Newsletter Jan Feb 2011
Content
2, Volume – 2, Issue - 1 www.bjpkaritcell.org www.bjpkaritcell.org itcell
INDIA FIRST
Magazine Online News Magazine
2011 Jan – Feb, 2011 itce [email protected]
WIKILEAKS: Leaking Beyond Limits
WikiLeaks is an international non-profit organization that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources and news leaks. Its website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press organization claimed a database of more than 1.2 million documents within a year of its launch. Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its director. The site was originally launched as a usereditable wiki, but has progressively moved towards a more traditional publication model and no longer accepts either user comments or edits.
The wikileaks.org domain name was registered on 4 October 2006. The website was unveiled, and published its first document in December 2006. The site claims to have been "founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa. The creators of WikiLeaks have not been formally identified. It has been represented in public since January 2007 by Julian Assange and others. Assange describes himself as a member of WikiLeaks' advisory board. News reports in The Australian have called Assange the "founder of WikiLeaks". As of June 2009, the site had over 1,200 registered volunteers and listed an advisory board comprising Assange and eight others. The organization's stated goal is to ensure that whistleblowers and journalists are not jailed for emailing sensitive or classified documents. WikiLeaks states that its "primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behaviour in their governments and corporations. WikiLeaks has no official headquarters. According to a January 2010 interview, the WikiLeaks team then consisted of five people working full-time and about 800 people who worked occasionally, none of whom were compensated. The expenses per year are about €200,000, mainly for servers and bureaucracy, but would reach €600,000 if work currently done by volunteers were paid for. WikiLeaks does not pay for lawyers, as hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal support have been donated by media organisations such as the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, and the National Newspaper Publishers Association. Its only revenue stream is donations, but WikiLeaks has planned to add an auction model to sell early access to documents. The Wau Holland Foundation helps to process donations to WikiLeaks. In July 2010, the Foundation stated that WikiLeaks was receiving no money for personnel costs, only for hardware, travelling and bandwidth. However, in December 2010 the Wau Holland Foundation stated that 4 permanent employees, including Julian Assange, had begun to receive salaries.
COPYRIGHT © 2010 All rights reserved
INDIA FIRST
PAGE 1 OF 6
Julian Assange: The face of Wikileaks Early years
Julian Paul Assange, born 3 July 1971 in Townsville, Queensland, spent much of his youth living on Magnetic Island. When he was one year old, his mother Christine married theatre director Brett Assange, who gave him his surname. Brett and Christine Assange ran a touring theatre company. His stepfather, Julian's first "real dad", described Julian as "a very sharp kid" with "a keen sense of right and wrong". “He always stood up for the underdog... he was always very angry about people ganging up on other people.” In 1979, his mother remarried; her new husband was a musician whom Julian Assange believed belonged to a new age group called Santiniketan Park Association that was led by Anne Hamilton - Byrne. The couple had a son, but broke up in 1982 and engaged in a custody struggle for Assange's half-brother. His divorced mother fled her boyfriend for years across Australia taking both children into hiding for the next five years. Assange moved 30 times before he turned 14, attending many schools, sometimes being home schooled.
First brush with law
In 1987, after turning 16, Assange began hacking under the name "Mendax" (derived from a phrase of Horace: "splendide mendax", or "nobly untruthful"). He and two other hackers joined to form a group which they named the International Subversives. In response to the hacking, the Australian Federal Police raided his Melbourne home in 1991. He was reported to have accessed computers belonging to an Australian university, the Canadian telecommunications company Nortel, the USAF 7th Command Group in the Pentagon and other organizations, via modem. In 1993, Assange was involved in starting one of the first public Internet Service providers in Australia, Suburbia Public Access Network Starting in 1994; he lived in Melbourne as a programmer and a developer of free software. From 2003 to 2006, Assange studied physics and mathematics at the University of Melbourne. He has also studied philosophy and neuroscience. Assange has lived for periods in Australia, Kenya and Tanzania, and has visited many other places including Vietnam, Sweden, Iceland, Siberia, Iraq, Belgium and the United States.
Awards and Honours
Assange received the 2009 Media award from Amnesty International which is intended to "recognize excellence in human rights journalism. He has been recognized as a journalist by the Centre for Investigation Journalism. Assange won the 2008 Economist Index on Censorship Award. He won the 2009 Amnesty International UK Media Award for exposing extrajudicial assassinations in Kenya. In 2010 Assange was awarded the Sam Adams Award Readers' Choice in Time magazine’s Person of the year and runner-up for Person of the Year. An informal poll of editors at Pot media network named him the top newsmaker for the year after six out of 10 felt Assange had "affected profoundly how information is seen and delivered". In April 2010, a video posted on a website called Collateral Murder established Wikileaks as a prime portal for unauthorized, accurate accounts, documents and video from distant battlefields. In July of the same year, Wikileaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 90,000 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available for public review. Assange has been praised and condemned for his work with WikiLeaks. In the USA, there have been calls that he be arrested or treated as a terrorist. COPYRIGHT © 2010 All rights reserved
INDIA FIRST
PAGE 2 OF 6
website Wikileaks website hosting
WikiLeaks describes itself as "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking". The site is available on multiple servers and different domain names following a number of denial-of-service attacks and its severance from different Domain Name System (DNS) providers. Until August 2010, WikiLeaks was hosted by PRQ, a Sweden-based company providing "highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services". PRQ is said to have "almost no information about its clientele and maintains few if any of its own logs". Currently, WikiLeaks is mainly hosted by Bahnhof in a facility that used to be a nuclear bunker. Other servers are spread around the world with the central server located in Sweden. Julian Assange has said that the servers are located in Sweden (and the other countries) "specifically because those nations offer legal protection to the disclosures made on the site". He talks about the Swedish constitution, which gives the information providers total legal protection. It is forbidden according to Swedish law for any administrative authority to make inquiries about the sources of any type of newspaper.These laws, and the hosting by PRQ, make it difficult to take WikiLeaks offline; such laws place an onus of proof upon any complainant whose suit would circumscribe WikiLeaks’ liberty, e.g., its rights, of exercising free speech online. Furthermore, "WikiLeaks maintains its own servers at undisclosed locations, keeps no logs and uses military-grade encryption to protect sources and other confidential information." Such arrangements have been called "bulletproof hosting." On 17 August 2010, it was announced that the Swedish Pirate Party will be hosting and managing many of WikiLeaks' new servers. The party donates servers and bandwidth to WikiLeaks without charge. Technicians of the party will make sure that the servers are maintained and working. After the site became the target of a denial-of-service attack from a hacker on its old servers, WikiLeaks moved its site to Amazon's servers. Later, however, the website was "ousted" from the Amazon servers. In a public statement, Amazon said that WikiLeaks was not following its terms of service. The company further explained, "There were several parts they were violating. For example, our terms of service state that 'you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content... that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.' It's clear that WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content." WikiLeaks then decided to install itself on the servers of OVH in France. After criticism from the French government, the company sought two court rulings about the legality of hosting WikiLeaks. While the court in Lille immediately declined to force OVH to shut down the WikiLeaks site, the court in Paris stated it would need more time to examine the highly technical issue. WikiLeaks is based on several software packages, including MediaWiki, Freenet, Tor, and PGP. WikiLeaks strongly encouraged postings via Tor because of the strong privacy needs of its users. On 4 November 2010, Julian Assange told Swiss public television TSR that he is seriously considering seeking political asylum in neutral Switzerland and setting up a WikiLeaks foundation in the country to move the operation there. According to Assange, Switzerland and Iceland are the only countries where WikiLeaks would feel safe to operate.
COPYRIGHT © 2010 All rights reserved
INDIA FIRST
PAGE 3 OF 6
Significant Some Significant Leaks
The first leak document by Wikileaks was the decision to assassinate the government officials signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a political figure of Somali, a radical Islamist in 2006. In August 2007, Wikileaks leaked the story of corruption by the family of the former Kenyan leader, Daniel arap Moi. In November 2007, a copy of Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta was released which gave the protocol of the US army at the Guantanamo Bay detention Camp. In February 2008, allegations of illegal activities at Cayman Islands branch of Swiss Bank, Julius Baer was leaked. In March 2008, Wikileaks published ‘the collected secret bibles of Scientology. In September 2008, wikileaks posted, the contents of yahoo account of Sarah Palin, during 2008 US presidential election campaigns. In November 2008, the membership list of the British National Party was released. In October 2009, another list of the British National Party members was leaked.
In January 2009, Wikileaks leaked the telephone recordings of political leaders and businessmen of Peru involved in Peru oil scandal. In July 2009, a report of the nuclear accident in Iran at the Natanz nuclear facility was leaked. In September 2009, internal documents of Kaupthing Bank were leaked which led to the financial crisis in Iceland. In October 2009, a British security advisory document was published in Wikileaks. Later in the same month they leaked the internal document regarding toxic dumping incident in the Ivory Coast. In April 2010, Wikileaks released a video showing two Reuters employees being fired in 2007 Baghdad air strike. In July 2010, Wikileaks released documents related to the war in Afghanistan to The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel. In October 2010, documents were released relating to Iraq war. The BBC quoted it as the largest leak of the classified documents in History. In November 2010, Wikileaks released the US diplomatic cable leaks.
COPYRIGHT © 2010 All rights reserved
INDIA FIRST
PAGE 4 OF 6
Wikileaks Reactions to Wikileaks
Wikileaks has attracted criticism as well as praise by different Governments.
Praise by different Governments
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da SilvaLuiz criticised Julian Assange’s arrest in the United Kingdom. Wikileaks had disclosed the classified US diplomatic cables in November and December 2010. According to the president, the exposure had appeared unreachable. He also told that the arrest is an attack on ‘freedom of expression’. Deputy Foreign Minister of Equador, Kinto Lucas offered an invitation to Assange to establish residency in Equador so that he can freely present the information he possesses not only on the internet but also on public forums. The office of the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, called on all non governmental organizations to consider nomination of Assange as a nobel laureate. The president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, stated his support for Wikileaks following the release of the US diplomatic cables in November 2010. In December 2010 United Nations Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression Frank LaRue stated he agreed with the idea that Julian Assange was a "martyr for free speech." LaRue went on to say Assange or other WikiLeaks staff should not face legal accountability for any information they disseminated, noting that, "if there is a responsibility by leaking information it is of, exclusively of the person that made the leak and not of the media that publish it. And this is the way that transparency works and that corruption has been confronted in many cases. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay has stated that Visa, Mastercard and Amazon may be 'violating WikiLeaks' e pluribus unum right to freedom of expression' by withdrawing their services.
Criticism by different Governments
Naturally, the governments and organizations whose information have been leaked by Wikileaks are critical about the group. The Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard has condemned the actions of Wikileaks and termed it irresponsible and illegal. However, later the Australian officials told that Assange has done nothing illegal. The French Minister for Industries, Eric Besson, wrote in a letter to CGIET technology that Wikileaks has violated the secret of diplomatic relations and it is unacceptable that the site was hosted on servers based in France. The minister asked for measures to bar WikiLeaks from France. The President of Iran, Mahumoud Ahmadinejad, also criticised WikiLeaks following the release of United States diplomatic cables. The President of Phillipines, Benigno Aquino III also condemned the Wikileaks’ actions. He also said that it can lead to massive miscommunications. Following the release of United States diplomatic cables, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton said "this disclosure is not just an attack on America's foreign policy interests, it is an attack on the international community." The chairman of the Homeland Security Committee of the US House of Representatives, Peter Kind, stated WikiLeaks as a "foreign terrorist organisation" explaining that "WikiLeaks presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States." Phillip J. Crowley, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs of US, stated on 2nd December 2010 that the US State Department does not regard WikiLeaks as a media organisation.
COPYRIGHT © 2010 All rights reserved
INDIA FIRST
PAGE 5 OF 6
spinOpenLeaks and other spin-offs
Releases of US diplomatic cables inspired the creation of a number of other organisations based on the WikiLeaks model.
•
•
•
•
• •
OpenLeaks was created by the former deputy to Assange. Daniel Domscheit-Berg (picture on left) said the intention was to be more transparent than WikiLeaks as "In these last months, the organisation has not been open any more. It lost its open-source promise." It planned to start in early 2011. Brussels Leaks was focused on the European Union as a collaborative effort of media professionals and activists that sought to "pull the shady inner workings of the EU system out into the public domain. This is about getting important information out there, not about Brusselsleaks [or any other 'leaks' for that matter]." TradeLeaks was created to "do to trade and commerce what WikiLeaks has done to politics." It was founded by Australian Ruslan Kogan. Its goal is to ensure ""individuals and businesses should attain values from others through mutually beneficial and fully consensual trade, rather than force, fraud or deception." Balkan Leaks was founded by Bulgarain Atanas Chobanov in order to make the Balkans more transparent and to fight corruption as "There are plenty of people out there that want to change the Balkans for good and are ready to take on the challenge. We're offering them a hand." Indoleaks is an Indonesian site that seeks to publish classified documents primarily from the Indonesian government. RuLeaks is aimed at being a Russian equivalent to WikiLeaks. It was originally launched to provide translated versions of the WikiLeaks cables but the Moscow Times reports it has started to publish its own content as well.
The Indian Connection Among the various events relating to Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran in which India figured during this period, four could be sensitive from India's point of view. Firstly, the pressure exerted on the Atal Behari Vajpayee government by the George Bush administration to send Indian troops to Iraq. By July,2003, the Vajpayee government had decided to say no to Washington DC, but there was a lot of voices in Delhi in favour of accepting the US request. Secondly, the papers captured by the US intelligence after the occupation of Iraq from the Iraqi government departments showing or corroborating the alleged involvement of Indian politicians in contact with the Saddam Hussein government to acquiring preferential quotas for the import of oil from Iraq (the oil for food scandal). Thirdly, the pressure exercised by the Bush Administration on the Manmohan Singh Government for voting against Iran in the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna]. The government of India succumbed to this pressure as a quid pro quo for the Indo-US civil nuclear co-operation agreement of July, 2005. Fourthly, the analysis and assessment made in the State Department and the Pentagon regarding Pakistani allegations of Indian involvement in Balochistan COPYRIGHT © 2010 All rights reserved
INDIA FIRST
PAGE 6 OF 6
INDIA FIRST
Magazine Online News Magazine
2011 Jan – Feb, 2011 itce [email protected]
WIKILEAKS: Leaking Beyond Limits
WikiLeaks is an international non-profit organization that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources and news leaks. Its website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press organization claimed a database of more than 1.2 million documents within a year of its launch. Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its director. The site was originally launched as a usereditable wiki, but has progressively moved towards a more traditional publication model and no longer accepts either user comments or edits.
The wikileaks.org domain name was registered on 4 October 2006. The website was unveiled, and published its first document in December 2006. The site claims to have been "founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa. The creators of WikiLeaks have not been formally identified. It has been represented in public since January 2007 by Julian Assange and others. Assange describes himself as a member of WikiLeaks' advisory board. News reports in The Australian have called Assange the "founder of WikiLeaks". As of June 2009, the site had over 1,200 registered volunteers and listed an advisory board comprising Assange and eight others. The organization's stated goal is to ensure that whistleblowers and journalists are not jailed for emailing sensitive or classified documents. WikiLeaks states that its "primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behaviour in their governments and corporations. WikiLeaks has no official headquarters. According to a January 2010 interview, the WikiLeaks team then consisted of five people working full-time and about 800 people who worked occasionally, none of whom were compensated. The expenses per year are about €200,000, mainly for servers and bureaucracy, but would reach €600,000 if work currently done by volunteers were paid for. WikiLeaks does not pay for lawyers, as hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal support have been donated by media organisations such as the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, and the National Newspaper Publishers Association. Its only revenue stream is donations, but WikiLeaks has planned to add an auction model to sell early access to documents. The Wau Holland Foundation helps to process donations to WikiLeaks. In July 2010, the Foundation stated that WikiLeaks was receiving no money for personnel costs, only for hardware, travelling and bandwidth. However, in December 2010 the Wau Holland Foundation stated that 4 permanent employees, including Julian Assange, had begun to receive salaries.
COPYRIGHT © 2010 All rights reserved
INDIA FIRST
PAGE 1 OF 6
Julian Assange: The face of Wikileaks Early years
Julian Paul Assange, born 3 July 1971 in Townsville, Queensland, spent much of his youth living on Magnetic Island. When he was one year old, his mother Christine married theatre director Brett Assange, who gave him his surname. Brett and Christine Assange ran a touring theatre company. His stepfather, Julian's first "real dad", described Julian as "a very sharp kid" with "a keen sense of right and wrong". “He always stood up for the underdog... he was always very angry about people ganging up on other people.” In 1979, his mother remarried; her new husband was a musician whom Julian Assange believed belonged to a new age group called Santiniketan Park Association that was led by Anne Hamilton - Byrne. The couple had a son, but broke up in 1982 and engaged in a custody struggle for Assange's half-brother. His divorced mother fled her boyfriend for years across Australia taking both children into hiding for the next five years. Assange moved 30 times before he turned 14, attending many schools, sometimes being home schooled.
First brush with law
In 1987, after turning 16, Assange began hacking under the name "Mendax" (derived from a phrase of Horace: "splendide mendax", or "nobly untruthful"). He and two other hackers joined to form a group which they named the International Subversives. In response to the hacking, the Australian Federal Police raided his Melbourne home in 1991. He was reported to have accessed computers belonging to an Australian university, the Canadian telecommunications company Nortel, the USAF 7th Command Group in the Pentagon and other organizations, via modem. In 1993, Assange was involved in starting one of the first public Internet Service providers in Australia, Suburbia Public Access Network Starting in 1994; he lived in Melbourne as a programmer and a developer of free software. From 2003 to 2006, Assange studied physics and mathematics at the University of Melbourne. He has also studied philosophy and neuroscience. Assange has lived for periods in Australia, Kenya and Tanzania, and has visited many other places including Vietnam, Sweden, Iceland, Siberia, Iraq, Belgium and the United States.
Awards and Honours
Assange received the 2009 Media award from Amnesty International which is intended to "recognize excellence in human rights journalism. He has been recognized as a journalist by the Centre for Investigation Journalism. Assange won the 2008 Economist Index on Censorship Award. He won the 2009 Amnesty International UK Media Award for exposing extrajudicial assassinations in Kenya. In 2010 Assange was awarded the Sam Adams Award Readers' Choice in Time magazine’s Person of the year and runner-up for Person of the Year. An informal poll of editors at Pot media network named him the top newsmaker for the year after six out of 10 felt Assange had "affected profoundly how information is seen and delivered". In April 2010, a video posted on a website called Collateral Murder established Wikileaks as a prime portal for unauthorized, accurate accounts, documents and video from distant battlefields. In July of the same year, Wikileaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 90,000 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available for public review. Assange has been praised and condemned for his work with WikiLeaks. In the USA, there have been calls that he be arrested or treated as a terrorist. COPYRIGHT © 2010 All rights reserved
INDIA FIRST
PAGE 2 OF 6
website Wikileaks website hosting
WikiLeaks describes itself as "an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking". The site is available on multiple servers and different domain names following a number of denial-of-service attacks and its severance from different Domain Name System (DNS) providers. Until August 2010, WikiLeaks was hosted by PRQ, a Sweden-based company providing "highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services". PRQ is said to have "almost no information about its clientele and maintains few if any of its own logs". Currently, WikiLeaks is mainly hosted by Bahnhof in a facility that used to be a nuclear bunker. Other servers are spread around the world with the central server located in Sweden. Julian Assange has said that the servers are located in Sweden (and the other countries) "specifically because those nations offer legal protection to the disclosures made on the site". He talks about the Swedish constitution, which gives the information providers total legal protection. It is forbidden according to Swedish law for any administrative authority to make inquiries about the sources of any type of newspaper.These laws, and the hosting by PRQ, make it difficult to take WikiLeaks offline; such laws place an onus of proof upon any complainant whose suit would circumscribe WikiLeaks’ liberty, e.g., its rights, of exercising free speech online. Furthermore, "WikiLeaks maintains its own servers at undisclosed locations, keeps no logs and uses military-grade encryption to protect sources and other confidential information." Such arrangements have been called "bulletproof hosting." On 17 August 2010, it was announced that the Swedish Pirate Party will be hosting and managing many of WikiLeaks' new servers. The party donates servers and bandwidth to WikiLeaks without charge. Technicians of the party will make sure that the servers are maintained and working. After the site became the target of a denial-of-service attack from a hacker on its old servers, WikiLeaks moved its site to Amazon's servers. Later, however, the website was "ousted" from the Amazon servers. In a public statement, Amazon said that WikiLeaks was not following its terms of service. The company further explained, "There were several parts they were violating. For example, our terms of service state that 'you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content... that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.' It's clear that WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content." WikiLeaks then decided to install itself on the servers of OVH in France. After criticism from the French government, the company sought two court rulings about the legality of hosting WikiLeaks. While the court in Lille immediately declined to force OVH to shut down the WikiLeaks site, the court in Paris stated it would need more time to examine the highly technical issue. WikiLeaks is based on several software packages, including MediaWiki, Freenet, Tor, and PGP. WikiLeaks strongly encouraged postings via Tor because of the strong privacy needs of its users. On 4 November 2010, Julian Assange told Swiss public television TSR that he is seriously considering seeking political asylum in neutral Switzerland and setting up a WikiLeaks foundation in the country to move the operation there. According to Assange, Switzerland and Iceland are the only countries where WikiLeaks would feel safe to operate.
COPYRIGHT © 2010 All rights reserved
INDIA FIRST
PAGE 3 OF 6
Significant Some Significant Leaks
The first leak document by Wikileaks was the decision to assassinate the government officials signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a political figure of Somali, a radical Islamist in 2006. In August 2007, Wikileaks leaked the story of corruption by the family of the former Kenyan leader, Daniel arap Moi. In November 2007, a copy of Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta was released which gave the protocol of the US army at the Guantanamo Bay detention Camp. In February 2008, allegations of illegal activities at Cayman Islands branch of Swiss Bank, Julius Baer was leaked. In March 2008, Wikileaks published ‘the collected secret bibles of Scientology. In September 2008, wikileaks posted, the contents of yahoo account of Sarah Palin, during 2008 US presidential election campaigns. In November 2008, the membership list of the British National Party was released. In October 2009, another list of the British National Party members was leaked.
In January 2009, Wikileaks leaked the telephone recordings of political leaders and businessmen of Peru involved in Peru oil scandal. In July 2009, a report of the nuclear accident in Iran at the Natanz nuclear facility was leaked. In September 2009, internal documents of Kaupthing Bank were leaked which led to the financial crisis in Iceland. In October 2009, a British security advisory document was published in Wikileaks. Later in the same month they leaked the internal document regarding toxic dumping incident in the Ivory Coast. In April 2010, Wikileaks released a video showing two Reuters employees being fired in 2007 Baghdad air strike. In July 2010, Wikileaks released documents related to the war in Afghanistan to The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel. In October 2010, documents were released relating to Iraq war. The BBC quoted it as the largest leak of the classified documents in History. In November 2010, Wikileaks released the US diplomatic cable leaks.
COPYRIGHT © 2010 All rights reserved
INDIA FIRST
PAGE 4 OF 6
Wikileaks Reactions to Wikileaks
Wikileaks has attracted criticism as well as praise by different Governments.
Praise by different Governments
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da SilvaLuiz criticised Julian Assange’s arrest in the United Kingdom. Wikileaks had disclosed the classified US diplomatic cables in November and December 2010. According to the president, the exposure had appeared unreachable. He also told that the arrest is an attack on ‘freedom of expression’. Deputy Foreign Minister of Equador, Kinto Lucas offered an invitation to Assange to establish residency in Equador so that he can freely present the information he possesses not only on the internet but also on public forums. The office of the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, called on all non governmental organizations to consider nomination of Assange as a nobel laureate. The president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, stated his support for Wikileaks following the release of the US diplomatic cables in November 2010. In December 2010 United Nations Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression Frank LaRue stated he agreed with the idea that Julian Assange was a "martyr for free speech." LaRue went on to say Assange or other WikiLeaks staff should not face legal accountability for any information they disseminated, noting that, "if there is a responsibility by leaking information it is of, exclusively of the person that made the leak and not of the media that publish it. And this is the way that transparency works and that corruption has been confronted in many cases. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay has stated that Visa, Mastercard and Amazon may be 'violating WikiLeaks' e pluribus unum right to freedom of expression' by withdrawing their services.
Criticism by different Governments
Naturally, the governments and organizations whose information have been leaked by Wikileaks are critical about the group. The Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard has condemned the actions of Wikileaks and termed it irresponsible and illegal. However, later the Australian officials told that Assange has done nothing illegal. The French Minister for Industries, Eric Besson, wrote in a letter to CGIET technology that Wikileaks has violated the secret of diplomatic relations and it is unacceptable that the site was hosted on servers based in France. The minister asked for measures to bar WikiLeaks from France. The President of Iran, Mahumoud Ahmadinejad, also criticised WikiLeaks following the release of United States diplomatic cables. The President of Phillipines, Benigno Aquino III also condemned the Wikileaks’ actions. He also said that it can lead to massive miscommunications. Following the release of United States diplomatic cables, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton said "this disclosure is not just an attack on America's foreign policy interests, it is an attack on the international community." The chairman of the Homeland Security Committee of the US House of Representatives, Peter Kind, stated WikiLeaks as a "foreign terrorist organisation" explaining that "WikiLeaks presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States." Phillip J. Crowley, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs of US, stated on 2nd December 2010 that the US State Department does not regard WikiLeaks as a media organisation.
COPYRIGHT © 2010 All rights reserved
INDIA FIRST
PAGE 5 OF 6
spinOpenLeaks and other spin-offs
Releases of US diplomatic cables inspired the creation of a number of other organisations based on the WikiLeaks model.
•
•
•
•
• •
OpenLeaks was created by the former deputy to Assange. Daniel Domscheit-Berg (picture on left) said the intention was to be more transparent than WikiLeaks as "In these last months, the organisation has not been open any more. It lost its open-source promise." It planned to start in early 2011. Brussels Leaks was focused on the European Union as a collaborative effort of media professionals and activists that sought to "pull the shady inner workings of the EU system out into the public domain. This is about getting important information out there, not about Brusselsleaks [or any other 'leaks' for that matter]." TradeLeaks was created to "do to trade and commerce what WikiLeaks has done to politics." It was founded by Australian Ruslan Kogan. Its goal is to ensure ""individuals and businesses should attain values from others through mutually beneficial and fully consensual trade, rather than force, fraud or deception." Balkan Leaks was founded by Bulgarain Atanas Chobanov in order to make the Balkans more transparent and to fight corruption as "There are plenty of people out there that want to change the Balkans for good and are ready to take on the challenge. We're offering them a hand." Indoleaks is an Indonesian site that seeks to publish classified documents primarily from the Indonesian government. RuLeaks is aimed at being a Russian equivalent to WikiLeaks. It was originally launched to provide translated versions of the WikiLeaks cables but the Moscow Times reports it has started to publish its own content as well.
The Indian Connection Among the various events relating to Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran in which India figured during this period, four could be sensitive from India's point of view. Firstly, the pressure exerted on the Atal Behari Vajpayee government by the George Bush administration to send Indian troops to Iraq. By July,2003, the Vajpayee government had decided to say no to Washington DC, but there was a lot of voices in Delhi in favour of accepting the US request. Secondly, the papers captured by the US intelligence after the occupation of Iraq from the Iraqi government departments showing or corroborating the alleged involvement of Indian politicians in contact with the Saddam Hussein government to acquiring preferential quotas for the import of oil from Iraq (the oil for food scandal). Thirdly, the pressure exercised by the Bush Administration on the Manmohan Singh Government for voting against Iran in the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna]. The government of India succumbed to this pressure as a quid pro quo for the Indo-US civil nuclear co-operation agreement of July, 2005. Fourthly, the analysis and assessment made in the State Department and the Pentagon regarding Pakistani allegations of Indian involvement in Balochistan COPYRIGHT © 2010 All rights reserved
INDIA FIRST
PAGE 6 OF 6
