- The story on the surface makes for a script for a new
Oliver Stone Hollywood thriller. A 39-year old Australian hacker holds
the President of the United States and his State Department hostage to
a gigantic cyber "leak," unless the President leaves Julian Assange
and his Wikileaks free to release hundreds of thousands of pages of sensitive
US Government memos. A closer look at the details, so far carefully leaked
by the most ultra-establishment of international media such as the New
York Times, reveals a clear agenda. That agenda coincidentally serves to
buttress the agenda of US geopolitics around the world from Iran to Russia
to North Korea. The Wikileaks is a big and dangerous US intelligence Con
Job which will likely be used to police the Internet.
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- It is almost too perfectly-scripted to be true. A discontented
22-year old US Army soldier on duty in Baghdad, Bradley Manning, a low-grade
US Army intelligence analyst, described as a loner, a gay in the military,
a disgruntled "computer geek," sifts through classified information
at Forward Operating Base Hammer. He decides to secretly download US State
Department email communications from the entire world over a period of
eight months for hours a day, onto his blank CDs while pretending to be
listening to Lady Gaga. In addition to diplomatic cables, Manning is believed
to have provided WikiLeaks with helicopter gun camera video of an errant
US attack in Baghdad on unarmed journalists, and with war logs from Iraq
and Afghanistan.
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- Manning then is supposed to have tracked down a notorious
former US computer hacker to get his 250,000 pages of classified US State
Department cables out in the Internet for the whole world to see. He allegedly
told the US hacker that the documents he had contained "incredible,
awful things that belonged in the public domain and not on some server
stored in a dark room in Washington, DC." The hacker turned him in
to US authorities so the story goes. Manning is now incommunicado since
months in US military confinement so we cannot ask him, conveniently. The
Pentagon routinely hires the best hackers to design their security systems.
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- Then the plot thickens. The 250,000 pages end up at the
desk of Julian Assange, the 39-year-old Australian founder of a supposedly
anti-establishment website with the cute name Wikileaks. Assange decides
to selectively choose several of the world's most ultra-establishment news
media to exclusively handle the leaking job for him as he seems to be on
the run from Interpol, not for leaking classified information, but for
allegedly having consensual sex with two Swedish women who later decided
it was rape.
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- He selects as exclusive newspapers to decide what is
to be leaked the New York Times which did such service in promoting faked
propaganda against Saddam that led to the Iraqi war, the London Guardian
and Der Spiegel. Assange claims he had no time to sift through so many
pages so handed them to the trusted editors of the establishment media
for them to decide what should be released. Very "anti-establishment"
that. The New York Times even assigned one of its top people, David E.
Sanger, to control the release of the Wikileaks material. Sanger is no
establishment outsider. He sits as a member of the elite Council on Foreign
Relations as well as the Aspen Institute Strategy Group together with the
likes of Condi Rice, former Defense Secretary William Perry, former CIA
head John Deutch, former State Department Deputy Secretary and now World
Bank head Robert Zoellick among others.
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- Indeed a strange choice of media for a person who claims
to be anti-establishment. But then Assange also says he believes the US
Government version of 9/11 and calls the Bilderberg Group a normal meeting
of people, a very establishment view.
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- Not so secret cables
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- The latest sensational Wikileaks documents allegedly
from the US State Department embassies around the world to Washington are
definitely not as Hillary Clinton claimed "an attack on America's
foreign policy interests that have endangered innocent people." And
they do not amount to what the Italian foreign minister, called the "September
11 of world diplomacy." The British government calls them a threat
to national security and an aide to Canada's Prime Minister calls on the
CIA to assassinate Assange, as does kooky would-be US Presidential hopeful
Sarah Palin.
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- Most important, the 250000 cables are not "top secret"
as we might have thought. Between two and three million US Government employees
are cleared to see this level of "secret" document, and some
500,000 people around the world have access to the Secret Internet Protocol
Network (SIPRnet) where the cables were stored. Siprnet is not recommended
for distribution of top-secret information. Only 6% or 15,000 pages of
the documents have been classified as even secret, a level below top-secret.
Another 40% were the lowest level, "confidential", while the
rest were unclassified. In brief, it was not all that secret.
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- Most of the revelations so far have been unspectacular.
In Germany the revelations led to the removal of a prominent young FDP
politician close to Guido Westerwelle who apparently liked to talk too
much to his counterpart at the US Embassy. The revelations about Russian
politics, that a US Embassy official refers to Putin and Medvedev as "Batman
and Robin," tells more about the cultural level of current US State
Department personnel than it does about internal Russian politics.
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- But for anyone who has studied the craft of intelligence
and of disinformation, a clear pattern emerges in the Wikileaks drama.
The focus is put on select US geopolitical targets, appearing as Hillary
Clinton put it "to justify US sanctions against Iran." They claim
North Korea with China's granting of free passage to Korean ships despite
US State Department pleas, send dangerous missiles to Iran. Saudi Arabia's
ailing King Abdullah reportedly called Iran's President a Hitler.
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- Excuse to police the Internet?
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- What is emerging from all the sound and Wikileaks fury
in Washington is that the entire scandal is serving to advance a long-standing
Obama and Bush agenda of policing the until-now free Internet. Already
the US Government has shut the Wikileaks server in the United States though
no identifiable US law has been broken.
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- The process of policing the Web was well underway before
the current leaks scandal. In 2009 Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller and
Republican Olympia Snowe introduced the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (S.773).
It would give the President unlimited power to disconnect private-sector
computers from the internet. The bill "would allow the president to
'declare a cyber-security emergency' relating to 'non-governmental' computer
networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat." We can
expect that now this controversial piece of legislation will get top priority
when a new Republican House and the Senate convene in January.
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- The US Department of Homeland Security, an agency created
in the political hysteria following 9/11 2001 that has been compared to
the Gestapo, has already begun policing the Internet. They are quietly
seizing and shutting down internet websites (web domains) without due process
or a proper trial. DHS simply seizes web domains that it wants to and posts
an ominous "Department of Justice" logo on the web site. See
an example at http://torrent-finder.com. Over 75 websites were seized
and shut in a recent week. Right now, their focus is websites that they
claim "violate copyrights," yet the torrent-finder.com website
that was seized by DHS contained no copyrighted content whatsoever. It
was merely a search engine website that linked to destinations where people
could access copyrighted content. Step by careful step freedom of speech
can be taken away. Then what?
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- BBCNews, Siprnet: Where the leaked cables came from,
29 November, 2010, accessed in http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11863618
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- Ken Dilanian, Inside job: Stolen diplomatic cables show
U.S. challenge of stopping authorized users, Los Angeles Times, November
29, 2010, accessed in http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sc-dc-1130-hackers-20101129,0,6716809.story
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