A letter written by the U.S. Office of the Independent Counsel before its dissolution is shedding new light on who helped cover up aspects of Iran-Contra and how senior officials are granted effective immunity. The letter, which was provided by someone who had been associated with the Independent Counsel’s investigation during the Iran-Contra aftermath, was written by Lawrence Walsh and addressed to President Bush. The three page letter was a diplomatic plea for justice. While much of the document dealt with Walsh’s attempts to investigate and prosecute Iran-Contra, it also reveals that the National Security Agency helped coverup aspects of it and forced charges against Oliver North to be dropped.
The first paragraph is simple; yet powerful in its statement of fact and its plea for intervention from the White House. “…We face the likelihood that former high officials cannot be tried for crimes related to their conduct in public office. The intelligence agencies, the Attorney General, and my office have been trying to deal with this problem without exposing intelligence secrets, and protecting government deniability of publicly known facts. It seems clear that if we continue to withhold this information we lose a much more important national value – the rule of law.” [Emphasis added] These sentiments and problems continue to be ones that challenge the United States, and much of the world, due to the increasing tension between secrecy and transparency.
The increased ability for people to hack or leak information is responsible for much of this tension, and has highlighted it in an unusual way. WikiLeaks has released and made available a lot of information, all of which has been confirmed so far, yet the release of the information doesn’t negate the government’s need for secrecy. The information is still classified, and some inside the government and military have faced concern about their security clearances due to reading publicly available documents on WikiLeaks or the New York Times. Some have even faced arrest for reading the Snowden documents. The problem that Walsh and his office faced, however, was more complex and wicked than this, and it had managed to worsen since Reagan’s administration.
Under the Reagan administration, Walsh enjoyed some level of cooperation. He worked closely with Ambassador Abshire and A.B. Culvahouse, who were competent liaisons. While Walsh didn’t always get the outcome he desired, the process was relatively unhampered. According to Walsh’s letter, however, not only was this relationship absent under the Bush administration – they were interfering with the efforts to prosecute former CIA Station Chief Joseph Fernandez (AKA Tomás Castillo, Thomas Castillo)...
https://glomardisclosure.com/2016/10/13/high-officials-cannot-be-tried-for-their-crimes/
Showing posts with label wikileaks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wikileaks. Show all posts
20160326
Clinton Emails: New Iran and Syria
Negotiations to limit Iran's nuclear program will not solve Israel's security dilemma. Nor will they stop Iran from improving the crucial part of any nuclear weapons program — the capability to enrich uranium. At best, the talks between the world's major powers and Iran that began in Istanbul this April and will continue in Baghdad in May will enable Israel to postpone by a few months a decision whether to launch an attack on Iran that could provoke a major Mideast war.
Iran's nuclear program and Syria's civil war may seem unconnected, but they are. For Israeli leaders, the real threat from a nuclear-armed Iran is not the prospect of an insane Iranian leader launching an unprovoked Iranian nuclear attack on Israel that would lead to the annihilation of both countries. What Israeli military leaders really worry about -- but cannot talk about -- is losing their nuclear monopoly. An Iranian nuclear weapons capability would not only end that nuclear monopoly but could also prompt other adversaries, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to go nuclear as well. The result would be a precarious nuclear balance in which Israel could not respond to provocations with conventional military strikes on Syria and Lebanon, as it can today.
If Iran were to reach the threshold of a nuclear weapons state, Tehran would find it much easier to call on its allies in Syria and Hezbollah to strike Israel, knowing that its nuclear weapons would serve as a deterrent to Israel responding against Iran itself...
https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/18328
https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/18328
20160218
'Operation Sophia': WikiLeaks releases classified data on EU military op against refugee flows
The leaked report, dated January 29, 2016, is written by the operation's commander, Rear Admiral Enrico Credendino of the Italian Navy, for the European Union Military Committee and the Political and Security Committee of the EU.
The document gives refugee flow statistics and details of performed and planned operation phases of the joint EU forces operating in the Mediterranean.
The report also places pressure on the responsible EU bodies to help speed up the process of forming a “reliable” government in Libya, which is expected to invite EU forces to operate within its territorial waters, and later give permission to extend EU military operations onshore.
"Through the capability and capacity building of the Libyan Navy and Coastguard we will be able to give the Libyan authorities something in exchange for their cooperation in tackling the irregular migration issue. This collaboration could represent one of the elements of the EU comprehensive approach to help secure their invitation to operate inside their territory during Phase 2 activities," the document states...
https://www.rt.com/news/332734-wikileaks-eu-op-refugees/
20150906
Barrett Brown vs. the Dept of Justice – Defining the Right To Link
by Douglas Lucas
At a time when a new megaleak seems to hit the Internet every week, the imprisonment of journalist Barrett Brown is causing many to ask if it is legally safe to share hyperlinks to leaked document troves containing credit card or personal identifying information—the kind of content the Dallas native is locked up in part for linking to. In fact, some media professionals are censoring such evidentiary links out of their work—they are not providing bibliography—citing his case as the reason. The risk is best assessed by looking at the transcript of the writer’s second and final sentencing hearing on January 22, obtained by Revolution News. It lays out the Department of Justice’s attack, the defense’s arguments, and the judge’s position, bringing into focus what little clarity is available for an uncertain environment.
The facts
First it is important to understand what Brown did.
In December 2011, Anonymous cracked into the servers of the Austin-based private spy firm Stratfor—and Brown was in close contact with the hacktivists, having published on data they exfiltrated from other spies and having promoted their work to international media. He even reached out to CEO George Friedman, offering to make redactions to copied or “stolen” emails, a move the plea deal he eventually struck construed as accessory after the fact: hindering hacker Jeremy Hammond’s arrest. Sentencing the writer, judge Sam A. Lindsay would say Brown “crossed the line in journalistic inquiry into criminal conduct when [he]abandoned the role as an observer and reporter of events and offered to aid Hammond.” Lindsay’s is a bloodless definition of journalism that turns protecting a source into crime on the excuse that—as the factual stipulations put it—the journo was working on “behalf” of the lawbreakers, a framing that seems to blame Brown for his anarchic goals.
While Stratfor was on the ropes, on December 25, 2011, Anonymous released to a wide audience on pastebin.com this link: http://wikisend.com/download/597646/stratfor_full_b.txt.gz. Wikisend is a file-sharing website, and the destination, stratfor_full_b.txt.gz, was a compressed document listing credit card data for Stratfor customers—not, as is sometimes mistakenly reported, the firm’s emails, which WikiLeaks later began publishing. The file has since been removed from the website, perhaps taken down by administrators...
http://revolution-news.com/barrett-brown-vs-the-dept-of-justice-defining-the-right-to-link/
20150505
WikiLeaks: Sony Email Archives
Today, 16 April 2015, WikiLeaks publishes an analysis and search system for The Sony Archives: 30,287 documents from Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) and 173,132 emails, to and from more than 2,200 SPE email addresses. SPE is a US subsidiary of the Japanese multinational technology and media corporation Sony, handling their film and TV production and distribution operations. It is a multi-billion dollar US business running many popular networks, TV shows and film franchises such as Spider-Man, Men in Black and Resident Evil.
In November 2014 the White House alleged that North Korea's intelligence services had obtained and distributed a version of the archive in revenge for SPE's pending release of The Interview, a film depicting a future overthrow of the North Korean government and the assassination of its leader, Kim Jong-un. Whilst some stories came out at the time, the original archives, which were not searchable, were removed before the public and journalists were able to do more than scratch the surface.
Now published in a fully searchable format The Sony Archives offer a rare insight into the inner workings of a large, secretive multinational corporation. The work publicly known from Sony is to produce entertainment; however, The Sony Archives show that behind the scenes this is an influential corporation, with ties to the White House (there are almost 100 US government email addresses in the archive), with an ability to impact laws and policies, and with connections to the US military-industrial complex.
WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange said: "This archive shows the inner workings of an influential multinational corporation. It is newsworthy and at the centre of a geo-political conflict. It belongs in the public domain. WikiLeaks will ensure it stays there..."
https://wikileaks.org/sony/press/
In November 2014 the White House alleged that North Korea's intelligence services had obtained and distributed a version of the archive in revenge for SPE's pending release of The Interview, a film depicting a future overthrow of the North Korean government and the assassination of its leader, Kim Jong-un. Whilst some stories came out at the time, the original archives, which were not searchable, were removed before the public and journalists were able to do more than scratch the surface.
Now published in a fully searchable format The Sony Archives offer a rare insight into the inner workings of a large, secretive multinational corporation. The work publicly known from Sony is to produce entertainment; however, The Sony Archives show that behind the scenes this is an influential corporation, with ties to the White House (there are almost 100 US government email addresses in the archive), with an ability to impact laws and policies, and with connections to the US military-industrial complex.
WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange said: "This archive shows the inner workings of an influential multinational corporation. It is newsworthy and at the centre of a geo-political conflict. It belongs in the public domain. WikiLeaks will ensure it stays there..."
https://wikileaks.org/sony/press/
20150125
WikiLeaks demands answers after Google hands staff emails to US government
Google took almost three years to disclose to the open information group WikiLeaks that it had handed over emails and other digital data belonging to three of its staffers to the US government, under a secret search warrant issued by a federal judge.
WikiLeaks has written to Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, to protest that the search giant only revealed the warrants last month, having been served them in March 2012. In the letter, WikiLeaks says it is “astonished and disturbed” that Google waited more than two and a half years to notify its subscribers, potentially depriving them of their ability to protect their rights to “privacy, association and freedom from illegal searches”.
The letter, written by WikiLeaks’ New York-based lawyer, Michael Ratner of the Center For Constitutional Rights, asks Google to list all the materials it provided to the FBI. Ratner also asks whether the California-based company did anything to challenge the warrants and whether it has received any further data demands it has yet to divulge...
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/25/wikileaks-google-staff-emails-us-government
20131130
20131124
Wikileaks Iran
"Our main objectives at WikiLeak.ir is to publish information that agree with the following guidelines:
1. Published information must not contain threatening contents to Iranian institutions, organizations and individual citizens around the world.
2. Published information must not contain any blasphemy against recognized religions.
3. Information with obscene content such as any adult related materials will not be published due to nature of this website, social and filtering issues.
We here by ask every organization, group, hacking team or individual who are against the ideas of capitalism، colonialism، racism and genocide to join us and share their information in order to expose the real picture of all regimes who support the very cruel nature of such ideas.
If you agree the above terms, you are now a member of this resistance movement and a free information publisher..."
http://wikileak.ir/?language=en
20131113
Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier
By Suelette Dreyfus with
Research by Julian Assange
[Excerpt. Mendax is the pseudonym of Julian Assange.]
He did, however, talk to Powerspike on the phone once in a while. The older hacker's highly irreverent attitude and Porky Pig laugh appealed to him. But other than those brief talks, Prime Suspect avoided talking on the phone to people outside the International Subversives, especially when he and Mendax moved into ever more sensitive military computers.
Using a program called Sycophant written by Mendax, the IS hackers had been conducting massive attacks on the US military. They divided up Sycophant on eight attack machines, often choosing university systems at places like the Australian National University or the University of Texas. They pointed the eight machines at the targets and fired. Within six hours, the eight machines had assaulted thousands of computers. The hackers sometimes reaped 100000 accounts each night.
Using Sycophant, they essentially forced a cluster of Unix machines in a computer network to attack the entire Internet en masse...
http://cryptome.org/2013/11/assange-moonlight-maze.htm
Research by Julian Assange
[Excerpt. Mendax is the pseudonym of Julian Assange.]
He did, however, talk to Powerspike on the phone once in a while. The older hacker's highly irreverent attitude and Porky Pig laugh appealed to him. But other than those brief talks, Prime Suspect avoided talking on the phone to people outside the International Subversives, especially when he and Mendax moved into ever more sensitive military computers.
Using a program called Sycophant written by Mendax, the IS hackers had been conducting massive attacks on the US military. They divided up Sycophant on eight attack machines, often choosing university systems at places like the Australian National University or the University of Texas. They pointed the eight machines at the targets and fired. Within six hours, the eight machines had assaulted thousands of computers. The hackers sometimes reaped 100000 accounts each night.
Using Sycophant, they essentially forced a cluster of Unix machines in a computer network to attack the entire Internet en masse...
http://cryptome.org/2013/11/assange-moonlight-maze.htm
20130121
Leaks.CC
The aim of this wiki is to coordinate efforts made by investigative journalists, activists of many kinds, Internet users, and others in the collective analysis of leaked information.
Every day new batches of extremely important and interesting information, coming from different places around the world, from a wide range of sources and in many languages appear in the virtual public space. Due to the format of these leaks, the amount of work, time or specialized knowledge required to analyze them, many go unnoticed in the local and mainstream media. Many times, however, they contain valuable information for the general public.
The structure of the wiki is divided into open investigations of data batches of leaked information which need to be studied in order to map actors, actions, and summaries of the files being analyzed. Afterwards the results of these investigations are turned into hard news or stories in order to be published.
via leaks.cc
20121212
LeaksWiki
Transparency is changing. Leaking websites and organizations are increasingly widespread. In large part, this rise of leaking organizations is likely due to the controversies around WikiLeaks. Leaking organizations are noteworthy because they separate the source from the release of the document or information and thus significantly alter the process of leaking, disclosure, and whistleblowing.[1] This separation has a few important implications. First, the separation of the source from the document release makes the leaking process safer for the source or whistleblower. Anonymous submission systems give the source anonymity in the initial transmission of documents and the disconnection of the source from the release makes the source less traceable. Second, the process becomes easier for the source to release any documents or more documents.[2] The intermediary leaking organization can study the documents in-depth, prepare them for release, work with media partners, and perhaps advocate for correction of a wrongdoing. Third, there is now a middleman in the process, the leaking organization.[3] However, this can be both a benefit and a detriment. The leaking organization can be an additional security risk to the source and innocent people mentioned in the leaked documents, but it is also a body often (but not always) independent of government agencies, companies, and mainstream media institutions. The independence of the leaking organization may sometimes make it easier for them to serve as an additional check on traditional institutions.[4] Fourth, there is now a group of people tasked primarily with determining how to make a leak successful and broadly defining what a successful release of leaked documents means.
via leakswiki.org
20121023
DoD Compares 9/11 Attack and WikiLeaks-Manning
FORT MEADE, Md., Oct. 18, 2012 – Pretrial hearings for two major court cases – one involving the alleged perpetrators behind the 9/11 terror attacks and the other involving the soldier charged with the largest intelligence leak in U.S. history – are converging this week as attorneys operating in two very different legal systems focus on the issue of classified information in the courtroom.
The pre-trial hearing for Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who has confessed to planning the 9/11 attacks “from A to Z,” and four others who allegedly trained, financed or arranged transportation for the 19 hijackers entered its fourth day today at Naval Air Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Mohammed’s codefendants in the case are his nephew, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali; Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak bin Attash, charged with selecting and training some of the hijackers; and Ramzi Binalshibh and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, accused with helping finance the attacks.
via cryptome.org
20120728
GUARDIANGATE
GuardianGate
props to bradley manning!
This is the full archive of all the 251,287 cables from the original encrypted z.gpg (370MB) file which contains the cables.csv (1.6GB) that got leaked from wikileaks.
Pick out interesting events and tell others about them. Use twitter, reddit, mail whatever suits your audience best.
For twitter or other social networking services please use the #cablegate or unique reference ID (e.g. #66BUENOSAIRES2481) as hash tags.
NOFORN = Not for release to foreign nationals
via leaks.hohesc.us
20120424
20120229
Stratfor Is a Joke and So Is Wikileaks for Taking It Seriously - Max Fisher - International - The Atlantic
On June 2, 2009, Anya Alfano of Stratfor, which describes itself as a private "global intelligence company," sent an email to a colleague requesting some global intelligence on a certain trans-national civilian group on behalf of a powerful international client. That email has now been released to the world, along with five million others like it, by global transparency group Wikileaks, thus revealing Stratfor's shadowy scheme.According to Anya Alfano's email, Stratfor's target was PETA, the animal rights group, and its client Coca-Cola. Their top secret mission was to find out "How many PETA supporters are there in Canada?" and other tantalizing global secrets that could only be secured through such top-secret means as calling PETA's press office or Googling it. Alfano concluded her chilling email, "I need all the information our talented interns can dig up by COB tomorrow."
via theatlantic.com
20110617
A Primer on Wikileaks Espionage on TOR Exit Nodes
"In 2007, Dan Egerstad, Swedish security researcher, exposed how the
Tor network could easily be used for intelligence gathering: [1]
nodes. Last month, he posted a list of 100 e-mail credentials --
server IP addresses, e-mail accounts and the corresponding
passwords -- for embassies and government ministries around the
globe, all obtained by sniffing exit traffic for usernames and
passwords of e-mail servers.'' Note that this was not a case of embassy staff using Tor to access
their own email accounts, which is absurd. This was a case of
blackhat hackers (or intelligence) using Tor to anonymously access
the compromised accounts. In fact, Egerstad states that the Iranian
government contacted him to thank him for having uncovered the
otherwise unknown compromise..." http://pgpboard.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=458
20110609
20110603
NATO report threatens to 'persecute' Anonymous
"NATO leaders have been warned that WikiLeaks-loving 'hacktivist' collective Anonymous could pose a threat to member states' security, following recent attacks on the US Chamber of Commerce and defence contractor HBGary - and promise to 'persecute' its members.
In a toughly-worded draft report to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, General Rapporteur Lord Jopling claims that the loose-knit, leaderless group is "becoming more and more sophisticated", and "could potentially hack into sensitive government, military, and corporate files". The group demonstrated its capabilities in February, says the report, when it hacked into US-based defence contractor HBGary..." http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/6/1/nato-report-threatens-persecute-anonymous/
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