No Lack of Irony in Snowden Case

We've all heard about the 2009 chat log in which Snowden says that leakers should be shot.

Worse yet, during a remarkable January 2009 chat, Snowden wrote that Obama had "appointed a fucking politician to run the CIA." In that same conversation, he vented his rage over reading a New York Times article about US actions in Iran, which was based on confidential leaks.

TheTrueHOOHA HOLY SHIT
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/washington/11iran.html?_r=1&hp
TheTrueHOOHA WTF NYTIMES
TheTrueHOOHA Are they TRYING to start a war?
Jesus christ
they're like wikileaks
User19 they're just reporting, dude.
TheTrueHOOHA They're reporting classified shit
User19 shrugs
TheTrueHOOHA about an unpopular country surrounded by enemies already engaged in a war
and about our interactions with said country regarding planning sovereignity violations of another country
you don't put that shit in the NEWSPAPER
User19 meh
TheTrueHOOHA moreover, who the fuck are the anonymous sources telling them this?
TheTrueHOOHA those people should be shot in the balls.
TheTrueHOOHA But the tense exchanges also prompted the White House to step up intelligence-sharing with Israel and brief Israeli officials on new American efforts to subtly sabotage Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, a major covert program that Mr. Bush is about to hand off to President-elect Barack Obama.
TheTrueHOOHA HELLO? HOW COVERT IS IT NOW? THANK YOU
User19 meh
TheTrueHOOHA I wonder how many hundreds of millions of dollars they just completely blew.
User19 you're over reacting. its fine.
TheTrueHOOHA It's not an overreaction. They have a HISTORY of this shit
User19 with flowersand cake.
User20 [User21]'s mushrooms are :o
TheTrueHOOHA these are the same people who blew the whole "we could listen to osama's cell phone" thing
the same people who screwed us on wiretapping
over and over and over again
Thank god they're going out of business.
User19 the NYT?
TheTrueHOOHA Hopefully they'll finally go bankrupt this year.
yeah.

But now, apparently, Ecuador is pissed that someone leaked the memo about them granted amnesty to the leaker, and want to prosecute the leaker who leaked the leak about the leaker leaking into leakedhood.

Officials on Thursday acknowledged that the Ecuadorean Embassy in London had issued a June 22 letter of safe passage for Snowden that calls on other countries to allow him to travel to asylum in Ecuador. But Ecuador's secretary of political management, Betty Tola, said the letter was invalid because it was issued without the approval of the government in the capital, Quito.

She also threatened legal action against whoever leaked the document, which she said "has no validity and is the exclusive responsibility of the person who issued it."

"This demonstrates a total lack of co-ordination in the department of foreign affairs," said Santiago Basabe, a professor of political science at the Latin American School of Social Sciences in Quito. "It's no small question to issue a document of safe passage or a diplomatic document for someone like Snowden without this decision being taken directly by the foreign minister or president."

So apparently, people who leak things to the media should be shot in the balls, and people whose country is protecting leakers should leak themselves.

By: Brant

Even Idiots Have Money

And can spend it in ridiculous ways.

Supporters of the Army private accused of providing a trove of U.S. government secrets to WikiLeaks have erected a billboard along New York Avenue NE in advance of an investigating officer’s recommendation on whether Manning should face a court-martial. “Free Bradley Manning,” reads the billboard, with a tag­line: “Blowing the whistle on war crimes is not a crime.”

“The military would like to characterize Manning as someone who broke military regulations and should be jailed for the rest of his life for doing so,” said Jeff Paterson of the Bradley Manning Support Network, which paid for the billboard. “We obviously have a different opinion.”

By: Brant

Legal Maneuverings Start in WikiLeaks Case

Bradley Manning is starting his pre-trail hearings. The BBC reports...

A military officer overseeing the hearing of a US Army analyst accused of leaking government secrets has rejected a request to withdraw from the case.

The request was made by a defence lawyer for Private Bradley Manning, 23, as he appeared at a military court.

He faces 22 charges of obtaining and distributing government secrets - which he allegedly leaked to anti-secrecy site Wikileaks.

The Article 32 hearing will determine whether Pte Manning is to stand trial.

During the hearing, which is expected to last around five days according to the defence team, prosecution and defence lawyers will each make their initial cases and are permitted to cross-examine witnesses.

Friday's session has been adjourned and the hearing is due to resume on Saturday.

The Brits abbreviate "Private" as "Pte" instead "PVT"...

By: Brant

Wikileaks Pre-Emptively Nullified, If Only Anyone Was Paying Attention

Collateral murder? Hardly. The American Journalism Review has provided everything you need to know about the Wikileaks "scandal" that put them in the public spotlight - the shooting of a couple of journalists that were suspected of being militants.

In an article from 2006, we find this gorgeous little nugget.

Photojournalists also find themselves facing a dilemma: to do their job, they have to be on the scene with equipment in full view, making them highly visible and provocative targets. A camera, positioned to make a picture, could be mistaken for a weapon, says Detroit Free Press photographer David Gilkey, who has had several close calls.

So let's see - a Detroit Free Press photographer has several close calls because his equipment looks like a weapon, but an Apache gunship responding to reports of troops under fire, with known insurgents in the area, is supposed to not mistake photography gear for a weapon? From 3000m away? In thermal sights? Suck it, Assange. You just wanted headlines, and you got them. Never mind the truth, eh?

More depressing is the number of media outlets that jumped on Wikileaks version of the story. The professional journal of their own trade had armed them with the truth they needed to fend of Assange's quest for headlines, and they ignored it.

So after being deconstructed by folks like This Ain't Hell and The Weekly Standard, you now have an American journalist admitting - months before the attack, and years before the video was released - that camera equipment can look like a weapon.
After all of this, you have to wonder who's still clinging to the idea that the US helicopter attack shown in the video wasn't completely legal and well within the bounds of the ROE at the time.

By: Brant

Ah Irony... thy name is "Wikileaks"

Anyone else find it funny that WikiLeaks forces their employees to sign NDAs?

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange now makes his associates sign a draconian nondisclosure agreement that, among other things, asserts that the organization’s huge trove of leaked material is “solely the property of WikiLeaks,” according to a report Wednesday.

“You accept and agree that the information disclosed, or to be disclosed to you pursuant to this agreement is, by its nature, valuable proprietary commercial information,” the agreement reads, “the misuse or unauthorized disclosure of which would be likely to cause us considerable damage.”

The confidentiality agreement (.pdf), revealed by the New Statesman, imposes a penalty of 12 million British pounds– nearly $20 million — on anyone responsible for a significant leak of the organization’s unpublished material. The figure is based on a “typical open-market valuation” of WikiLeaks’ collection, the agreement claims.

Interestingly, the agreement warns that any breach is likely to cause WikiLeaks to lose the “opportunity to sell the information to other news broadcasters and publishers.”

By: Brant

Manning Illegally Installed Software on SIPRNet

The investigation into Bradley Manning's traitorous actions has now determined that he illegally installed software on his SIPRNet terminal.

Accused WikiLeaks source Pfc. Bradley Manning installed and used unauthorized “data-mining software” on his SIPRnet workstation during the time he allegedly siphoned hundreds of thousands of documents off that classified network, the Army said Friday in response to inquiries from Threat Level.

Manning’s use of unauthorized software was the basis of two allegations filed against him this year in his pending court martial, but the charge sheet listing those allegations was silent on the nature of that software.

On Friday, an Army spokeswoman clarified the charges. “The allegations … refer to data-mining software,” spokeswoman Shaunteh Kelly wrote in an e-mail. “Identifying at this point the specific software program used may potentially compromise the ongoing criminal investigation.”

She added that the two allegations relate to “the same data-mining software used on two different dates.”

I gotta ask why he's got admin rights to his SIPRNet box? How did he get permission to install any sort of software on that terminal?

By: Brant

In Defense of Manning?

You knew someone was going to stick up for Bradley Manning. At least we can enjoy the fact that they got arrested trying to show their support.

Dozens of activists, including the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War, were arrested Sunday at a military base holding the US soldier suspected of leaking secret US cables, supporters said.
"It was a strong showing of a cross section of Americans who support Bradley Manning and oppose his unconstitutional confinement," said Kevin Zeese, an attorney with the Bradley Manning Support Network, in a statement.
Manning "is being selectively prosecuted, pure and simple," said Zeese.

If by "selectively prosecuted" you mean "prosecuted because he selected the option to distribute highly-classified information to illegal recipients" then yes, yes he is. And he should be.

And as far as "a strong showing of a cross section of Americans"? You have a stronger showing of a cross section of Americans on most public busses in America, given that there were only about 30 people outside Quantico at the protest. You'd have a stronger showing of a cross section of Americans in most DMV waiting rooms. You could get a stronger showing of a cross section of Americans if you gave away free ice cream and happened to do it near a protest location.


By: Brant

The State Department Redefines "Stupid" - UPDATED

Wow... did a State Department spokesman really call the DoD's treatment of Bradley Manning"stupid"?!

The US treatment of the man accused of leaking secret cables to Wikileaks is "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid", US state department spokesman PJ Crowley has said.

Mr Crowley made the remarks about Bradley Manning to an audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Lemme tell you what's stupid: being a whiny, self-centered, attention-seeking PFC in a job you don't like but on which people to depend to stay alive, and deciding to stick it to "the man" by splashing classified cables all over the world's media like you're some sort of political savior.

Hey State Department - get with the program. Your dirty laundry is flapping in the breeze, too.

---

Follow-up:

Crowley is out.

Chief State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley quit on Sunday after causing a stir by describing the Army's treatment of the suspected WikiLeaks leaker as "ridiculous" and "stupid," pointed words that forced President Barack Obama to defend the detention as appropriate.
"Given the impact of my remarks, for which I take full responsibility, I have submitted my resignation" to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, according to a department statement attributed to the office of the spokesman. In a separate statement released simultaneously, Clinton said she had accepted the resignation "with regret."
Crowley's comments about the conditions for Pfc. Bradley Manning at a Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va., reverberated quickly, from the small audience in Massachusetts where Crowley spoke, to a White House news conference Friday where Obama was asked to weigh in on the treatment of the 23-year-old believed responsible for the largest leak of classified American documents ever.
Manning is being held in solitary confinement for all but an hour every day, and is stripped naked each night and given a suicide-proof smock to wear to bed. His lawyer calls the treatment degrading. Amnesty International says the treatment may violate Manning's human rights.
Crowley, who retired as colonel from the Air Force in 1999 after 26 years in the military, was quoted as telling students at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology seminar on Thursday that he didn't understand why the military was handling Manning's detention that way, and calling it "ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid." Crowley also said "Manning is in the right place" in military detention.

By: Brant

BUB: A Deeper Look at the Ideological Struggle Over WikiLeaks

It's no secret that there's a lot of sound and fury surrounding WikiLeaks. It's also not hard to infer that we're not huge fans of WikiLeaks here at GrogNews. Opinions on GrogNews are everywhere, but it's particularly entertaining when people completely shoot themselves in the foot when talking about WikiLeaks.

One such essay comes from The Atlantic magazine, in an article entitled "Truth Lies Here ". The whole tenor of the article is that right-wing websites, especially newsblogs and other opinion sites, are manipulating the "truth" by trying to bury factual accounts of news that they don't like. By contrast, The Atlantic holds up WikiLeaks as a bastion of truth for truth's sake.

“We believe prima facie that true information does good,” Assange told The Economist in July. But even in his world of unmediated information, truth can be murky, as Assange noted in a CNN interview in which he defended the Afghanistan release as “legitimate reports,” but conceded: “It doesn’t mean the contents are true.” Assange was on surer ground last spring with his blockbuster leak of video footage that showed an American helicopter strike killing civilians in Iraq. The footage was grotesque, compelling, and a helpful reminder that war is far from the antiseptic experience usually portrayed in the U.S. media, and morally complex even in the most clear-cut of cases.

And yet, as chronicled by the New York Times - hardly a bastion of right-wing defensiveness - WikiLeaks have themselves been guilty of playing fast and loose with the "truth".

WikiLeaks’s biggest coup to that point was the release, last April, of video footage taken from one of two U.S. helicopters involved in firing down on a crowd and a building in Baghdad in 2007, killing at least 18 people. While some of the people in the video were armed, others gave no indication of menace; two were in fact journalists for the news agency Reuters. The video, with its soundtrack of callous banter, was horrifying to watch and was an embarrassment to the U.S. military. But in its zeal to make the video a work of antiwar propaganda, WikiLeaks also released a version that didn’t call attention to an Iraqi who was toting a rocket-propelled grenade and packaged the manipulated version under the tendentious rubric “Collateral Murder.”

(see both videos here)

Back to the Atlantic, where the author argues that the partisan "feedback loop" that one finds online is a bad thing, without bothering to acknowledge that similar sites exist for numerous left-wing causes like Palestinian 'independence' and the banning of private military contractors.

But factual counterterrorism is a tricky enterprise in this era of asymmetric information warfare. The urge to shape the data to suit the message, to outfit one’s argument with a set of misappropriated, cynically edited, or simply fabricated facts that can be fed into a self-sustaining partisan feedback loop, will no doubt prove irresistible to many. WikiLeaks’s Assange is playing an old game (see the Pentagon Papers; whistle-blowers in general) with powerful new tools. But the Breitbarts, Gingriches, and bury brigades are engaged in an enterprise uniquely enabled by the collapse of the center and the ubiquitous means by which information can spread instantly

.

Cracks are developing within the WikiLeaks hierarchy, too A new book from a former high-placed coder at WikiLeaks blasts Assange and his approach to the website.

WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange went from being "imaginative, energetic (and) brilliant" to a "paranoid, power-hungry, megalomaniac," a former colleague charges in a new book out Thursday.
Assange also has "a very free and easy relationship with the truth," Daniel Domscheit-Berg claims

That "free and easy relationship with the truth" is something that the New York Times clearly demonstrated, and yet The Atlantic - usually so very good about their articles - celebrates WikiLeaks as the truth standard against which we should judge conservative websites. That's setting the bar pretty low, eh?

And the greatest irony of all? WikiLeaks key transport mechanism was written by the US government, and it's an American hacker that makes it all go for them.

The Tor Project has received funding not only from major corporations like Google and activist groups like Human Rights Watch but also from the U.S. military, which sees Tor as an important tool in intelligence work. The Pentagon was not particularly pleased, however, when Tor was used to reveal its secrets. Wikileaks runs on Tor, which helps to preserve the anonymity of its informants. Though Appelbaum is a Tor employee, he volunteers for Wikileaks and works closely with Julian Assange, the group's founder. "Tor's importance to Wikileaks cannot be understated," Assange says. "Jake has been a tireless promoter behind the scenes of our cause."

By: Brant

GrogNews Daily Headlines

US to WikiLeaks: WTF! Yes, the WikiLeaks Task Force is now in effect, yo.

Good to that US intelligence is keeping an eye on developments in London (or not...)

The Norks are vowing a "sacred war" if they are provoked by the South. Uh, OK.

China wants to speed up the launch of their aircraft carrier.

Will the Russians ratify START before the US?

A nice story about a wedding dress going on display at the Airborne & Special Ops Museum in Fayetteville, NC. Yes, a wedding dress. Go read it. (h/t Guardian)

By: Brant

GrogNews Daily Headlines

Apple has dumped a WikiLeaks app from the App Store. Caving to the government? Or was it just a crap program?

Secretary Gates has released a statement on the new START Treaty.

The President has signed the DADT repeal. Now here comes the "woe is America" rhetoric.

Are the Brits training Bangladeshi "death squads"?

France has warned their nationals to leave the Ivory Coast as the incumbent not-gonna-quit president threatens to starve out the UN peacekeepers.

So the AP is all up in arms about a high percentage of recruits "failing" the military "entrance" exam. OK look, first of all the ASVAB is not an "entrance" exam. It's not designed to tell you whether or not you should be in the military. It's designed to tell you what specialties you'd be good at in the Army. Now, it's possible you could come back with a result that says you're qualified to be a doorstop, or a target goalie, or a the stick pusher on freefall wingsuit testing without a chute or something else undesirable. But it's not a "test" to see if you can join the military. It's there to tell you what job you might be good at.

By: Brant

GrogNews Insomniac Headlines

Yes, they're late. Sorry. It's been a loooooong day.

The Southies are pretty sure the Norks have more uranium sites. Hey, if they've got one, then it's one more than the number of army chiefs the Southies have right now.

Richard Holbrooke, who brokered the Bosnian peace accords in Dayton, has died.

The Army birther who refused to deploy is having his day in court.

Another bomb threat in Sweden as we learn that the bomber was hoping for bigger targets.

Assange is hoping for bail.

By: Brant

GrogNews Daily Headlines

That 'cyberwar' the WikiDrips started? Yeah, turns out they can't even hit the right targets. Oops.

There were arrests in the Afghan attack that killed 6 US troops. Yep, arrests. Not deaths. Not mass explosions. Arrests. In one of the most corrupt nations on the planet. Yippee.
Why not arrest the tuckfards who are killing teachers in Pakistan?

The Norks are threatening nuclear war. Yawn. The US and China apparently discussed this, as well as maritime security in recent talks.

And the bombing in Stockholm might could have been worse.

By: Brant

GrogNews Weekend Headlines

Winter fighting in Afghanistan? Yep, and there's a bunch of dead insurgents.

Dennis Blair, former US national intel director, thinks South Korea might attack the Norks. Given Blair's sketchy (at best) performance as DNI, you gotta wonder if this is just another reason to be glad he's not in charge.

Are the Assange's WikiDrips crusaders bailing on their cyberwar? Yeah, probably, now that the school week is about to start again. They all need to turn in their 11th grade trig homework.

Israel is publicly saying what everyone's whispered all along... they don't want to share Jerusalem.

By: Brant

GrogNews Weekend Headlines

Is the head of the New Zealand Defence Force a wargamer? Woohoo!

CNN is running a behind-the-lines documentary from Afghanistan. Maybe they can explain with the AfPak intel reviews are bleak.
The history of one blogger's critique of the Afghan War has been turned into a book.
There are some damn old rifles in circulation in Afghanistan.
And as odd as it may seem, there's a Christmas Tree in the middle of the Afghan desert.

The Mirror (UK) sees a bleak outlook with North Korea situation?

Pirates have seized a U.S.-operated ship.

Is Iran selling medium-range missiles to Venezuela?

Putin thinks that Assange being arrested is undermining democracy. OK, I guess he's the expert, huh?

The Navy has successfully fired a rail gun.

The Russians would love to project power with aircraft carriers the way the US does, but just can't afford them.

By: Brant

GrogNews Daily Headlines

The DoD is threatening courts martial to stop the use of removable media of the kind that Manning used to feed the WikiTroll.

The BBC has a report on the unveiling of the Rwanda genocide archive.

The Norks are claiming they were "forced" to go nuclear.

Now that anything and everything is dripping out into public, how many more fake 'leaks' will we see like the bogus anti-India cables that fooled Pakistan this week.

Hard to improve on this headline from FoxNews: Berkeley Gives America the Middle Finger.

By: Brant

GrogNews Daily Headlines

The WikiDrips hackwar continues, and has now roped in Amazon, whose servers quit hosting the site a few days ago, Visa, Mastercard, and PayPall, all of whom quit processing donations for the site, and a Swedish government website. The anonymous twits running the hacks? They say they'll continue.

The latest revelations? The US is monitoring China's activities in Africa. Oh, and apparently the US and Canada are close allies.

Tensions are still rising in Korea.

Israel has launched strikes on Gaza.

And what do the holidays look like in Afghanistan?


By: Brant

GrogNews Daily Headlines

A little late today, but real life is busy intruding...

Korea
The US is hoping for a tri-lateral Axis of Kicking Nork Ass with SKorea & Japan, and they're
frustrated China is not doing more about the Norks. Hard to have leverage over crazy people. A top US admiral has a warning for Nork's "bad guy", too.

WikiLeaks
Australia blames the US, rather than blaming Assange over WikiLeaks. The US says WikiLeaks has hurt US foreign relations. I'm sure the US contributed at least in part to that damage. And even though Assange is in jail, WikiLeaks keeps dripping.

A suicide bomb kills 15 at a market in NW Pakistan.

The Palestinians are openly questioning if the US can/will lead the peace process.


By: Brant

SecDef on WikiLeaks and Diplomatic Cables

From last week's briefing where he talks about the way the US government leaks like a sieve...

One of the common themes that I heard from the time I was a senior agency official in the early 1980s in every military engagement we were in was the complaint of the lack of adequate intelligence support. That began to change with the Gulf War in 1991, but it really has changed dramatically after 9/11.

And clearly the finding that the lack of sharing of information had prevented people from, quote, unquote, “connecting the dots” led to much wider sharing of information, and I would say especially wider sharing of information at the front, so that no one at the front was denied – in one of the theaters, Afghanistan or Iraq – was denied any information that might possibly be helpful to them.

Now, obviously, that aperture went too wide. There’s no reason for a young officer at a forward operating post in Afghanistan to get cables having to do with the START negotiations. And so we’ve taken a number of mitigating steps in the department. I directed a number of these things to be undertaken in August.

First, the – an automated capability to monitor workstations for security purposes. We’ve got about 60 percent of this done, mostly in – mostly stateside. And I’ve directed that we accelerate the completion of it.

Second, as I think you know, we’ve taken steps in CENTCOM in September and now everywhere to direct that all CD and DVD write capability off the network be disabled. We have – we have done some other things in terms of two-man policies – wherever you can move information from a classified system to an unclassified system, to have a two-person policy there.

And then we have some longer-term efforts under way in which we can – and, first of all, in which we can identify anomalies, sort of like credit card companies do in the use of computer; and then finally, efforts to actually tailor access depending on roles. But let me say – let me address the latter part of your question. This is obviously a massive dump of information.

First of all, I would say unlike the Pentagon Papers, one of the things that is important, I think, in all of these releases, whether it’s Afghanistan, Iraq or the releases this week, is the lack of any significant difference between what the U.S. government says publicly and what these things show privately, whereas the Pentagon Papers showed that many in the government were not only lying to the American people, they were lying to themselves.

But let me – let me just offer some perspective as somebody who’s been at this a long time. Every other government in the world knows the United States government leaks like a sieve, and it has for a long time. And I dragged this up the other day when I was looking at some of these prospective releases. And this is a quote from John Adams: “How can a government go on, publishing all of their negotiations with foreign nations, I know not. To me, it appears as dangerous and pernicious as it is novel.”

When we went to real congressional oversight of intelligence in the mid-’70s, there was a broad view that no other foreign intelligence service would ever share information with us again if we were going to share it all with the Congress. Those fears all proved unfounded.

Now, I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on. I think – I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought. The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets.

Many governments – some governments deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation. So other nations will continue to deal with us. They will continue to work with us. We will continue to share sensitive information with one another. Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest.

By: Brant

GrogNews Weekend Headlines

Senator McConnell says Assange is "a high-tech terrorist". No. He might be a spy. He might be guilty of treason. But he hasn't terrorized anyone, except maybe DISA. Either way, they're having trouble just staying online as their founder fights his legal woes.

The Russian spy uncovered in British parliament was apparently better at her job than Anna Chapman was.

Rivals are calling for Ivory Coast's President Gbagbo should step down even though he appears to have won the vote.

Iran is saying they can make their own nuclear fuel.

By: Brant