WikiLeaks Sues Guardian, Cables Controversy Grows

WikiLeaks alleges that the newspaper violated its confidentiality agreement by publishing a password to a file containing unredacted versions of 251,000 State Department cables.

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WikiLeaks on Thursday announced that its suing the
Guardian
newspaper in Britain for facilitating the leak of unredacted U.S. diplomatic cables.
A
Guardian
journalist has negligently disclosed top secret WikiLeaks decryption passwords to hundreds of thousands of unredacted unpublished U.S. diplomatic cables, according to a
statement
released by WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks has commenced pre-litigation action against the
Guardian
and an individual in Germany who was distributing the
Guardian
passwords for personal gain, it said. In particular, WikiLeaks alleged that the
Guardian
violated the confidentiality agreement that it signed with the whistleblowing group, which dictated that the cables be published by groups in exchange for their local knowledge, which would be used to remove the names of persons reporting unjust acts to U.S. embassies.
The suit marks an abrupt change in the tenor of WikiLeaks with the
Guardian
, which along with the
New York Times
,
Der Spiegel
,
Le Monde
and
El Pais
were selected by the group to help study, redact, release, and publicize the
sensitive diplomatic cables
.
The
Guardian
, however, has denied the WikiLeaks allegations. Its nonsense to suggest the
Guardian
s WikiLeaks book has compromised security in any way, according to a
statement
released by the paper.
Our book about WikiLeaks was published last February, according to the statement. It contained a password, but no details of the location of the files, and we were told it was a temporary password which would expire and be deleted in a matter of hours.
The password in question--ACollectionOfDiplomaticHistorySince_1966_ToThe_PresentDay#--appears on page 148 of
WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assanges War On Secrecy
written by David Leigh and Luke Harding, and published in February 2011.
Earlier this week, news reports cited rumors that WikiLeaks had
lost control
of a password-protected archive containing unredacted versions of all 251,287 cables in its possession. Rumors also suggested that the password was circulating separately, and available via the Internet. Some news reports cited WikiLeaks rival
OpenLeaks
, founded by WikiLeaks defector Daniel Domscheit-Berg, as the source of the tip-offs. A resident of Germany, he may be the individual in Germany mentioned by WikiLeaks as a target of its pre-litigation action.
Over the past nine months, just a fraction of the 251,287 cables that WikiLeaks obtained had been released. But the availability via BitTorrent of the cables.csv file, containing all of the cables, as well as accessibility of the password, led WikiLeaks to last week to suddenly release 134,000 new cables. Those cables included the names of at least 100 diplomatic sources that had been marked for special protection, meaning that the State Department didnt want the names to be disclosed publicly.
WikiLeaks said that its known of the existence of the BitTorrent file, as well as the passwords for accessing it, for the past month, but avoided commenting on the matter, in an attempt to not draw attention to the passwords.
WikiLeaks blames the
Guardian
for causing it to rush its cable-release program. Over time WikiLeaks has been building up, and publishing, the complete Cablegate library--the most significant political document ever published, it said. The mammoth task of reading and lightly redacting what amounts to 3,000 volumes or 284 million words of global political history is shared by WikiLeaks and its partners. That careful work has been compromised as a result of the recklessness of the
Guardian
.
These days, of course,
data breaches
--or in this case at least, loss of data control--are nothing new. Furthermore, numerous breaches can be traced to insiders who release, maliciously or inadvertently, sensitive information. Accordingly, was it reasonable for WikiLeaks to expect that it could maintain full control over a sensitive cache of all of the cables, many of which its already shared with more than 90 media and human rights groups worldwide? Perhaps the group can consider itself lucky that it managed to control its publication schedule for as long as nine months.
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WikiLeaks Sues Guardian, Cables Controversy Grows