Category: wikileaks

Dining with spies

<originally a column for Webwereld – in Dutch – also on HuffPo UK>

Foto van Israelische plutonium core, gemaakt door klokkenluider

At their yearly conference the Dutch The National Cyber ??Security Center stated this week they want to listen more to the hacker community. It is fine that the government will at last listen to the people who have been ahead of the curve for decades, although the question remains – why it has waited to do this until 2013? Even if this had been done as recently as 5 or 10 years ago it would have saved an incredible amount of trouble and public money. I sincerely hope that the consultations with the hack(tivist) community are about more than just technical tricks, because most benefits to society are derived from discussing policy. For purely technical issues the usual consulting companies can always be hired and then simply pay hackers for their knowledge and advice, just like any other experts.

Meanwhile a big group of hackers were unhappy about the fact they were not welcome and organized an alternative meeting. If the NCSC’s intentions for the coming year work out in practice, next time this might not be necessary. On the community side, these invitations to the table should be dicussed openly and in detail (who sits at the table and wearing what hat). Because when community contributions and possible commercial interests get mixed up, things quickly degenerate into bickering and arguing. I speak from experience ;-). Nobody is "representative" of the entire hacker community. The NCSC will have to adjust to the idea that we have no centralised organisation with a head office where you can meet up with the CEO/director/top-dog.

Unfortunately I could attend neither meeting as I had a dinner engagement in London. This took place at the Embassy of Ecuador, where Julian Assange resides as a political refugee from US government extradition. This government has convened a secret grand jury to indict him for espionage (or just assasinate without process – a perennial favourite). This despite the fact he has violated no US law – journalism is still just about allowed. The small Embassy of Ecuador in London is now probably one of the best guarded places on earth, both visible (police-trailer-with-antennae) as well as invisible surveillance.

The dinner was held in preparation for the presentation of the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence held the next day at the prestigious Oxford Union Society. This prize is awarded annually to someone who has played an important role in the field of intelligence, peace and human rights. Some former prize-winners and organisers gathered in London ahead of the ceremony to visit Julian Assange (another former winner) as he can not leave the embassy property without risking a one-way trip to Cuba.

The winner this year was Dr. Thomas Fingar, who in 2007 was responsible for coordinating the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. Despite enormous political pressure on him to produce a desirable response, Dr. Fingar did his job and analysed the facts. The study emphatically concluded that since 2003 Iran had abandoned a nuclear weapons program. In his memoirs Governor G.W. Bush (the title of president "elected") admitted this report made it impossible for him to "use the US military to deploy against Iran" – you can hear the disappointed tone. Dr Fingar’s integrity saved lives, in this case potentially millions of Iranians and others in the region.

The sober (in terms of both atmosphere and alcohol) portion of the dinner was spent on planning the ceremony. After both the planning and several bottles had been dealt with, the conversation turned to the situation in the embassy. Naturally such a group will then speculate about eavesdropping by the former colleagues of tablemates Ray McGovern (CIA), Thomas Drake (NSA), Coleen Rowley (FBI), Annie Machon (MI5) and Ann Wright (US Army). Bugging devices in the walls and the ceiling through very slowly and silently drilled holes? Laser beams on the windows? Directional microphones from across the street? Microwave radar?

Talking with a group of former spies and Julian Assange about all the different ways to be eavesdropped on is a sure-fire way to lose any and all illusions about privacy. Fortunately for now, such aggressive surveillance need only be of concern to people who visibly and effectively speak truth to power. The power of intimidation – the push-back – used against you also provides a good measure of your effectiveness as an activist (or journalist). "If you’re not getting arrested every now and then, you need to try harder". In the Netherlands we have too many reporters who write what others tell them to, and too few journalists who write what others tell them not to. Respect to the small group in the latter category.

The planned programme for the award ceremony would be brutally swept off the table the following day by the Board of Trustees of the Oxford Union. The promised live streaming of video (and posting on the youtube channel of the Union) was blocked at the last minute on vague grounds. Apparently a discussion between former intelligence insiders is threatening enough to suspend a centuries-long tradition of openness and academic freedom of speech. Clearer evidence of the need for Wikileaks can hardly be imagined.

Update: a video clip of the speech of Julian Assange during the awards ceremony last Wednesday by the Oxford Union has been put online. The background of the video (originally the helicopter video leaked in April 2010) is replaced by the logo of the Union (in some of the images filmed of the audience in the debating chamber you can still see the original display). The official reason is that they are worried about possible copyright claims from the Pentagon (on a video that shows how journalists, citizens and children were shot with anti-tank weapons made from depleted uranium). Update 2: Wikileaks has published its own version of the speech.

Footage of the speeches of half a dozen other attendees (including the recipient of the prize who was the point of the entire gathering) will hopefully follow as soon as possible.

The Real News Network has produced an overview of the event and its broader context. This will remain relevant to understanding current global poliics for a long time.


Xeroxing the war

In 1969, when the Vietnam War was in full swing,  a senior analyst at the U.S. Department of Defense was quietly copying a secret report about the war. This report, which ran to 7000 pages, covered the progress of the Vietnam war in exhaustive detail. The analyst intended to share this highly classified information with influential politicians and scientists, in the hope that it would quickly bring the war to an end.

That analyst was Daniel Ellsberg, a former officer of the Marine Corps who worked for RAND, the Pentagon think tank. As a result of his experiences in Vietnam and his meetings with conscientious objectors in the US, he became convinced that the war was wrong. With his insider’s knowledge, he already knew that it was militarily lost, but that the American government was misleading the people. Every day the Vietnam war took about eight hundred Vietnamese lives, more than two thirds of them civilians, and twenty American soldiers. Many more were seriously injured or maimed for life..

On June 13, 1971 The New York Times tried to publish a number of excerpts from these documents, but was blocked by the Nixon government through legal and political means. Senator Mike Gravel made a breakthrough by reading a large part of the document in the Senate. The reading of 4100 pages took a while, but the rules of the Senate do not allow a senator who is talking to be interrupted (the "filibuster"). Everything the Senator said automatically became part of the proceedings of the Senate and thus on the public record. The publication of this information was the beginning of the end of the Vietnam war and the start the process of withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Fast forward to 2010. The US is once again embroiled in unwinnable wars, launched on dubious grounds, that continue indefinitely without any clear strategy or goal. Every extra day that these wars continue, more civilians and soldiers die.

And now there are new people who leak secret information about the wars, in the hope that the resulting political pressure will bring them to a close. The Xerox technology in 1969 has been replaced by a global computer network that uses encryption to protect the identity of the whistleblowers. Even Wikileaks does not know their identities – this is safer for both the whistleblowers and Wikileaks.

But the media’s response is simply surreal. The bulk of the attention and the debate is about the Xerox machine – or at least the 21st century equivalent of it, the Wikileaks website. Questions such as "is WikiLeaks journalism?" and "should you be allowed to leak classified information?" are discussed in exhaustive detail by apparently intelligent media pundits – who with alarming regularity seem to have little understanding of the very technology they are discussing.

Iraq Deaths EstimatorThe first ‘big’ coup from Wikileaks, the “Collatoral Murder" video, led to a huge debate about the culpability of the helicopter pilots and whether or not it was reasonable for them to be able to distinguish between a camera and a grenade launcher. The key topic that was not discussed was the simple fact that the Pentagon had knowingly, for three years, lied to both Reuters and the families of the civilian casualties in Baghdad about the circumstances surrounding the shooting by an Apache helicopter, which was one kilometre away and which riddled two children with bullets from its cannon. The Pentagon made a statement in 2007 saying that it knew nothing of any injuries to children, even though it had been in possession of this video from day one and it leaves nothing to the imagination.

The deliberate lying from the start of the Iraq war continues to this day. The Dutch late night talk show, P&W, led the news on TV with "Dutchman involved in leaking attack video": that, after all, is news – apparently far more important than the fact that children were shot and there was a cover-up.

Wikileaks has already been the top story in the news for more than one week, and that’s a problem. The Xerox machine is not important. Illegal wars of aggression launched on the basis of lies are important. The torture of innocent citizens in secret prisons is important. Spying on UN diplomats is important. Messing about in the internal political decisions of other countries is important.

So why is the entire media is so busy with the Xerox machine and the person with his finger on the copy button? Dear journalists, you have been presented with a cornucopia of scoops, many of which make Watergate pale into insignifcance. If African dictators were doing the things Western countries are being accused of, they would be dragged in handcuffs to the International Court in The Hague. Get to work!


Weapons of mass distraction

On July 12, 2007 in Baghdad 12 civilians, including a Reuters photographer and his driver, were shot dead by a U.S. Apache helicopter. Because of the involvement of the Reuters staff, this became minor news and the Pentagon gave a statement on the circumstances surrounding the events: nine ‘rebels’ and two civilians were killed (the Reuters employees). That seemed to be end of the case. Reuters tried to research the circumstances of the shooting but was blocked by the U.S. government. A formal request for access to videos of the Apache helicopter and audio communication between the crew and ground troops was refused. At that time the story was a tiny blip on the news radar, and quickly forgotten. There have been over 100 journalists killed in Iraq since March 2003 and an estimated 700,000 to over 1.3 million civilians (the U.S. military sees no need to keep track of exactly how many – "we do not do body counts").

Nearly three years later the incident is known worldwide because of the online release of 38 minutes of video recorded by the Apache helicopter involved in the incident. The shortened version on Youtube has been viewed over 6 million times. For anyone who thinks the Iraq invasion was a good idea, watch the full 38 minutes. Twice. A wealth of supporting information is available at collateralmurder.com. On Dutch TV, activist and hacker extraordinaire Rop Gonggrijp was invited to give some background to the video. The anchor closed the item with the immortal words "well, it’s a good story." Former Chief of Staff General Hans Couzy had called the actions of the Apache crew a war crime one day earlier.

Immediately after the appearance of the video, heated debates erupted on a number of online forums. Was it reasonable or unreasonable to shoot? Or was just the first shooting reasonable and the second at the-bus-with-the-kids was not? The New York Times found it necessary for military experts to “explain”, and to suggest with detailed analysis that really nothing was wrong. The ‘rules of engagement” were followed and that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Similar discussion took place in a multitude of other places. Many arm-chair generals who anonymously claimed military expertise stated that the behaviour of the Apache pilots were quite normal. How a badly injured person without any visible weapons can be a threat to an armored Apache helicopter flying at least one kilometre away remains unclear to me (take the time difference between the Apache firing its gun and the impacting of the shells and multiply this by 800 meters per seconds). Luckily there are many veterans who honestly reveal that the Wikileaks video is unfortunately not exceptional.

But what was missing from virtually all discussion was the simple point that the original statement of the U.S. Army from 2007 was incorrect and that they must have known that. On the day of the attack itself, the Pentagon had the video that we have access to only now. So how come they said for years they did not know how the two children were injured, as the crystal-clear video images show that the Apache helicopter shot them and their father for no reason?

Apart from the specific tragedy of 12 dead civilians and two seriously injured children, it seems to me the main lesson of the WikiLeaks video is that we are still consistently being lied to. The case for war in Iraq was based on deliberate lies back in 2003 and it seems nothing has changed since then. To retain support in Europe for continuing the war in Afghanistan, the CIA has developed a great propaganda plan in which the fears and principles of certain demographics in each country will be manipulated.

In The Netherlands, the Davids Committee report on the Dutch support for the invasion of Iraq expertly avoided the most important question, "did we participate militarily?" by claiming that it found no evidence. It is unclear how hard they searched for that evidence, because more than enough has emerged in recent years. The easiest way to avoid annoying answers is still not to ask the question.

Soon on Wikileaks there will be a new video of a bombing in Granai, Afghanistan. Hopefully, the discussion will not be about what type of bombs we can better use next time.