After setting up an account on Zotero, a free cloud-based research tool that allows you to gather, organize and share articles and research, I begin my search using Google News for three news media sources that focus on Wikileaks. There were thousands of search results, so I decided to utilize the advanced search function which tells Google to return news articles by specific location. As this activity specifies one Canadian, one American, and one international news piece, I wanted to find articles that were from uncommon news sources. I.e.: No articles from the Globe and Mail or the New York Times. Here are my findings:
Canada
“US saw mafia-ridden Italian region as ‘failed state,’ according to WikiLeaks cable” - The Canadian Press
A United States diplomatic cable labelled the Italian state of Calabria a ‘failed state’ that is comprised of corrupt politicians, drug trafficking, extortion, money laundering and other gang-related activities. The cable, from 2008, was written before the Italian government started cracking down on gang-related crimes. A spokeswoman from the U.S. Embassy in Rome said that the cables were woefully out of date and much progress has been made since they were written.
While the cable might be out of date, it still points to the fact that the United States called Calabria a ‘failed state’. While the cable doesn’t ‘attack’ Italy politically, the article includes a quote from Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, who took office in May 2008 after Premier Silvio Berlusconi came to power. Maroni points to the progress being made, dismissing the significance of the cables. Italy has admitted in their response to this leak that there were, and still are problems present in Calabria, and that they are working hard to fix those problems.
United States
“FBI searching for WikiLeaks’ ‘hacktivists’ allies” – The Miami Herald
The FBI has served over 40 search warrants in the United States as part of an investigation on the hacking of websites belonging to corporations that stopped providing services to Wikileaks. The FBI plans to prosecute for their actions that ultimately support Wikileaks. The attacks, which took down the websites of Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal, among others, did no long term damage and only lasted for a few hours at the most. Before these warrants were served, the only known criminal investigation resulting from the leak of the cable documents was the one that ties Bradley Manning to the actual leaking of the files.
In my opinion, this article seemed very neutral. The article does not discredit or support the FBI or the individual hackers. It does say, however, that FBI officials were unavailable for comment, meaning the organization probably did not return calls for more information from the Miami Herald. The article does not comment on Wikileaks itself, but mentions that the UK has arrested five teenagers involved in the hacking. There seems to be no political imbalance in this article.
Azerbaijan
“Swiss whistleblower hands bank data to WikiLeaks” – The Azeri Press Agency
Rudolf Elmer, a former Swiss private banker with Julius Baer, handed over private data on hundreds of offshore bank account holders to Wikileaks. Elmer states that he wants to bring financial abuses and hidden offshore accounts to the public’s attention. Wikileaks will take a couple of weeks to leak the data, and may hand some of the data over to Britain’s Serious Fraud Office, Julian Assange was quoted as saying. The bank released a statement indicating that the goal of Elmer’s activities is to discredit Julius Baer as well as clients in the eyes of the public.
This article seems very anti-Julius Baer, indicating that the bank uses corrupt methods to hide offshore accounts. It also seems to have a pro-Wikileaks stance, as it indicates that Wikileaks may hand over the data to the British Serious Fraud Office, indicating that the organization will do good things by bringing this information to government authorities. The article includes a quote that states Julius Baer has denounced Elmer and the leaking of the files, but it seems like the author did not allow the bank to defend itself in this article.
Articles Cited (Using Zotero)
Mark Seibel. “FBI searching for WikiLeaks’ ‘hacktivists’ allies.” The Miami Herald 27 Jan. 2011. Web. 28 Jan. 2011.
Nicole Winfield. “US saw mafia-ridden Italian region as ‘failed state,’ according to WikiLeaks cable.” The Canadian Press 13 Jan. 2011. Web. 27 Jan. 2011.
Unknown Author. “Swiss whistleblower hands bank data to WikiLeaks.” The Azeri Press Agency 18 Jan. 2011. Web. 28 Jan. 2011.
One thing I find interesting about Wikileaks is that governments haven’t really done anything extreme in terms of blocking access to Wikileaks and the information it has published. Perhaps it is because the damage has already been done, and blocking all access to the website and its contents would only make governments look as if they are trying to cover up more.
People’s Republic of China
Wikileaks claims that the People’s Republic of China has blocked all traffic to websites that contain the word ‘Wikileaks’ in the url web address
Australia
The Australian Communications and Media Authority added the Wikileaks website to a list of sites that will be unaccessible by all Australians if internet filtering becomes implemented. As of late November, they have removed Wikileaks from the list
Thailand
Wikileaks is currently being censored by the Centre for the Resolution of the Emergency Situation in Thailand. The centre is also censoring 40,000 other websites due to political situations and instabilities in the region
United States
The United States Library of Congress as well as all U.S. federal government staff has no access whatsoever. The United States State Department has also warned Columbia University students that accessing Wikileaks and partaking in online discussion about its information would have repercussions and “would call into question (their) ability to deal with confidential information”
Canada
It seems that Canada has been keeping fairly quiet about Wikileaks, and have not limited access or blocked the website. Information regarding government employee monitoring or blocking is unknown. However, Canadian Internet Service Providers are filtering the wikileaks.ch based in Switzerland. Bell and its subsidiaries – MTS, Sasktel, and Access Telecom have denied any filtering
Iceland
While Julian Assange was working on releasing video footage in Iceland, his volunteers came under heavy surveillance. Assange stated that police and foreign intelligence agencies used hidden photography to spy on the volunteers. One member of Wikileaks was held by the police for 21 hours, and another posted on Twitter that his computers were seized
I found that trying to find information about how governments are censoring Wikileaks to be rather frustrating. There doesn’t seem to be too much information out there about countries other than the United States. While we know that several American corporations (Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Amazon, etc) have blocked or banned any transactions with Wikileaks due to pressure from the U.S. government, we don’t exactly know the steps they are taking to censor it to the public.
It seems that if governments really want to censor Wikileaks, they will have to completely shut off access to the entirety of the Internet somehow, and we know that isn’t going to happen.
I have embedded something I made using Prezi, which creates presentation layouts and designs.
Acquiring the Cablegate documents that have been released so far was a nightmare. It is amazing that these files are so difficult to find and sort, seeing as the cables have been mentioned on the Internet and in the media so frequently. My first attempt at downloading the cables started from the link posted on one of my classes webpages, which lead me to a page titled “The Secret US Embassy Cables”.
After scrolling around the subsequent pages, I noticed that the website actually allowed you to download all of its content in a single archive, which I assumed would be a .zip or .rar file. After clicking the link, it brought me to a 404 File not Found page. What I did notice, however, was that the URL ended in .torrent, meaning the single archive file is actually in .torrent form.
Since .torrent files are commonly used to share files, sometimes large files anonymously, I simply typed in the file name (cablegate-201101132206.7z.torrent) into Google. The search brought back no promising results, bringing back sketchy websites that require you to pay to access the file. No thanks.
I then searched for the .torrent file directly on The Pirate Bay, and again the search brought back no results. I then searched “Cablegate” on The Pirate Bay, which brought back 148 files. It seemed that ~5MB files were being uploaded daily from anonymous users. I then torrented all the files that were available (2010/11/28 – 2011/01/08) using Transmission.
The files downloaded incredibly quickly, but were compressed with a .7z file extension. I then downloaded The Unarchiver, which is an archive utility for Mac OSX. The files uncompressed easily and the entire process of downloading the torrents and then unarchiving them took approximately fifteen minutes. I then dumped all the files into a folder. The folder totalled 6.45 GB, which seems huge for a bunch of .html/text files. The total number of files in the folder equates to a whopping 167,214 files, which is odd seeing as only 2428 cables have been released as of today, January 16th 2011.
The files are formatted in .html and occasionally .txt, and are labelled with numbers (cablegate-201012041409). This is extremely frustrating because you cannot search using keywords. When I searched the title TERRORISM FINANCE: REQUEST FOR POSTS ASSISTANCE, which is the title of a cable on the Cable Viewer, Mac OSX returned 132 results.
Clearly, these files seem to be in no organizational or hierarchical structure, and are not properly searchable. In order to use these files, they need to be sorted through, renamed, and formatted in a way that allows for easy viewing. The Guardian has sorted the cables using Google Fusion Tables, but does not allow users to actually read the cables.
To sum up, trying to access these files was difficult since the link to the Wikileaks full site archive is broken. Once downloaded through torrents, the files are difficult to read and use as there is not a suitable way to search through the documents.
Here are several Wikileaks milestones that anticipate in some way Wikileaks and Cablegate. These are for an MA class at McMaster University.
June 13th, 1971 – Release of the Pentagon Papers
The New York Times publishes the first article in a series of classified documents termed the Pentagon Papers, given to them by former U.S. Military analyst Daniel Ellsberg
July 3rd, 1971 – Julian Assange is born
Internet activist Julian Assange is born in Townsville, Queensland, Australia
March 25th, 1995 – First wiki developed
Ward Cunningham launches the world’s first wiki and calls it wikiwikiweb. The website is named after a shuttle bus at Honolulu International Airport called the ‘Wiki Wiki Shuttle’
July 1999 – Leaks.org is registered
Assange registers leaks.org but says he then did nothing with it
October 4th, 2006 – Wikileaks.org is registered
Wikileaks.org is registered and claims to be founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists
December 2006 – Wikileaks posts its first document
Wikileaks posts a leaked classified document that involves a decision to assassinate government officials signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a Somali political figurehead. The document leads to a story about corruption by the family of the former Kenyan leader Daniel arap Moi, and is published by The Guardian
January 2007 – Wikileaks preparing for very large document leak
Wikileaks states that it is preparing to publish over 1.2 million leaked documents on its website
February 18th, 2008 – Wikileaks faces Government censorship
A California judge rules that the company hosting the domain of Wikileaks must shut down public access to the website
March 2008 – Release of Scientology documents
Wikileaks releases documents originating from the Church of Scientology’s Office of Special Affairs. The documents include the official procedures of how to detect ‘thetans’ in the human body
September 2008 – Release of Sarah Palin’s Emails
Wikileaks leaks a series of personal emails belonging to Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, after an online hacker group compromised her Yahoo! account
November 28th, 2008 – Wikileaks calls for help
Wikileaks sends an email to its subscribers asking them to tell Wikileaks their ‘most radical ideas for our vision of justice and how they might be economically, politically, legally, technically and socially sustained’
June 2009 – Wikileaks claims to have many volunteers
Wikileaks claims to have over 1,200 volunteers working for them, and lists an advisory board that includes Assange and eight others
November 25th, 2009 – Release of 9/11 pager messages
Wikileaks posts over half a million pager messages that were sent on September 11th, 2001
December 24th, 2009 – Shortage of funding
Wikileaks announces that is experiencing a shortage of funds and removes all access to its website, including material and leaked documents that were previously available
July 25th, 2010 – Release of Afghan War Logs
Wikileaks releases 91,000 war documents relating to the Afghanistan War. The documents are written by soldiers and intelligence officers and include lethal actions involving the U.S. Military
October 15th, 2010 – Loss of funding
The Guardian reports that all funding to Wikileaks has been blocked
November 28th, 2010 – Release of U.S. diplomatic cables
Wikileaks releases over 250,000 U.S. classified documents to several news agencies
November 29th, 2010 – Move to Amazon
Wikileaks moves their website to Amazon Web Services after a denial of service attack took the site down for a couple hours the day before
December 1st, 2010 – Amazon drops Wikileaks
Amazon.com stops hosting the Wikileaks website under pressure from Senator Lieberman and the U.S. government