read this far, and allow me to voice my concern. Cryptome request submitted 9 August 2010 to: Thank you very much. Contact. Kabul War Diary. Wikileaks Afghanistan Data. This happens to be one of those rare instances where the benefit of hindsight does not make me regret something said flippantly on a panel. I deeply believe that in order to truly change the world we cannot simply "throw analytics at the problem. " To that end, the medical and health industries are perhaps the most primed to be disrupted by data and analytics.
To be successful, however, a deep respect for both the methodological and clinical contexts of the data are required. It is incredibly exciting to be at an organization that is both working within the current framework of health care and data to create new insight for people, but also pushing the envelope with respect to individuals' relationships with their own health. The challenges are technical, sociological, and political; but the potential for innovation that exists in this space comes along very rarely.
I feel lucky to have an opportunity to move into the health data space now. Sensor data Strength of team. Video: How to read the Afghanistan war logs | World news. The Afghanistan War Logs Released by Wikileaks, the World's First Stateless News Organization. July 26, 2010 The Afghanistan War Logs Released by Wikileaks, the World's First Stateless News Organization "In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it.
This is new. " Wikileaks.org: Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010Der Spiegel: Explosive Leaks Provide Image of War from Those Fighting It New York Times: The War Logs The Guardian: The Afghanistan War Logs From my internal notebook and Twitter feed, a few notes on this development: 1. “It’s counterintuitive,” he said then. 2. This leak will harm national security. 3. He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. 4. 5. Notice how effective this combination is. 6. 7. Also, can we agree that a news organization with a paywall wouldn’t even be in contention? 8. 9. Wikileaks Data Spurs App Development - ReadWriteCloud. While politicians, pundits, military, and journalists assess and debate the fallout from Wikileaks' release of the "Afghan War Diary" - the legality and ethics of Wikileaks, its impact on the war efforts, the rise of the "world's first stateless news organization" - a number of developers are diving right into the 91,000 some odd classified documents and seeing what they can do with the data.
And it's a substantial chunk of data. The documents dated from 2004 to 2010 are available in HTML, CSV, or SQL formats, as well as several KML files. But even in the HTML format, reading through the Afghan War Diary is no easy task. This is no Stephen Ambrose-presentation of history. It's raw data, with the following queries available: type, category, region, affiliation, date, severity.
Analyzing the Wikileaks Data Dump Building the Wikileaks CouchApp One such project is the Wikileaks CouchApp, created by CouchDB community member Benoit Chesneau. Why CouchDB? Tech Tools for a Data-Driven Future.