News
Saturday, September 03, 2011
WikiLeaks reveals all, media groups criticise moveLONDON: WikiLeaks disclosed its entire archive of US State Department cables on Friday, much if not all of it uncensored - a move that drew stinging condemnation from major newspapers, which in the past collaborated with the anti-secrecy group’s efforts to expose corruption and double-dealing.
WikiLeaks’ decision to post the 251,287 cables on its website makes potentially sensitive diplomatic sources available to anyone, anywhere at the stroke of a key. American officials have warned that the disclosures could jeopardise vulnerable people such as opposition figures or human rights campaigners.
A joint statement published on the Guardian’s website said that the British publication and its international counterparts - The New York Times, France’s Le Monde, Germany’s Der Spiegel and Spain’s El Pais - “deplore the decision of WikiLeaks to publish the unredacted State Department cables, which may put sources at risk”.
Previously, international media outlets - and WikiLeaks itself - had redacted the names of potentially vulnerable sources, although the standard has varied and some experts warned that even people whose names had been kept out of the cables were still at risk.
But now many, and possibly even all, of the cables posted to the WikiLeaks website carry unredacted names.
In an interview with the AP earlier this week, former US State Department official PJ Crowley warned that the new release could be used to intimidate activists in authoritarian countries. In a series of messages on Twitter, the group suggested that it had no choice but to publish the archive because copies of the document were already circulating online following a security breach.
WikiLeaks has blamed the Guardian for the blunder, pointing out that a sensitive password used to decrypt the files was published in a book put out by David Leigh, one of the paper’s investigative reporters.
But the Guardian, Leigh and others have rejected the claim. Although the password was in fact published in Leigh’s book about seven months ago, Guardian journalists have suggested that the real problem was that WikiLeaks posted the encrypted file to the Web by accident and that Assange never bothered to change the password needed to unlock it. In their statement, the Guardian’s international partners lined up to slam the 40-year-old former computer hacker.
“We cannot defend the needless publication of the complete data - indeed, we are united in condemning it,” the statement read. It added, “The decision to publish by Julian Assange was his, and his alone.” ap
Courtesy www.dailytimes.com.pk