- Jan 24, 2011
- 9,378
Wikileaks has accused a Guardian journalist of negligently publishing the passphrase for a database of unredacted secret US diplomatic cables in a book. The encrypted database is available on BitTorrent.
The book by David Leigh, Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, contains an excerpt explaining how he persuaded Julian Assange™ to give him the PGP passphrase, named as ACollectionOfDiplomaticHistory_Since_1966_ToThe_PresentDay#.
Armed with the passphrase, interested parties possessing the relevant encrypted database can see copies of the controversial documents. The material includes raw copies of more than 100,000 classified US diplomatic cables.
WikiLeaks published carefully redacted and selected samples of the US diplomatic cables starting last November. Details pointing to the identity of informants or naming agents contained in the raw Cablegate archive were removed. After months in hiatus the whistleblowing site began publishing further cables at a greatly increased rate last week.
The passphrase disclosure problem must have been known about for months but only became public after German magazines highlighted the issue recently.
WikiLeaks, which has remained silent on the issue in order to avoid drawing attention to the presence of the passphrase in The Guardian book, said that it has "spoken to the State Department and commenced pre-litigation action" against The Guardian. It accused the paper of an "act of gross negligence or malice".
Read more...
The book by David Leigh, Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, contains an excerpt explaining how he persuaded Julian Assange™ to give him the PGP passphrase, named as ACollectionOfDiplomaticHistory_Since_1966_ToThe_PresentDay#.
Armed with the passphrase, interested parties possessing the relevant encrypted database can see copies of the controversial documents. The material includes raw copies of more than 100,000 classified US diplomatic cables.
WikiLeaks published carefully redacted and selected samples of the US diplomatic cables starting last November. Details pointing to the identity of informants or naming agents contained in the raw Cablegate archive were removed. After months in hiatus the whistleblowing site began publishing further cables at a greatly increased rate last week.
The passphrase disclosure problem must have been known about for months but only became public after German magazines highlighted the issue recently.
WikiLeaks, which has remained silent on the issue in order to avoid drawing attention to the presence of the passphrase in The Guardian book, said that it has "spoken to the State Department and commenced pre-litigation action" against The Guardian. It accused the paper of an "act of gross negligence or malice".
Read more...
