Cablegate 2

[Frosty Jack]

Heavy. 9 months on, the full Cablegate is finally out there.

 

http://wikileaks.org/Wikileaks-Statement-on-the-9-Month.html

 

The coverage of the first batch of cables we read about last december, after promising so much, was laughably narrow in scope.

 

There appeared to have been a concerted effort to play down the impact of the documents.

Whereas then we heard about the likes of Prince Andrew's business deals, and Ghaddafi liking the ladies, we now read about the apparently "un-newsworthy" stories, such as the US Army buying 180 deadly viruses from germany for breeding/weaponisation, and yet more coalition massacres of innocent families in Iraq, not to mention all those stories focussed on individual states that were not relevant enough for our own media to publish.

 

After 8 months of regularly releasing cables by country, partnering with media in those territories, over the last week they've started to crowdsource a huge new batch of released cables in a twitter focussed project called #wlfind. The number jumped from 20k to 140k in a few days. They obviously do not have the resources to do the work themselves, and it has already been successful in uncovering stories like the ones mentioned above, and for example this selection from Salon.com.

 

http://www.salon.com/news/wikileaks/index.html?story=/news/feature/2011/09/01/wikileaks_revelations

 

But something else happened last week, which perhaps had been anticipated: an estranged and now discredited former volunteer told German newspaper Freitag, that the file and password were in the wild. The latter came from a surprising source, it was used as a chapter heading in David Leigh's hostile book on WL.

 

http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/09/01/its-done-bruised-egos-lead-to-the-release-of-uncensored-wikileaks-cables/

 

The cat was out of the bag, and all 251k cables are now available to download, unredacted.

Despite his protestations the Guardian journalist involved now needs to accept their share of responsibility for publishing a sensitive encryption key in a book.

Idiotic regardless of circumstance.

 

So with those files already in the wild, Wikileaks has decided to go ahead and release the whole thing officially, yet obviously unredacted.

People can be cynical about the actors involved but there's no doubting the historic importance of this release.

It's an unprecedented opportunity for the public to know the nature of power, and improve our democracies as a result.

 

Naturally in repressive regimes, and perhaps closer to home, some diplomatic informants could now be named, and need to be protected, but personally I don't think the hypothetical blood on hands argument should be any justification for keeping the world in the dark on 45 years of US foreign policy, which has already demonstrably left many millions dead.

With this information in the historical record, perhaps further suffering can be averted.

 

It's at least a refreshing return to the original arguments surrounding the organisation and away from the personalities involved.

 

If you're interested, the csv file that contained the cables themselves is now on cryptome.org, as is the password though the file differs to what Wikileaks themselves released this morning, which is far bigger, I assume formatted for easier reading.

[Frosty Jack]

This post is not viewable to guests.

You can sign in to your account at the login page here

If you do not have an account then you can register here

[Swan Red]

This post is not viewable to guests.

You can sign in to your account at the login page here

If you do not have an account then you can register here

[Frosty Jack]

This post is not viewable to guests.

You can sign in to your account at the login page here

If you do not have an account then you can register here

[Frosty Jack]

This post is not viewable to guests.

You can sign in to your account at the login page here

If you do not have an account then you can register here