Burn Notices Going Out

Burn Notices Going Out

So apparently the U.S. government really likes the USA show Burn Notice. Enough to just allow a ton of them out in to the market and potentially help people in trouble on their spare time between over arching season story lines because it looks like a lot of people just got their own burn notice.

WikiLeaks Springs a Leak: Full Database of Diplomatic Cables Appears Online

For the second time in a year, WikiLeaks has lost control of its full, unredacted cache of a quarter-million U.S. State Department cables — and this time the leaked files are apparently online.

The uncensored cables are contained in a 1.73-GB password-protected file named “cables.csv,” which is reportedly circulating somewhere on the internet, according to Steffen Kraft, editor of the German paper Der Freitag. Kraft announced last week that his paper had found the file, and easily obtained the password to unlock it.

Unlike the cables that WikiLeaks has been publishing piecemeal since last fall, these cables are raw and unredacted, and contain the names of informants and suspected intelligence agents that were blacked out of the official releases. Der Freitag said the documents include the names of suspected agents in Israel, Jordan, Iran and Afghanistan, and noted that interested parties — such as the Iranian government or intelligence agencies — could have already discovered and decrypted the file to uncover the names of informants.

“The story is that a series of lapses, as far as I can see on behalf of WikiLeaks and its affiliates, has led to the possibility a file becoming generally available which it never should have been available,” confirmed former WikiLeaks staffer Herbert Snorrason, of Iceland, who left the organization as part of a staff revolt last year, and is now part of the competing site OpenLeaks.

Information about the exposed file and password was also confirmed by the German newsweekly Der Spiegel. According to that publication, the cables were contained in an encrypted file that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had stored on a subdirectory of the organization’s server last year, which wasn’t searchable from the internet by anyone who didn’t already know its location.

Assange had reportedly given the password for the file to an “external contact” to access the file’s contents. With both the file and the password now online, the leak is complete.

“The issue is double: On one hand there is the availability of the encrypted file, and on the other the release of the password to the encrypted file,” Snorrason told Threat Level on Monday. “And those two publications happened separately.”

The password leak was done “completely inadvertently,” Snorrason added. He declined to identify the leaker, or the circumstances of the leak, but said it was someone who was with neither WikiLeaks nor OpenLeaks.

Last year, former WikiLeaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg and another WikiLeaks staffer led a staff revolt at WikiLeaks following a rift with Assange. They finally left the organization and set up OpenLeaks.org. When they left WikiLeaks, they took the contents of the WikiLeaks server with them, which included the encrypted file. Last December, Domscheit-Berg returned most of what he had taken, including the file containing the cables.

Wikileaks supporters subsequently released an archive of the data that Domscheit-Berg had returned, as a public service to provide readers with access to everything WikiLeaks had previously published. But among the documents was the encrypted file containing the cables. Several months later, the person to whom Assange had provided the password somehow made it public online. Der Spiegel doesn’t elaborate on precisely why or how that person published the password, and Snorrason declined to say more, for fear of guiding people to the password.

“It’s not very obvious how the password was made available, and we’re not keen on making it any more obvious how or why it might have been published,” Snorrason said.

Both the encrypted file and password went unnoticed until recently. Der Spiegel implies that Domscheit-Berg or someone else connected to his rival OpenLeaks organization was responsible for calling Der Freitag’s attention to the file and password to make a point that WikiLeaks is unable to properly secure the data it possesses. Domscheit-Berg did not immediately respond to an e-mail query from Threat Level on Monday.

After nine months of slow, steady publication, WikiLeaks abruptly opened the spigot last week on its cable publications, spewing out over 130,000 by Monday afternoon — more than half the total database.

This is not the first time that WikiLeaks has lost control of its database of cables. Last year, as the organization and its media partners were beginning preparations to publish stories related to the cables, a WikiLeaks member gave the database to a freelance reporter, Heather Brooke.

Brooke was not a member of the approved cabal of media outlets that had been given access to the documents and her possession of them threatened to derail the plans that WikiLeaks and its media partners had hammered out for publication. The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. subsequently secured agreement from Brooke that she wouldn’t herself publish any of the cables or stories related to them.

WikiLeaks responded to the leak on Twitter on Monday by writing: “There has been no ‘leak at WikiLeaks’. The issue relates to a mainstream media partner and a malicious individual.”

This is could be a good indication on how well or bad the Assange rape trail must be going. Things must have taken a turn against him.

But won't someone please think of the U.S. spies that are potentially going to die? Wait no. Good! I hope all the intelligence agents are murdered.

Then again, nothing is going to happen because the State Department is often so out of the loop on CIA black-ops and most of the cables aren't even that sensitive really. Do you remember that during the Afghan diary release Robert "Iran-Contra" Gates accused Wikileaks of having blood on their hands for releasing the files and putting lives in danger? Then later he admitted in a letter to Senator Levin that no Afghan informants or operatives were killed or even threatened.

I guess I just wish there was a cable that said, "Damn... you 'member all that dope we was slingin' in Laos and Thailand? Thems was the days!"

So you're probably wondering why I have no love loss for the potential name dropping of our spies and super soldiers. Hmmm, I wonder why. \

US forces had committed a heinous war crime during a house raid in Iraq in 2006, wherein one man, four women, four children, and one infant were summarily executed, a State Department diplomatic cable released last week by WikiLeaks revealed.

The cable excerpts a letter written by Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, addressed to then Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.

American troops had approached the home of Faiz Harrat Al-Majma’ee, a farmer living in central Iraq, to conduct a house raid in search of insurgents in March 2006.

“It would appear that when the MNF (Multinational Forces) approached the house,” Alston wrote, “shots were fired from it and a confrontation ensued.” Afterwards, “troops entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them.” Mr. Faiz Hratt Khalaf, (aged 28), his wife Sumay’ya Abdul Razzaq Khuther (aged 24), their three children Hawra’a (aged 5) Aisha ( aged 3) and Husam (5 months old), Faiz’s mother Ms. Turkiya Majeed Ali (aged 74), Faiz’s sister (name unknown), Faiz’s nieces Asma’a Yousif Ma’arouf (aged 5 years), and Usama Yousif Ma’arouf (aged 3 years), and a visiting relative Ms. Iqtisad Hameed Mehdi (age 23) were killed during the raid.

Alston’s letter reveals that a US airstrike was launched on the house presumably to destroy the evidence, but that “autopsies carried out at the Tikrit Hospital’s morgue revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed.”

That's right. Our brave mercenaries handcuffed a 5 month old baby before blowing his brains out and then ordering a bombing on his corpse. You have to remember that it's standard procedure to fire bomb children 5 and under after shooting them in the head. They're just way too resilient.

Then they blamed the acts of their murder victims on the inherent brutality of their savage opponents. Nothing ever changes, I guess. I can just see their mentality in all this.

"islam is evil because it induces its followers to oppress women"

*Lines all women ever up against the wall, shoots them in the head with one hand while giving a thumbs-up and a huge grin to the camera* But I guess you can't be oppressed if you're dead. I thought we hit peak war crimes when those soldiers got drunk and killed a family except the 15 year old daughter, who they later raped and then killed, then mutilated the bodies - but hey, executing a baby?

Fuck this shit! and you wonder why I don't give a shit if these fine warriors are burned and the potential of their deaths comes ever so slightly closer.