Oops, they did it again. WikiLeaks, the self-styled "multi-jurisdictional public service designed to protect whistleblowers, journalists and activists who have sensitive materials to communicate to the public," yesterday released tens of thousands of documents that they are calling the Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010. WikiLeaks calls it a "document set...written by soldiers and intelligence officers,and mainly describing lethal military actions involving the United States military, also include intelligence information, reports of meetings with political figures and related details."
Needless to say, lots of airtime, column inches and pixels have been used up analyzing what's in this material. There's some amazing stuff about the Taliban having heat-seeking missiles, the possible cover-up of civilian casualties and the potential whereabouts of Osama bin Laden over the past six years.
As usual, WikiLeaks is being tight-lipped about its source(s) for these documents.
This is the second time this year that WikiLeaks has made big headlines. Back in April, the group released a video called Collateral Murder, which showed a U.S. Apache helicopter crew attacking civilians in Iraq. Private Bradley Manning, an intelligence analyst with the U.S. Army, has been charged with leaking the video to WikiLeaks. Now, it looks like suspicion is also centering on Manning for this latest leak as well.
I spent the day talking to some smart people about this story for a radio piece teasing out the tech angles for the day job. Jim Lewis, who runs the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, contrasted The Pentagon Papers leak in the early 1970s with the WikiLeaks case.
"With The Pentagon Papers, you had one fellow, Daniel Ellsberg, smuggling paper out the building and giving it to a reporter. Now, in the WikiLeaks example, you have some unknown number of people who are able to contribute to a website that thousands, or even millions of people, can look at, right now."
And that contribution is kept fiercely anonymous by a convoluted network of Internet service providers, computer servers, hard drives, encryption and private, "virtual tunnels."
In this June 7, 2010 article from the New Yorker, Raffi Khatchadourian explains:
As it now functions, the Web site is primarily hosted on a Swedish Internet service provider called PRQ.se, which was created to withstand both legal pressure and cyber attacks, and which fiercely preserves the anonymity of its clients. Submissions are routed first through PRQ, then to a WikiLeaks server in Belgium, and then on to “another country that has some beneficial laws,” Assange told me, where they are removed at “end-point machines” and stored elsewhere. These machines are maintained by exceptionally secretive engineers, the high priesthood of WikiLeaks. One of them, who would speak only by encrypted chat, told me that Assange and the other public members of WikiLeaks “do not have access to certain parts of the system as a measure to protect them and us.” The entire pipeline, along with the submissions moving through it, is encrypted, and the traffic is kept anonymous by means of a modified version of the Tor network, which sends Internet traffic through “virtual tunnels” that are extremely private. Moreover, at any given time WikiLeaks computers are feeding hundreds of thousands of fake submissions through these tunnels, obscuring the real documents. Assange told me that there are still vulnerabilities, but “this is vastly more secure than any banking network.
Technology's not just changed the speed with which this stuff can come out, but also the quantity. One push of a button, and WikiLeaks put some 91,000 documents at the public's disposal. Colonel Richard Kemp, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, told the BBC:
"There's very little that can be kept secret these days...it's potentially damaging for our operational security, and it does restrict what you can do. I'm not saying we have to switch off the Internet and go back to the dark days, but I just think it's something military leaders will have to find new ways of dealing with."
But when so much can be leaked so quickly by so few people, "dealing with it" will be tricky. Manning is said to have gotten the Collateral Murder video by accessing an encrypted computer in a room with an access code restricted door. He reportedly downloaded the information onto a CD, while pretending to sing along, and then just walked out the door.
"The computers attached to that top secret network aren't supposed to have CD drives," says Noah Schachtman, who runs the Danger Room blog over at Wired. They're supposed to have no drives so you can't take any information off of them."
Schachtman reckons that the U.S. military, in the wake of this leak, will reassess computer security, and will also look at the process of getting, and keeping, a security clearance.
But in the end, all the technological fixes may not matter that much, says Schachtman.
"Security experts have long said that the most dangerous threat is the disgruntled insider, and that's what we seem to have hear. If a disgruntled soldier decides he's going to spill some secrets, it's pretty tough to stop him actually."
Most everyone I spoke with said they expected to see more leaks like this in the months and years ahead.
Credit: Cpl. James L. Yarboro
Tags: Computer Networking
comments ( )