All officially released cables including content - WikiLeaks

http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/

by edo • 16 years ago

118 74 16 years ago

cablegate.wikileaks.org

edo• 16 years ago

Only 219 cables released so far. It is mind-boggling to think how much there still is left, although WikiLeaks presumably started off with some of the most juicy bits to get press coverage.

lionhearted7• 16 years ago

I wonder what happens the first time that there's a credible link to someone dying as a results of Wikileaks leaking a document.

You know, if you keep leaking any and all classified information you can, inevitably some informant or logistics route or defensive position is going to get routed or assassinated. It's just a matter of time - while the government does some bad stuff, I'd reckon the majority of classified documents are classified for decent reasons. It's not just a bunch of wild animals running the show.

And when an operative or informant or ally or supply team or soldier or law enforcement officer eventually gets killed as a result of a leak, I wonder what the government's response will be.

Edit: Knock off the downvoting and make a reply. There's an informant in the Chinese politburo who is risking his life to protect the dissidents that the Chinese government targeted with the Google attacks. His life is at risk now. If you have any credible argument for why releasing any information related to the man, let's hear your argument. Because I think his life is at risk, and that's a bad thing. If you disagree, let's hear your reasoning of why it's okay to do that.

mcantelon4• 16 years ago

>You know, if you keep leaking any and all classified information you can, inevitably some informant or logistics route or defensive position is going to get routed or assassinated.

Risky business is risky.

>It's not just a bunch of wild animals running the show.

They did unilaterally invade Iraq, killing, by their own records, tens of thousands of civilians in the process. They may not be animals, but their hands are far from clean.

lionhearted7• 16 years ago

Did you read any of the leaks? It's talking about how there's an American informant in the Chinese Politburo... you know the Chinese are going to be looking for him now. What are they going to do to him and his family if they find him?

What happens if friendly politicians in Yemen are bombed by al-Qaeda when their role in counter-terrorism comes out? What if their wives and children are beheaded on television, as has happened in the past?

Leaking war documents to show what's happening - questionable.

Leaking anything and everything possible, with no particular objective in mind - reckless and insane.

jbooth2• 16 years ago

"They did unilaterally invade Iraq, killing, by their own records, tens of thousands of civilians in the process."

But that was ok, because it was approved by Very Serious People with flag pins and sometimes with stars on their shoulders. Their decisions regarding hundreds of thousands of lives should be judged by an entirely different standard than disorganized hacker hippies who accidentally endanger a single individual.

joe_the_user3• 16 years ago

I wonder what happens the first time that there's a credible link to someone dying as a results of Wikileaks leaking a document.

It depends on who is doing the crediting, I suspect.

To ask the opposite loaded-question, [rhetoric]"what will happen the first time there's a credible link to someone's life being saved by a Wikileaks release?" (Perhaps someone being released from Guantanamo Bay when they wouldn't have otherwise been? What if Wikileaks catches child-molestors in high places?)[/rhetoric]

Back honest discussion... it's pretty hard to pin blame Wikileaks for any given event, though. If our supposedly democratic government has decided that secrecy will be standard operating procedure for law enforcement, that government still has the main job of protecting it's secret operatives. Wikileaks isn't a spy agency, they just take information that's there. Any good intelligence operation compartmentalizes information on a need-to-know basis. So if names of some operator are flying around, someone has screwed up long before Wikileaks appears on the scene. The good way of protecting the classified information is keeping it within an intelligence agency. Should free-speech be hobbled for those situations where the secret-keepers screw-up?

Further, it doesn't seem coincidental to me that the main justification for government secrecy is stopping victimless crimes and intervening in foreign conflicts. How many people have been killed as a result of this? (countless) What are people going to do about this?

lionhearted7• 16 years ago

> To ask the opposite loaded-question, [rhetoric]"what will happen the first time there's a credible link to someone's life being saved by a Wikileaks release?" (Perhaps someone being released from Guantanamo Bay when they wouldn't have otherwise been? What if Wikileaks catches child-molestors in high places?)[/rhetoric]

This is where discretion comes into play. If they caught a child molestor, that'd absolutely be the kind of thing you should leak - a crime.

Leaking war videos to show people the real impact of a war - probably okay.

Leaking war plans and war logistics info - a heck of a lot more questionable.

Leaking anti-nuclear proliferation, leaking informants trying to protect dissidents - totally, straightup wrong.

Discretion. They just demonstrated they don't have very much. Why the hell would they release that Chinese informant info? That's crazy. That's nuts. That's against their own frigging goal of more openness in the world. They want publicity, and don't have a sense of judgment.

Leak crimes. Absolutely, yes! That's a public service. But don't frigging leak info that obstructs obviously good causes and accomplishes nothing.

> Should free-speech be hobbled for those situations where the secret-keepers screw-up?

Free speech has limits. Risking getting objectively good guys killed - like the Chinese politburo agent - is probably over that line.

Can you see any good reason to leak that info besides getting celebrity and attention? Let me ask you Joe - do you think leaking that was bad? I do. I don't see any good it accomplishes for the potential damage it does.

mike-cardwell• 16 years ago

Couldn't it go either way? Isn't there just as much likelihood that somebody's life would be saved by these leaks?

vaksel• 16 years ago

leaks happened before and people got killed, i.e when Valerie Plame was outed something like 70 of her informants were killed

and in that case most people behind the leak got away scott free

waterlesscloud• 16 years ago

I'm not ready to toss out that number, but is there any source for it more credible than Roger Ebert? That's all I got from Google, and a bajillion references to Ebert's assertion (insert comment about quality of google search results here).

dctoedt• 16 years ago

> when Valerie Plame was outed something like 70 of her informants were killed

The massive leak is certainly likely to be damaging, but the Plame citation seems unwarranted: A quick Google search revealed zero corroborating evidence for this assertion, which seems to have been a bald, unsupported assertion by Roger Ebert in reviewing a film on the Plame affair. See http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/11/i_bet_youre_wron...

mattm• 16 years ago

> I wonder what happens the first time that there's a credible link to someone dying as a results of Wikileaks leaking a document.

I'm really getting sick and tired of the "If it saves one life, it is worth it" argument. No it isn't. Life has risks. I prefer a world that is open and truthful.

This informant obviously knows that. What if he believes that risking his life in the name of freedom is more important? That is his prerogative. Just because you place safety and life as a priority over freedom, doesn't necessarily mean that other do.

CamperBob2• 16 years ago

Let's say you're a Politburo member who has developed serious moral qualms about what your regime is doing. You have three options:

1) Stick with business as usual. Go along to get along.

2) Quietly retire to "spend more time with your family" or for "health reasons."

3) Use your position to betray your country as a spy, working for what is arguably a greater good.

Option 3) is what this Politburo member went with. Just like delivering pizzas, installing roof shingles, or maintaining power lines, espionage and treason comes with certain risks. This is true whether you're working for the good guys or the bad guys. This is one of those risks. He knew, or could reasonably have been expected to know, what he was doing.

I agree with the comment from the other thread: Wikileaks is putting the whole US government through a full-body scanner. Frankly, I'm tired of governments having all the illegal search-and-seizure fun. Now we get to play, too.

GHFigs3• 16 years ago

This is one of those risks.

In other words, Wikileaks is making it riskier for dissidents to work as US informants. Gee, thanks, Julian.

davidcuddeback• 16 years ago

I agree with you that Wikileaks should be selective about what they publish. Publishing some secrets may only risk lives without revealing much, but certainly there are things that citizens have a right to know. A press that can expose government deception is the people's check and balance against unrestrained government power. If the mainstream media did a better job of exposing government deception, we wouldn't need Wikileaks.

I'd like to point you to the Pentagon Papers case [1], in which The New York Times published information that revealed the US government's true intentions in the Vietnam war. When Nixon asked the courts for an injunction preventing The New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers, here is what the Supreme Court said in its ruling [2] (in favor of The New York Times):

"In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell. In my view, far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly. In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam war, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do."

Later in their decision, another justice wrote:

"In the absence of the governmental checks and balances present in other areas of our national life, the only effective restraint upon executive policy and power in the areas of national defense and international affairs may lie in an enlightened citizenry - in an informed and critical public opinion which alone can here protect the values of democratic government. For this reason, it is perhaps here that a press that is alert, aware, and free most vitally serves the basic purpose of the First Amendment. For without an informed and free press there cannot be an enlightened people."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers

[2] http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us...

jrockway2• 16 years ago

Freedom is worth dying for.

nano81• 16 years ago

Easy to say when you're not the one at risk of dying.

danbmil99• 16 years ago

I think the issue is that future informants, such as this Chinese guy, are going to simply assume that anything they say to anyone in the USA is potentially going to get leaked. Therefore intelligence will dry up, making the US weaker.

I suspect both Wikileaks and most of those doing the leaking are of the opinion that a crippled US intelligence force, and corresponding limitation of the USA operating in the international sphere, is net net a good thing.

electromagnetic2• 16 years ago

So the Chinese managed to infiltrate Google's systems to get information on dissidents, but they can't infiltrate US government systems (like Wikileaks did) while the US government is still passing virtually all its software contracts off to Microsoft - you know, the least secure OS out there.

Please, you're tech savvy, actually fucking think. If Wikileaks did it, a government with thousands of trained operatives in espionage were doing this four fucking decades ago. Wikileaks just illustrates how easy this information is to get.

If we know our governments counter-espionage is this bad, at least we know our people are already in danger. Taking down wikileaks simply leaves everyone with a false sense of security.

I would put thousands of dollars on the fact the Chinese already know everything about the informant in the politburo that the US government does. At least now the general public and the US government believes he may be in danger.

You're moronic if you think a US spy in China is, in any form or bastardized definition of the word, safe. Hiding in a lions den is always dangerous... even if they're not eating you right this second.

napierzaza• 16 years ago

Aren't these diplomatic communications? Not tactical military ones?

dotBen• 16 years ago

I think it's interesting that Wikileaks have been 'late' on actually releasing the cables directly to the public. At the time of writing only 219 cables are available out of what is supposed to be 250k+.

Sure, that could be because of the DDOS attack but it looks as though this leak is taking place via a new server at cablegate.wikileaks.org which presumably anyone DDOS'ing wouldn't have had prior knowledge about to route attacks against.

It has meant that the newspapers (who were given pre-public access to the dumps) have effectively "leaked" the information as NYTimes and Guardian have started publishing the details before Wikileaks actually does the leaking.

I'm wondering if there was an agreed embargo when Wikileaks was supposed to actually "press the button". I further wonder if this will negatively effect the relationship between Wikileaks and the media going forward. Interestingly, Guardian which always prides itself on having data driven processes on stuff like this, has only released the metadata so far [1] -- I guess so that they are not the ones to do a complete leak before Wikileaks.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/nov/29/wikileak...

jedbrown• 16 years ago

View-source:

    <a href='/classification/1_0.html' title='unclassified'>CONFIDENTIAL</a>
    <a href='/classification/2_0.html' title='secret'>CONFIDENTIAL//NOFORN</a>
    <a href='/classification/3_0.html' title='confidential'>SECRET</a>
    <a href='/classification/4_0.html' title='secret//noforn'>SECRET//NOFORN</a>

y0ghur7_xxx• 16 years ago

care to explain?

aptimpropriety• 16 years ago

As the NYT explained it - I believe the classifications organize the cables into degrees of secrecy. 'Top secret' is the highest secrecy in the US Gov't, so I would imagine 'secret' is therefore more secret than 'classified'. 'Noforn' apparently means 'this should not be seen by foreign [individuals'.

zakhar• 16 years ago

This bugged me also. The title text doesn't match what the links actually are.

moon_of_moon• 16 years ago

Interesting that November 2008 is missing.

gwern2• 16 years ago

No kidding. What were the diplomats' reactions to Obama's being really truly elected? What last minute orders came down from the Bushies? What new !orders were issued by Obama's newbies?

Mithrandir2• 16 years ago

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Special:Support

"Not Found"

There's irony for you.

ck2• 16 years ago

Apparently while we are busy getting fondled by the TSA, this is what the rest of the world was ignoring:

North Korea secretly gave Iran 19 powerful missiles with a range of 2,000 miles. The missiles, known as the BM-25, are modified from Russian R-27s, which were submarine-based missiles carrying nuclear weapons

How insanely scary is that?

PostOnce• 16 years ago

There's always a worse thing. We can fight multiple injustices/wrongs at once. I don't like it when people say we've been duped into paying attention to the wrong wrong.

Don't let all this leaked stuff cause us to forget about the TSA and their (and the government at large's) ridiculousness.

rorrr2• 16 years ago

So what? US (and other countries) has much worse missiles. US is the only country who used nuclear weapons in war.

Why do you fear Iran so much? US, Russia, China seem much more dangerous from the point of view of the weapons.

Iran is being bullied by the US for no real reason. Even if they were building nuclear weapons, it's their right. A bunch of countries have them.

AaronI• 16 years ago

The issue most likely is not the weapons themselves, but who controls them. A stockpile of weapons are only dangerous in the "wrong" hands. If Iran is being bullied, as you put it, then it's not just by the U.S. Quite a few other countries apparently feel those weapons would essentially be in the "wrong" hands if Iran acquires them.

Mithrandir2• 16 years ago

I think Wikileaks main site is down.

"It works!

This is the default web page for this server.

The web server software is running but no content has been added, yet."

Going to their IP 88.80.13.160:

We are sorry,

WikiLeaks is currently underoing scheduled maintenance. We will be back online as soon as possible. For status updates you can follow our twitter feed.

You can still visit our IRC channel:

    * Using the web interface available here
    * Using regular IRC client, connect to chat.wikileaks.org SSL port 9999

vgurgov• 16 years ago

Can someone who support this release care to explain this. I seriously don't understand how can publishing someone's conversations be good.

1) How should communication with foreign embassies be done? Publicly via twitter?

2) Do you think that absolutely all information that gov has and exchange should be public? If not who should decide which info can be published?

3) What if somebody from Google get all you gmail conversations and publish it? If you dont like this idea, please explain why you support somebody publishing gov conversations then?

Thank you.

rorrr2• 16 years ago

Transparency. There's a lot of important shit going on without public's approval. Do you want to live in a world where important things are decided by a bunch of corrupt politicians with no oversight?

alnayyir3• 16 years ago

Of course not, but Wikileaks is an adversary with an agenda, not an independent government oversight organization with the peoples' interests in mind. Certainly not that of residents of the US.

We need oversight and transparency concerning policy, prevention of the violation of constitutional and human rights, and any actions that violate the sovereignty of our allies and friends.

Not transparency of every communique between our embassies.

gcb2• 16 years ago

what is "the cables"?

gasull2• 16 years ago

Diplomatic communications.

gcb2• 16 years ago

thanks. but i'm a little more in the dark about their physical representation.

Is it email? analog audio via oceanic cables?

the wikipedia page is blank now. but it's history show that someone described it simply as "oceanic cable" sometime.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomatic_cable

ilitirit• 16 years ago

Why weren't they able to get there hands on Classified content? I bet that would make for good reading.

All officially released cables including content - WikiLeaks

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