Welcome Guest [Log In] [Register]
Add Reply
Wikileaks strikes back!
Topic Started: Aug 5 2010, 07:39 PM (722 Views)
Quasimodo

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100805/ap_on_hi_te/afghanistan_wikileaks

WikiLeaks posts huge encrypted file to Web


LONDON – Online whistle-blower WikiLeaks has posted a huge encrypted file named "Insurance" to its website, sparking speculation that those behind the organization may be prepared to release more classified information if authorities interfere with them.

At 1.4 gigabytes, the file is 20 times larger than the batch of 77,000 secret U.S. military documents about Afghanistan that WikiLeaks dumped onto the Web last month, and cryptographers say that the file is virtually impossible to crack — unless WikiLeaks releases the key used to encode the material.

(snip)

Some say the files could be the 15,000 or so intelligence reports which WikiLeaks says it's held back for vetting. Others, pointing to its enormous size, say it could be a compilation of the 260,000 classified diplomatic cables allegedly accessed by Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning.

(snip)

Cryptographers say that the file was likely made using a 256-bit encryption standard known as AES256, which the U.S. government and others employ to mask some of their most sensitive data.

"It is widely viewed as extremely strong," said crypotgraphy pioneer Whitfield Diffie, of Britain's Royal Holloway College. He said there were no known instances of anyone being able to beat the standard.

Kocher, of Cryptography Research, agreed, saying that the only conceivable way anyone outside of WikiLeaks could decode "Insurance" was if Assange and his colleagues had used a blatantly obvious password or experienced some kind of "catastrophic algorithm error."

"We're not going to find out what's in that file unless somebody reveals the key," Kocher said.

(snip)

Manning, currently jailed on suspicion of leaking classified material to WikiLeaks in a previous case, has been quoted as saying that the cables would expose "almost criminal political back dealings" and that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would "have a heart attack" when the files went public.

(snip)
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Quasimodo

Quote:
 
260,000 classified diplomatic cables allegedly accessed by Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning


Questions :

If it is possible to use an almost unbreakable code (as apparently Wikileaks is doing)--

then why haven't the State Dept. and the Army been using such encryption?

If they have been using it, then why do low-level clerks have access either to the code's key, or to the contents
of the information? And how does one single clerk get access to State Dept. messages between Washington and Kabul, Baghdad,
Islamabad, Kuwait, etc. etc. (assuming that to be the case)?

We may have some leaks, but we also appear to be using a leaky boat anyway.

Why has any sensitive information--such as the names of informants and cooperating Afghans--been committed
to computers (or even to paper) at all?





Edited by Quasimodo, Aug 5 2010, 07:47 PM.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Quasimodo

Quote:
 

At 1.4 gigabytes, the file is 20 times larger than the batch of 77,000 secret U.S. military documents about Afghanistan


And probably also much larger than 260,000 State Dept. cables.

(Who knows what else may be in there?)
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
kbp

With the tight holiday budget, I'll skip Christmas wishes and go straight to hoping for a 2012 surprise that Hillary and her Emperor will regret (so long as it does not endanger any of our military men).
Edited by kbp, Aug 5 2010, 08:57 PM.
Online Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
LTC8K6
Member Avatar
Assistant to The Devil Himself
Interesting development...

Something might go Boom!
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Quasimodo

Quote:
 
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/aug/5/pentagon-bars-staff-from-visiting-wikileaks-site/

Pentagon bars staff from visiting WikiLeaks site



The U.S. military is banning personnel from visiting the WikiLeaks website, which recently released more than 70,000 classified diplomatic and military messages on the long war in Afghanistan.

"[Department of the Navy] personnel should not access the WikiLeaks website to view or download the publicized classified information," said a July 29 message to sailors from the Navy's national security litigation law division. "Doing so would introduce potentially classified information on unclassified networks."

"There has been rumor that the information is no longer classified since it resides in the public domain. This is NOT true," said the message, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times.

Asked if the Pentagon is making the site off-limits, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told The Times that all four services "have put out such messages."

The orders seem to be the most far-reaching effort by the Pentagon in its ongoing effort to stop the release of classified information. The military is telling the troops they cannot even view what is publicly available, even though the WikiLeaks documents are on hundreds of websites.

(snip)


The above orders strike me as "dumb".. . it only serves to make the pentagon brass look
ridiculous, in the eyes of a generation of soldiers who have been raised with computers.

ETA: how many of the top brass (or our dottering senior senators, for that matter) regularly surf the Web or understand fully what the NET is? How many played computer games as kids? How many have practiced hacking skills? IOW, how out of touch are they with the
generation of soldiers they command? I think the above orders may suggest that they are a bit out of touch...)

Edited by Quasimodo, Aug 5 2010, 10:15 PM.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Quasimodo

Quote:
 
Pentagon demands return of leaked war documents
August 5, 2010 By The Associated Press ANNE GEARAN (AP National Security Writer)

(AP) — The Pentagon demanded Thursday that a website that solicits leaked government secrets cancel any plan to publish more classified military documents and pull back tens of thousands of secret Afghan war logs already posted on the Internet
.


Out of touch???
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
kbp

Sounds like a good cure for HIV also, just "pull back' all infections!
Edited by kbp, Aug 5 2010, 10:28 PM.
Online Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Quasimodo

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/08/chasing-wikileaks.html

AUGUST 5, 2010
CHASING WIKILEAKS
Posted by Raffi Khatchadourian

(snip)

Rather than treating WikiLeaks like a terrorist cell, the military is better off accepting that the Web site is a product of the modern information age, and that it is here to stay, in some form or another, no matter who is running it.

Thiessen’s argument calls to mind the music industry’s effort to shut down Napster—a Web site where recorded music could be traded and downloaded without regard to copyright—in the nineteen-nineties, in that it loses sight of the broader technological and cultural revolution that the Internet has brought to the exchange of information. In 2001, after a lengthy legal battle, the Recording Industry Association of America succeeded in forcing Napster offline, only to watch Napster’s services move to a number of other Web sites that were structured in a more decentralized way (pdf)—making the piracy of music even more diffuse and difficult to prosecute. Only recently has the industry grudgingly been adapting to file-sharing rather than fruitlessly seeking to eliminate it, and one can now find music executives who even speak of Napster as a lost opportunity for their industry.

Shutting WikiLeaks down—assuming that this is even possible—would only lead to copycat sites devised by innovators who would make their services even more difficult to curtail. A better approach for the Defense Department might be to consider WikiLeaks a competitor rather than a threat, and to recognize that the spirit of transparency that motivates Assange and his volunteers is shared by a far wider community of people who use the Internet. Currently, the government has its own versions of WikiLeaks: the Freedom of Information Act and the Mandatory Declassification Review. The problem is that both of these mechanisms can be grindingly slow and inconsistent, in part because the government appears to be overwhelmed by a vast amount of data that should never have been classified to begin with—a phenomenon known as “overclassification.”


(snip)

There is a simple lesson here: whatever the imperfections of WikiLeaks as a startup, its emergence points to a real shortcoming within our intelligence community. Secrets can be kept by deterrence—that is, by hunting down the people who leak them, as Thiessen proposes, and demonstrating that such behavior comes with real costs, such as prison time. But there are other methods: keep far fewer secrets, manage them better—and, perhaps, along the way, become a bit more like WikiLeaks. An official government Web site that would make the implementation of FOIA quicker and more uniform, comprehensive, and accessible, and that might even allow anonymous whistleblowers within federal agencies to post internal materials, after a process of review and redaction, could be a very good thing—for the public, and for the official keepers of secrets, too.



Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
chatham
Member Avatar

IMO, this is either an obama associated ploy to get the home country or someone really hates obama and his lies about ending the conflicts.

your choice.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Quasimodo

http://www.darkgovernment.com/news/biggest-threat-to-an-open-internet-u-s-intelligence-community/

Biggest Threat to an Open Internet: U.S. Intelligence Community

March 3, 2010

The biggest threat to the open internet is not Chinese government hackers or greedy anti-net-neutrality ISPs, it’s Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence.

McConnell’s not dangerous because he knows anything about SQL injection hacks, but because he knows about social engineering. He’s the nice-seeming guy who’s willing and able to use fear-mongering to manipulate the federal bureaucracy for his own ends, while coming off like a straight shooter to those who are not in the know.

(snip)

And now McConnell is back in civilian life as a vice president at the secretive defense contracting giant Booz Allen Hamilton. He’s out in front of Congress and the media, peddling the same Cybaremaggedon! gloom.

And now he says we need to re-engineer the internet.

We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options — and we must be able to do this in milliseconds. More specifically, we need to re-engineer the Internet to make attribution, geo-location, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable. The technologies are already available from public and private sources and can be further developed if we have the will to build them into our systems and to work with our allies and trading partners so they will do the same.

Re-read that sentence. He’s talking about changing the internet to make everything anyone does on the net traceable and geo-located so the National Security Agency can pinpoint users and their computers for retaliation if the U.S. government doesn’t like what’s written in an e-mail, what search terms were used, what movies were downloaded. . .

(snip)

Those enamored with the idea of “cyberwar” aren’t dissuaded by fact-checking.

They like to point to Estonia, where a number of the government’s websites were rendered temporarily inaccessible by angry Russian citizens. They used a crude, remediable denial-of-service attack to temporarily keep users from viewing government websites. (This attack is akin to sending an army of robots to board a bus, so regular riders can’t get on. A website fixes this the same way a bus company would — by keeping the robots off by identifying the difference between them and humans.) Some like to say this was an act of cyberwar, but if that was cyberwar, it’s pretty clear the net will be just fine.

In fact, none of these examples demonstrate the existence of a cyberwar, let alone that we are losing it.

But this battle isn’t about truth. It’s about power.

(snip)

But McConnell isn’t the only threat to the open internet.

Just last week the National Telecommunications and Information Administration — the portion of the Commerce Department that has long overseen the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — said it was time for it to revoke its hands-off-the-internet policy.

That’s according to a February 24 speech by Assistant Commerce Secretary Lawrence E. Strickling.

In fact, “leaving the Internet alone” has been the nation’s internet policy since the internet was first commercialized in the mid-1990s. The primary government imperative then was just to get out of the way to encourage its growth. And the policy set forth in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was: “to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation.”

This was the right policy for the United States in the early stages of the Internet, and the right message to send to the rest of the world. But that was then and this is now.


Now the NTIA needs to start being active to prevent cyberattacks, privacy intrusions and copyright violations, according to Strickling. And since NTIA serves as one of the top advisers to the president on the internet, that stance should not be underestimated.

Add to that — a bill looming in the Senate would hand the president emergency powers over the internet — and you can see where all this is headed. And let the past be our guide.

Following years of the NSA illegally spying on Americans’ e-mails and phone calls as part of a secret anti-terrorism project, Congress voted to legalize the program in July 2008. That vote allowed the NSA to legally turn America’s portion of the internet into a giant listening device for the nation’s intelligence services. The new law also gave legal immunity to the telecoms like AT&T that helped the government illegally spy on American’s e-mails and internet use. Then-Senator Barack Obama voted for this legislation, despite earlier campaign promises to oppose it.

As anyone slightly versed in the internet knows, the net has flourished because no government has control over it.

But there are creeping signs of danger.

Where can this lead? Well, consider England, where a new bill targeting online file sharing will outlaw open internet connections at cafes or at home, in a bid to track piracy.

(snip)

And it’s waging a psychological warfare campaign on the American people to make that so. The military industrial complex is backed by sensationalism, and a gullible and pageview-hungry media. Notable examples include the New York Times’s John “We Need a New Internet” Markoff, 60 Minutes’ “Hackers Took Down Brazilian Power Grid,” and the WSJ’s Siobhan Gorman, who ominously warned in an a piece lacking any verifiable evidence, that Chinese and Russian hackers are already hiding inside the U.S. electrical grid.

Now the question is: Which of these events can be turned into a Gulf of Tonkin-like fakery that can create enough fear to let the military and the government turn the open internet into a controlled, surveillance-friendly net.

What do they dream of? Think of the internet turning into a tightly monitored AOL circa the early ’90s, run by CEO Big Brother and COO Dr. Strangelove.

That’s what McConnell has in mind, and shame on The Washington Post and the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee for giving McConnell venues to try to make that happen — without highlighting that McConnell has a serious financial stake in the outcome of this debate.

Of course, the net has security problems, and there are pirated movies and spam and botnets trying to steal credit card information.

(snip)

The internet is a hack that seems forever on the edge of falling apart. For awhile, spam looked like it was going to kill e-mail, the net’s first killer app. But smart filters have reduced the problem to a minor nuisance as anyone with a Gmail account can tell you. That’s how the internet survives. The apocalypse looks like it’s coming and it never does, but meanwhile, it becomes more and more useful to our everyday lives, spreading innovation, weird culture, news, commerce and healthy dissent.

But one thing it hasn’t spread is “cyberwar.” There is no cyberwar and we are not losing it. The only war going on is one for the soul of the internet. But if journalists, bloggers and the security industry continue to let self-interested exaggerators dominate our nation’s discourse about online security, we will lose that war — and the open internet will be its biggest casualty.


Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Quasimodo

On another board, someone posted THIS:

*most likely* the Wikileaks guy prepared multiple "dead man switches". He knows he jumped the shark on this one. For example, he hacks into some obscure computer somewhere, and programs a simple instruction to email the password to the whole world on a certain date, or if something happens, or if something doesn't happen.

Just to illustrate, he may post some trivial ad on Craigslist, every week a different one, and only the computer knows what that ad must and must not contain to hold onto the key for another week. The algorithm may be simple enough to just remember, but any mistake (unverifiable if he is arrested and works under control) will result in the release of the key. With Craigslist's traffic it's impossible to detect a lone computer in Elbonia (or California, to that matter) that checks ads.

That's the whole idea of distribution of the encrypted material. The whole world can take its time to download the bits, and since nobody knows what's there it's largely safe in legal terms. For all we know, it might be the video of Hillary Clinton running under sniper fire in Bosnia :-)

All it takes to unlock is a tiny key; it's only 32 bytes, or 64 printable characters. It can be emailed, or mailed on a postcard, or shouted from rooftops, or spray-painted on a bridge, or anonymously posted anywhere on the Internet. It's trivial to write down and enter into the program that then decrypts the large file.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
abb
Member Avatar

Quasimodo
Aug 6 2010, 05:12 PM
On another board, someone posted THIS:

*most likely* the Wikileaks guy prepared multiple "dead man switches". He knows he jumped the shark on this one. For example, he hacks into some obscure computer somewhere, and programs a simple instruction to email the password to the whole world on a certain date, or if something happens, or if something doesn't happen.

Just to illustrate, he may post some trivial ad on Craigslist, every week a different one, and only the computer knows what that ad must and must not contain to hold onto the key for another week. The algorithm may be simple enough to just remember, but any mistake (unverifiable if he is arrested and works under control) will result in the release of the key. With Craigslist's traffic it's impossible to detect a lone computer in Elbonia (or California, to that matter) that checks ads.

That's the whole idea of distribution of the encrypted material. The whole world can take its time to download the bits, and since nobody knows what's there it's largely safe in legal terms. For all we know, it might be the video of Hillary Clinton running under sniper fire in Bosnia :-)

All it takes to unlock is a tiny key; it's only 32 bytes, or 64 printable characters. It can be emailed, or mailed on a postcard, or shouted from rooftops, or spray-painted on a bridge, or anonymously posted anywhere on the Internet. It's trivial to write down and enter into the program that then decrypts the large file.
Years ago, one of the better cold war spy thrillers I read was this one by Walter Wager. It was made into a Charles Bronson movie in the 70s. Read/watch whenever you get time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telefon
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Rusty Dog
Member Avatar

what does the base word "wiki" in wikipedia and wikileaks mean?
Online Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
abb
Member Avatar

Rusty Dog
Aug 7 2010, 08:04 AM
what does the base word "wiki" in wikipedia and wikileaks mean?
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wiki#Hawaiian

Etymology

From Proto-East-Polynesian witi
Verb

wiki

1. to hasten; quick, fast

* “wiki” in the Hawaiian Dictionary, Revised and Enlarged Edition, University of Hawaii Press, 1986
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous)
ZetaBoards - Free Forum Hosting
Join the millions that use us for their forum communities. Create your own forum today.
Learn More · Register Now
Go to Next Page
« Previous Topic · LIESTOPPERS UNDERGROUND · Next Topic »
Add Reply