Thursday, December 9, 2010

Comprehensive Wikileaks Timeline



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As mentioned before, "Wikileaks was not a story, but an ongoing continuum of stories . . . It's a story that is destined to keep on giving." In that short time since that post, it has indeed done just that.
Wikileaks -- its actions and the reactions to them, the implications of what has happened around the whistle-blowing site -- has given birth to an extremely complex and ever-changing situation. In lieu of summing up a situation that has not come to a tidy conclusion, we have put together a full timeline of Wikileaks news and analysis from our site. Read through from our earliest coverage (February, 2008) to our most recent (today) and you should have a reasonably complete sense of why Wikileaks is important.

"A very interesting site for whistle blowers called WikiLeaks is facing government censorship as today a California judge reportedly ruled that the company in control of the site's domain name must shut down public access to the entire site."
"Wikileaks.org, a website that publishes classified, confidential, censored or otherwise secret documents for anyone to see, put out a call last night for help in advancing the site beyond its remarkable early success. Just a week after publishing one of its most high profile documents yet, the organization sent an email to subscribers last night asking them to "tell us your most radical ideas for our vision of justice and how they might be economically, politically, legally, technically and socially sustained."



"The group will give publishers the opportunity to embed a Wikileaks submission form on their websites. The idea is that users will be able to anonymously upload material, and Wikileaks will verify it. In return for embedding the form, the publisher will receive the verified documents under embargo and will be the first to publish the story."
"Earlier this morning, Wikileaks began to post pager messages that were sent on September 11, 2001. According to Wikileaks, these messages were intercepted by an 'organization which has been intercepting and archiving US national telecommunications since prior to 9/11.'"
"If you woke up today thinking this would finally be the day you would leak that top-secret document, you might want to hold off for another day. Wikileaks, the Internet home for whistleblowers world-wide, has temporarily shut its doors to concentrate on fundraising."
"Iceland establishes strong free-speech laws. In order to become a "new media haven" Iceland has passed the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative proposal, co-written by whistle-blower site WikiLeaks."
"'The reports, while written by soldiers and intelligence officers mainly describing lethal military actions involving the United States military, also include intelligence information, reports of meetings with political figures, and related detail.'"
"While politicians, pundits, military, and journalists assess and debate the fallout from Wikileaks' release of the 'Afghan War Diary' - the legality and ethics of Wikileaks, its impact on the war efforts, the rise of the 'world's first stateless news organization' - a number of developers are diving right into the 91,000 some odd classified documents and seeing what they can do with the data."
"A group of hackademics took the Wikileaks activity data from the Afghanistan war and mapped it, creating a video visualization of the events. The 91,000 documents track events including friendly fire and civilian injuries and death over the course of the last six years."
"Gawker has had enough of the tight-lipped Wikileaks and its elusive founder, Julian Assange, it would seem. According to a blog post this morning, the media outlet decries the website to be 'about as open as North Korea.' In response, it has launched the hilariously-named Wikileakileaks, 'your source for Wikileaks-related secrets, documents and rumors.'"
"Wikileaks came to prominence after it released 91,000 documents related to the Afghanistan War. Now, officials inside the organization have begun leaving in protest over its founder's insistence on releasing nearly 400,000 similar documents from the Iraq War."
"After being dropped by Moneybooker, the e-commerce company that processes the organizations donations, Assange accused it of collusion in a U.S. government conspiracy to destroy him."
"Take a look this morning at Reuters, the BBC, CNN or any number of other media sources and you'll read that WikiLeaks, the controversial wiki-based site for whistle-blowers, is about to release nearly half a million records pertaining to the Iraq War. Wikileaks says that this news has been reported in more than 700 articles across the Web and that it's all based on 'a single tabloid blog at Wired Magazine.'"
"The raid comes as Wikileaks is preparing to release 15,000 classified documents related to the war in Afghanistan, which the U.S. government is anxious to prevent. PRQ denied that Wikileaks was the subject of the raid, and Wikileaks has not made any statement yet."
"Wikileaks, the wiki-based site for whistle-blowers, has been facing increasing pressure from the U.S. government since its July release of more than 90,000 war documents from the war in Afghanistan. Today, the Guardian is reporting that this pressure has finally hit where it hurts the most - in the pocket - as the site's funding has been blocked."
"Wikileaks' leak of its approximately 400,000 Iraq military field reports to major media outlets has turned into a torrent today. Like the whistle-blower outfit's release of its 91,000 Afghanistan war documents, it gave the MSM a chance to look, and interpret, before releasing any information to the public."
"As most readers probably know by now, Julian Assange, Wikileaks' leader, has gone ahead with the release of 391,832 secret documents related to the war in Iraq. These documents cover most of the period between May 2004 and March 2009."
"Anonymous whistle-blowing outfit Wikileaks has been criticized for insufficiently redacting (covering or deleting) the names of civilians in its release of Afghanistan war documents. Everyone from the more predictable U.S. officials to non-profits like Reporters Without Borders to Wikileaks' own staff has faulted its founder, Julian Assange for a lack of concern for people's lives. As unlikely as it might seem, given apparent Assange's high-handedness with media and co-workers and many conspiracy theories, he seems to have heard the complaints. In the latest release, that of almost 400,000 documents related to the Iraq War, redactions were carried out."
"Back in September, we reported that whistle-blowing site Wikileaks had hemorrhaged a number of prominent personnel. Now some of those who've left have begun assembling an organization designed to directly compete with its parent. The alleged high-handedness of the organization's founder, Julian Assange, and the beliefs of some of his co-workers' belief that he has not properly protected lives by carefully redacting the Iraq documents, has created a rift and the rift has created and opportunity."
"Hours prior to the documents' publication, Wikileaks tweeted that the website was experiencing a 'mass distributed denial of service attack.' But whether or not the site goes down - it's functioning, albeit slowly at this time - the documents released today have already been distributed to a number of international news agencies who are publishing their findings from the trove of leaked documents."
"Yesterday we reported that Wikileaks' web site suffered a denial of service (DOS) attack just before the publication of its most recent cache of documents. The site was down for only a few hours, according to Forbes' Andy Greenberg. Today, The Guardian reports that Wikileaks turned to Amazon.com's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) service to get back online and survive the DOS attack."
"Amazon.com has taken down the Wikileaks web site under what appears to be pressure from the U.S. government. Senator Lieberman issued a statement saying that Amazon.com has informed his staff that the company has ceased hosting Wikileaks."
"Our question for the week: Should Amazon Have Dropped Wikileaks?"
"Amazon.com issued a statement today regarding its decision to stop hosting Wikileaks' main site yesterday, claiming the organization's site violated the Amazon Web Services terms of service and that the content was endangering peoples' lives."
"Facing indirect pressure from the U.S. Government, Tableau Software has dropped Wikileaks' data from its site for people to use for data visualization. According to an announcement posted on Tableau's blog, the company decided to drop Wikileaks' content after reading Sen. Joe Lieberman's public request that companies hosting Wikileaks' data remove it."
"'EveryDNS.net provided domain name system (DNS) services to the wikileaks.org domain name until 10PM EST, December 2, 2010, when such services were terminated. As with other users of the EveryDNS.net network, this service was provided for free. The termination of services was effected pursuant to, and in accordance with, the EveryDNS.net Acceptable Use Policy."'
"Wikileaks, the site and the group behind it, could not have happened until the social web did. Leaks have happened for decades but the penetration and the mass of documents only became possible recently. Websites, email, wikis, blogs, microblogs and social networks created a network of avenues for leaks to come in and to spread out again."
"The whistle-blower site's previous release of Afghani and Iraqi war documents inspired a lot of criticism, much of which was understandable even for those who did not agree. After all, lives were (arguably) at stake. The current brouhaha over the diplomatic cables just seems like pique on behalf of the embarrassed governments."
"PayPal has posted a (late-night) statement to its website, saying: 'PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We've notified the account holder of this action.'"
"Wanted by the law across multiple countries, threatened with military action by US hawks, shut out by internet vendors from Amazon to PayPal, Wikileaks leader Julian Assange may still be named TIME Magazine's Person of the Year for 2010. He's currently leading in the magazine's online poll, ahead of the Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Erdogan, in influence score if not in votes."
"'The first serious infowar is now engaged,'" EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow tweeted on Friday. "'The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.'"
"'The Wikileaks Facebook Page does not violate our content standards nor have we encountered any material posted on the page that violates our policies.'"
"The much-maligned Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange has been arrested this morning in London. Assange turned himself in to London police to face a Swedish arrest warrant for rape allegations, which Assange has denied."
"Over the weekend, PayPal announced that it would no longer handle donations to whistleblower site Wikileaks. In a late night statement, the company said that the site had violated its terms of service and the account would be immediately shut down."
"Mastercard's website was down for several hours this morning, and now it appears as though Visa's is offline as well, as these sites have become the targets of ongoing DDoS attacks. And so the infowar rages on today with these latest shots apparently fired by Anonymous, a vigilante group of hacktivists loosely affiliated with the message board 4chan."
"Following its very public DDoS attacks on the Visa and Mastercard websites this afternoon, it appears as though the vigilante group Anonymous will no longer be able to keep us apprised via Twitter or Facebook. The group's access to both social networking sites has been pulled. Updated: 30 minutes later, it looks like you can follow Anonymous at @AnonOps."
"The US government has called on the organization Wikileaks to "return" all the classified documents it received and has begun to publish and "destroy" all the documents in its databases. For at least the fraction of the documents that have been released to the public, it's far too late for that."
"Clinton used the Wikileaks issue to illustrate the theme of his discussion, which centered on instability in the world. 'What you do not see is how many people were exposed,' Clinton said about Wikileaks, referring to informants providing information about their native countries to the United States. As a result, people may be killed and careers will be ruined, Clinton said."
"Less than an hour ago, the Twitter account @Op_Payback (Operation Payback) tweeted its intention to take down Amazon.com with its LOIC application, the software designed to launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, as directed by the group of hackers known only as Anonymous. The group's Operation Payback campaign has already hit websites like MasterCard and Visa in recent days, successfully taking the sites offline for hours."
"One thing that keeps Wikileaks going, however, is the simple fact that it has hundreds of mirror sites in different languages and locales. One such listing of these sites hosted on name-in-kind service Wikipedia has been deleted by the collaborative encyclopedia's editors. Should we cry 'Foul!' or is the deletion just more business as usual for the site?"
"It's been 11 days since the first batch of U.S. diplomatic cables was released by the online organization WikiLeaks. A lot has happened in those 11 days. Below is a recounting of the key events, issues and debates that have arisen. There's enough going on that it's almost sure to include some details you weren't familiar with, dear reader, but we also invite you to correct the history we're working on documenting as it unfolds."
posted by: i.k.y
labels: , , , , on 9.12.10

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