WikiLeaks cables reveal US diplomats feared that 'elements of the security-legal establishments' in Britain beyond MI5 were resisting an inquiry into the murder of Patrick Finucane. Photograph: Reuters MI5 has said that it is prepared to hand over sensitive files on one of the most high-profile murders during the Northern Ireland Troubles carried out by loyalist gunmen working with members of the British security forces.
The offer in the case of the Pat Finucane, the well-known civil rights and defence lawyer murdered in front of his wife and three young children in 1989, is contained in confidential US embassy cables passed to WikiLeaks.
Supporters of Finucane welcomed the revelation of the offer last night as "highly significant" and believe it could pave the way for a fresh inquiry into the killing that would be acceptable to the family.
Owen Paterson, the Northern Ireland secretary, has told Finucane's widow that he will decide early next year whether to hold a hearing that could shine a new light on collusion between gunmen from the Ulster Freedom Fighters and members of the security forces. A refusal to hold such a hearing, which Paterson has questioned in the past, would prevent an examination of the MI5 files.
Finucane's supporters spoke out last night after leaked US embassy cables, published by WikiLeaks, showed that: • Bertie Ahern, the Irish prime minister between 1997 and 2008, told US diplomats that "everyone knows the UK was involved" in the murder.
• US diplomats feared that "elements of the security-legal establishments" in Britain beyond MI5 were fighting hard to resist an inquiry.
• Brian Cowen, the current Irish prime minister, warned that a failure to hold an inquiry could be a "deal breaker"...
The folks at Reddit have uncovered what appears to be WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's OKCupid dating profile. The uber-private Assange would never be an online dater, you say! But, the last time this user accessed the profile was way back in 2006, when Julian Assange wasn't the cable-dumping anti-hero he is today. Back then, he was just a danger-loving lonely boy. So, if this profile is The Real Him - and the pictures of him and the fake name "HarryHarrison" seem to suggest that it is - then what do we learn about the enigma of Julian Assange by examining the face he wanted to show the world? Or, at least, the face he showed the world he hoped to sleep with?
He is 87% slutty. Okay, we could have guessed that too. People never change. Anyway, he confirms it in his "self-summary:" "Want a regular, down to earth guy? Keep moving. I am not the droid you're looking for. Passionate and often pig headed activist intellectual seeks siren for love affair." And in the "Test" section, he came back "87% dominating, 87% slut." But also "Strong Democrat." On the "I'm Really Good At" section, he wrote "A gentleman never tells." So he's also kind of cheesy and gross.
He likes tough, dangerous girls. "I like women from countries that have sustained political turmoil," he wrote. "Western culture seems to forge women that are valueless and inane. OK. Not only women!"
Despite the fangirls, he gets lonely: "Although I am pretty intellectually and physically pugnacious I am very protective of women and children," he wrote. And while he said, "I have asian teengirl stalkers," he ceded: "I could adapt to anything except the loss of female company and carbon." (And carbon. Ha.)
But, mostly, the Julian Assange on OkCupid seems like any pretentious outcast looking for love on the Internet, if more arrogant and vaguely misogynist. It's clear, however, that even back in '06, he was pretty sure that he was heading toward serious international intrigue, as he was also seeking a siren for "occasional international conspiracy." How did he spend his time? "Changing the world through passion, inspiration and trickery," and "directing a consuming, dangerous human rights project which is, as you might expect, male dominated." As for the user name: "Harry Harrison is a scifi writer that was popular in the '70s and '80s for his Stainless Steel Rat character," reports a commenter at Reddit. "The SSR was an intergalactic criminal mastermind with a conscious who was too smart to get caught." So, Julian Assange: Still not really that much like us.
Governments had better get used to WikiLeaks and realise that feeding the public misleading drivel has become much harder.
Nations need secrets. They are fundamental to the preservation of national security. Democracy demands openness and governments dealing frankly and honestly with the people to whom they are accountable. If the point of national security is to preserve our open democratic society, we must start with a presumption of openness and ask what tests a document must meet to warrant the protection of a national security classification.
Obvious subject matter includes sensitive military technologies, the design and performance of military equipment, technical means of intelligence collection, human intelligence sources, intelligence priorities, defence science programs and priorities, the readiness state of elements of the Australian Defence Force and information about military operations. Release of any such material would enable a potential adversary to put counter-measures in place and/or improve the performance of their own forces.
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Material falling into these categories would be classified ''top secret'', ''secret'', ''confidential'' or ''restricted'' according to the consequences for national security if it were to be made public, ranging from ''exceptionally grave'' to not much.
In my younger days one of the attributes that would attract a ''confidential'' classification was that the information, if known, ''could cause administrative embarrassment''. In these days of freedom-of-information laws, a document could not as a matter of law be withheld on the grounds the information would cause administrative embarrassment - a point to be borne in mind in considering many of the WikiLeaks revelations.
Within this framework a security classification would apply to many diplomatic communications, but it cannot be justified by a desire to protect the exchange of scuttlebutt, or self-aggrandisement such as Kevin Rudd big-noting himself by referring to the French and German efforts in Afghanistan as ''organising folk-dancing festivals''.
Nor should national security classifications be used to conceal the real assessments and motives of the governments we elect.
Some striking examples of this have come to light in the past couple of days. One relates to the Chinese response to provocative and unnecessary commentary about China in the 2009 Defence white paper, which I understand was inserted at the behest of then prime minister Rudd. The Australian public was told from the defence minister down that China had no particular problems with this content. Now the WikiLeaks material reveals that in fact the paper's principal author was ''dressed down'' by the deputy director of foreign affairs in the Chinese Defence Ministry. No national security purpose was served by misleading the Australian public in this way.
Other leaks show that Rudd was less than frank about his attitude to US deployment of ballistic missile defences, publicly opposed but privately telling the US we were on board.
Perhaps the most serious case relates to the prospects for the war in Afghanistan. The stock line from Western governments is that they are optimistic, things are going well, perhaps not quite as well as we would like, but we are making progress. What we find from WikiLeaks is that the real assessment, no doubt shared by all our NATO allies, is quite different. In October 2008 Rudd told visiting US congressmen that the national security establishment in Australia was very pessimistic about the long-term prognosis for Afghanistan, a pessimism evident in a December 2009 cable reporting the views of Australia's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, former defence secretary Ric Smith, who referred to the ''train wreck'' the Australian Federal Police has to deal with in working with the Afghan National Police.
This deceptiveness is unconscionable. The situation it suggests is that all Western governments involved know the outlook in Afghanistan is bleak, but none is prepared to confess this to the public. They all cling on, feeding us their bromides, hoping that when the war is lost it will be on someone else's watch. Meanwhile, they attend the funerals, praise the fallen and comfort the families.
Such deceptiveness is not confined to the Rudd and Gillard governments. The Howard government was committed to the US invasion of Iraq by July 2002. Yet John Howard insisted right up to the eve of the March 2003 invasion that no decision had been taken on our participation.
This particular game is up - governments will sooner or later be outed when they say one thing to foreign governments and another to their public. The world is witnessing something like a collision between galaxies; the hot, swirling mass of secret diplomatic correspondence has come into collision with the rapidly changing and supremely adaptable mass of the internet. The latter will devour the former, and governments had better get used to that. The leaks are technology-driven, occurring because they can.
The consequences will not be confined to the foreign policy arena. In the hubris of power and their desire to stay in office solely for the purpose of being in office, modern governments routinely mislead us in two ways. They feed us an endless stream of misleading drivel manufactured by spin doctors, and they withhold information about their real agenda and other inconvenient truths the public has a right to know about. This is now much harder to sustain.
Julian Assange will no doubt pay a heavy price for his role in this inevitable development, but in the long sweep of history he will be seen more as hero than as villain.
Paul Barratt is a former intelligence analyst and a former secretary to the Australian Defence Department.
Researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands report that the LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) software used in pro-Wikileaks Anonymous attacks discloses the identity of the user.
If hacktivists use this tool directly from their own machines, instead of via anonymization networks such as Tor, the Internet address of the attacker is included in every Internet message being transmitted. In the tools no sophisticated techniques are used, such as IP-spoofing, in which the source address of others is used, or reflected attacks, in which attacks go via third party systems. The current attack technique can therefore be compared to overwhelming someone with letters, but putting your address at the back of the envelope. In addition, hacktivists may not be aware that international data retention laws require that commercial Internet providers store data regarding Internet usage for at least 6 months. This means that hacktivists can still be traced easily after the attacks are over.
2600 Magazine, a quarterly journal for the hacker community that has published since 1984, is speaking out against numerous media reports that hackers are responsible for a spate of attacks on numerous e-commerce corporations as part of the ongoing Wikileaks controversy.
Denial of service attacks against PayPal, Amazon, Visa, Mastercard, and other corporations and entities have been underway for the last few days, as widely reported in the mainstream media. Each of these targets had previously taken some sort of action against the whistleblower website wikileaks.org and its affiliates. The media reports almost invariably refer to "hackers" as being behind these actions. While there is great sympathy in the hacker world for what Wikileaks is doing, this type of activity is no better than the strong-arm tactics we are fighting against.
These attacks, in addition to being a misguided effort that doesn't accomplish very much at all, are incredibly simple to launch and require no technical or hacker skills. While writing such programs requires a good degree of ingenuity and knowledge of security weaknesses, this doesn't mean that everyone who runs them possesses the same degree of proficiency, nor should we necessarily believe people who claim to be doing this on behalf of the hacker community.
What the above named corporations have done to Wikileaks is inexcusable and constitutes a different sort of denial of service attack, one that is designed to eliminate an organization, an individual, or an idea. We find it inexplicable that donations can easily be made to hate groups and all sorts of convicted criminals through these same services, yet somehow a website that publishes leaked information - and which has never been charged or convicted of a crime - is considered unacceptable. We believe it's not the place of credit card companies or banks to judge the morality or potential threat level of anyone, let alone those who are following in the long tradition of journalists and free speech advocates worldwide.
The assault on Wikileaks must not be overshadowed by the recent denial of service attacks and these certainly must not be allowed to be associated with the hacker community. This will play right into the hands of those who wish to paint us all as threats and clamp down on freedom of speech and impose all kinds of new restrictions on the Internet, not to mention the fact that the exact same types of attacks can be used on "us" as well as "them." (Interestingly, it was only a week ago that "hackers" were blamed for denial of service attacks on Wikileaks itself. That tactic was ineffectual then as well.) Most importantly, these attacks are turning attention away from what is going on with Wikileaks. This fight is not about a bunch of people attacking websites, yet that is what is in the headlines now. It certainly does not help Wikileaks to be associated with such immature and boorish activities any more than it helps the hacker community. From what we have been hearing over the past 24 hours, this is a viewpoint shared by a great many of us. By uniting our voices, speaking out against this sort of action, and correcting every media account we see and hear that associates hackers with these attacks, we stand a good chance of educating the public, rather than enflaming their fears and assumptions.
There are a number of positive steps people - both inside and outside of the hacker community - can take to support Wikileaks and help spread information. Boycotts of companies that are trying to shut Wikileaks down can be very effective and will not win them any sympathy, as the current attacks on their websites are unfortunately doing. Mirroring Wikileaks is another excellent method of keeping the flow of information free. Communicating with friends, family, classes, workplaces, etc. is not only a way of getting the word out, but will also help to sharpen your skills in standing up for what you believe in. This is never accomplished when all one tries to do is silence one's opponent. That has not been, and never should be, the hacker way of dealing with a problem.
2600 Magazine has been publishing news, tutorials, and commentary by, about, and for the hacker community since 1984. We were sued in 2000 by the Motion Picture Association of America for linking to a website containing source code enabling Linux machines to play DVDs and thus became the first test case of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In a similar vein, we are supporting Wikileaks by linking to their existing website through wikileaks.2600.com. We've already changed where this address points to twice as Wikileaks sites have been taken down, and will continue to ensure that this link always manages to get to wherever Wikileaks happens to be. We hope people follow that link and support the existence of Wikileaks through whatever method is being publicized on their site.
He is one of the newest recruits to Operation Payback. In a London bedroom, the 24-year-old computer hacker is preparing his weaponry for this week's battles in an evolving cyberwar. He is a self-styled defender of free speech, his weapon a laptop and his enemy the US corporations responsible for attacking the website WikiLeaks.
He had seen the flyers that began springing up on the web in mid-September. In chatrooms, on discussion boards and inboxes from Manchester to New York to Sydney the grinning face of a Guy Fawkes mask had appeared with a call to arms. Across the world a battalion of hackers was being summoned.
"Greetings, fellow anons," it said beneath the headline Operation Payback. Alongside were a series of software programs dubbed "our weapons of choice" and a stark message: people needed to show their "hatred".
Like most international conflicts, last week's internet war began over a relatively modest squabble, escalating in days into a global fight.
Before WikiLeaks, Operation Payback's initial target was America's recording industry, chosen for its prosecutions of music file downloaders. From those humble origins, Payback's anti-censorship, anti-copyright, freedom of speech manifesto would go viral, last week pitting an amorphous army of online hackers against the US government and some of the biggest corporations in the world.
Charles Dodd, a consultant to US government agencies on internet security, said: "[The hackers] attack from the shadows and they have no fear of retaliation. There are no rules of engagement in this kind of emerging warfare."
The battle now centres on Washington's fierce attempts to close down WikiLeaks and shut off the supply of confidential US government cables. By Thursday, the hacktivists were routinely attacking those who had targeted WikiLeaks, among them icons of the corporate world, credit card firms and some of the largest online companies. It seemed to be the first sustained clash between the established order and the organic, grassroots culture of the net.
But the clash has cast the spotlight wider, on the net's power to act as a thorn not only in the side of authoritarian regimes but western democracies, on our right to information and the responsibility of holding secrets. It has also asked profound questions over the role of the net itself. One blogger dubbed it the "first world information war".
At the heart of the conflict is the WikiLeaks founder, the enigmatic figure of Julian Assange – lionised by some as the Ned Kelly of the digital age for his continued defiance of a superpower, condemned by his US detractors as a threat to national security.
Calls for Assange to be extradited to the US to face charges of espionage will return this week. The counteroffensive by Operation Payback is likely to escalate.
The targets include the world's biggest online retailer, Amazon – already assaulted once for its decision to stop hosting WikiLeaks-related material – Washington, Scotland Yard and the websites of senior US politicians. There is talk of infecting Facebook, which last week removed a page used by pro-WikiLeaks hackers, with a virus that spreads from profile to profile causing it to crash. No one seems certain where the febrile cyber conflict will lead, only that it has just begun...
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Mark Townsend, Paul Harris in New York, Alex Duval Smith in Johannesburg, Dan Sabbagh, Josh Halliday @'The Guardian'
