Later On

Fascinating article in New Scientist by Paul Marks. Very encouraging, since the first action of any organization or institution is to slap a whistle-blower silly. Article begins:

Just how accurate are GPS-guided precision bombs, and what is most likely to send them off-target? Now you can find out by simply reading the smart bomb’s tactical manual on the internet. No, the Pentagon didn’t slip up and post the instructions online. Rather, a whistle-blower leaked the manual via Wikileaks, a website that uses anonymising technology to disguise the source of leaked information.

Launched online in early 2007, Wikileaks is run by an informal group of open government and anti-secrecy advocates who want to allow people living under oppressive regimes, or with something to say in the public interest, to anonymously leak documents that have been censored or are of ethical, political or diplomatic significance.

Wikileaks’ fame has spread rapidly in recent weeks, thanks to the release of some headline-grabbing documents. These include the design for the Hiroshima atomic bomb, a report on how the UK acquired its nuclear weapons capability, and hundreds of camera phone pictures of the Tibetan riots.

In the last fortnight alone it has released 50 documents and it is now hosting more leaks than its global network of volunteer editors appear able to check.

Thanks to Wikileaks, potential whistle-blowers are now far more willing to come forward, says John Young, who runs the long-standing site Cryptome.org, which specialises in posting documents on espionage, intelligence and cryptography issues. “We started getting a lot less information after 9/11 as people became more cautious when law enforcement agencies got more draconian powers. So we are very happy to see Wikileaks doing what they are doing so aggressively.”

This flood of leaked documents has been made possible by internet technology that allows whistle-blowers to post documents online without revealing their identity or IP address. The website uses a network called The Onion Router (Tor), to disguise the origin of documents. Tor routes documents sent to the Wikileaks website into a cloud of hundreds of servers, where they bounce randomly between a handful of them, before finally landing in one of Wikileaks’ inboxes (see “The onion will cover your tracks”).

To track where a leaked document, picture or video came from would take the computing power of the US National Security Agency. And it would have to be trained on the right servers at the right time, making it virtually impossible to succeed.

“To trace a leak would take a vast amount of computing power trained on the right servers”

Ironically, given the number of military documents that are leaked to Wikileaks and other whistle-blowing websites, the Tor network was originally developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory, based in Washington DC, before becoming an open source project anybody can use. But this does not mean the military has a back door into the system, says Wikileaks spokesman Julian Assange. “Like the internet, Tor is out of the hands of those that were once involved in crafting it,” he says.

Wikileaks itself is actually much more than a single website. Wikileaks.org has mirror sites hosted in a number of countries, including Belgium, Sweden, Australia, Christmas Island and California. This means that if someone tries to take legal action against Wikileaks in one country – by taking down the wikileaks.org website for example, as a Swiss bank tried and failed to do earlier this year – it cannot take down the entire service. Also, Sweden and Belgium in particular have very strong anti-censorship legislation, making Wikileaks a resilient beast.

Once a document has been submitted to the website, and before it can be published, editors check it for veracity and assure themselves that it is of compelling public interest. “Anonymous leaking is an ancient art and many websites publish documents from sources they cannot identify,” says Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists’ (FAS) Project on Government Secrecy. “What Wikileaks has done is to professionalise the operation. They have created a standard procedure for receiving, processing and publishing leaks.”

In 2007, for example, Wikileaks revealed massive corruption in the Kenyan government and made the startling discovery that agents of the Stasi, the former East German secret police, had become members of the commission investigating Stasi crimes. It also leaked a Pentagon handbook revealing that psychological torture was used against prisoners at the US’s Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay.

So how do Wikileaks’ editors decide which leaks to post? Unlike print editors, Wikileaks’ editors do not reject leaked documents just because they are unlikely to have widespread appeal. The only rule is that leaks must be in the public interest, says Assange. And there are few frivolous leaks, he says. “Our sources, perhaps inspired by examples already set, nearly always send in genuine public interest material. Wikileaks pushes submissions through a number of questions and only the well-motivated leaks get through.”

One example is the manual for the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM), or smart bomb, available on the Wikileaks site. The leaked document from 2002 reveals that while the bomb, which has since been upgraded, had an accuracy of 2.8 metres in flight tests, this dropped to 7.8 metres in actual combat, thanks to guidance errors, failure to specify target coordinates accurately, and inaccuracies in the GPS systems.

“JDAM is the most strategically significant US military development in the past twenty years,” says Assange. It costs from $20,000 to $40,000 and bolts onto existing 500 to 2000-pound bombs, turning them into individually targeted gliders that are accurate to within 3 metres. Eighty JDAMs can level all the critical infrastructure of a medium-sized city in one B2 bomber flight, says Assange. “This means that posting the manual clearly fits our editorial policy that the material be of political, diplomatic or ethical significance.”

Despite the success of Wikileaks in bringing such documents out into the open, potential whistle-blowers should remain on their guard when posting documents to any leak site, says Young. Some are in fact run by intelligence agencies hoping to catch whistle-blowers in the act, he says.

“There are lots of dirty tricks out there. We always caution against trusting our site or anybody else’s because there are so many ‘sting’ sites out there,” he adds.

Meanwhile, some anti-secrecy advocates in the US criticise Wikileaks’ editorial policy for being too open, as the website does not censor sensitive military documents, including potentially dangerous details on bombs.

Assange says there are no documents Wikileaks would not post on the grounds of military sensitivity. “It would be quite incorrect for us to express any national favouritism,” he says.

That greatly troubles Aftergood, who also leaks documents through his FAS newsletter Secrecy News and the FAS website. “They are essentially an outlaw operation – operating literally outside the framework of the law – and they have shown no willingness to refrain from publication of sensitive military technology.”

This could make the website a threat to security, Aftergood says. “It’s troubling that Wikileaks is beyond accountability to anyone. The better they are at what they do the more pressing it becomes that there is some kind of accountability. Otherwise Wikileaks itself could become a threat.”

First things first, says Assange. “When governments stop torturing and killing people, and when corporations stop abusing the legal system, then perhaps it will be time to ask if free speech activists are accountable.”