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According to The Daily Beast website, US officials want to find Julian Assange, who they believe may be in possession of documents leaked by Bradley Manning, 22, a soldier who was detained in Baghdad a week ago. Manning was detained in connection with the leak of a military video that was provided to Wikileaks and showed Apache helicopters gunning down unarmed men in Iraq, including two journalists. The intelligence specialist is now being held in Kuwait but has not been charged. The US State Department is studying hard drives from the computers Manning allegedly used to download 260,000 classified diplomatic cables and reports relating to leaders and governments in the Middle East. Pentagon officials told The Daily Beast they were seeking "co-operation" from Australian-born Mr Assange and it was unclear what they could do to stop further publication even if they found him. Mr Assange works from different countries, including Iceland and Sweden, and his whereabouts is currently unknown. In a posting on Twitter, Wikileaks said suggestions it had 260,000 classified cables were "as far as we can tell, incorrect." It added: "Any signs of unacceptable behaviour by the Pentagon or its agents towards this press will be viewed dimly."

Pentagon 'hunting Wikileaks founder over Iraq video' - Telegraph

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SEE? Your professors were right. Terrorists control the media but blogs will usher in world peace...

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Mr Assange works from different countries, including Iceland and Sweden, and his whereabouts is currently unknown

It's not because you're paranaoid that they are not after you...

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From the (London) Times

Inside the Pimpernel’s bunker

Julian Assange is obsessed with exposing secrets while staying hidden himself. But now he has let his guard drop

By Stuart Wavell
From The Sunday Times
June 13, 2010


There was little to arouse suspicion about the group of conspirators who converged on a rented house in Reykjavik on a blustery day three months ago. Their leader, Julian Assange, hid his striking shock of white hair beneath a grey snowsuit and his words to the property’s owner were blandly reassuring: “We are journalists. We’re here to write about the volcano.”

In truth, Assange and his team had a different kind of eruption in mind. They planned to release Collateral Murder, a secret video shot in 2007 showing Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists being mown down by an American attack helicopter in cold blood.

Less than a week after they had turned their Icelandic hideaway into a clandestine editing suite, the film was ready to be launched across the world. Assange used 20 servers to thwart any attempts at suppression.

Audio of the US air crew mocking the dead caused an international outcry and embarrassed the Pentagon — but it could do nothing. On YouTube alone the film promptly got more than 7m hits. Furious, the US military detained Bradley Manning, a military analyst in Kuwait, on suspicion of leaking the footage.

Investigators are now hunting Assange himself, who is thought to have been given a huge cache of classified State Department cables by Manning. Assange, in hiding, has promised to help Manning with his defence.

He’ll need money and support to make good his promise: fortunately both seem plentiful. Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing website that calls itself the “uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis”. Within days of putting the video out, it received £137,000 in donations and the figure increases daily.

To its fans WikiLeaks carries an electrifying buzz of danger, challenging governments with compelling evidence of illegal activity and cover-ups. Since its emergence in 2007 it has published a huge volume of secret material ranging from the “Climategate” emails from the University of East Anglia and the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo! account to Nato’s plans for the Afghan war and the operations manual for the US prison in Guantanamo Bay.

It’s an outlaw operation, a will-o’-the-wisp that has no headquarters and relies on five editors and 800 unpaid volunteers. Designed as a digital drop box, the site is a place where anyone can anonymously post sensitive information. Assange’s adversarial stance, treating legal threats with contempt, takes activism and provocation into uncharted territory.

Well aware of the dangers it was courting, the WikiLeaks group that assembled in Reykjavik on March 30 emulated the extreme measures of secrecy adopted by its leader, a Pimpernel figure whose nomadic lifestyle has kept his enemies guessing whether he is in east Africa, Belgium or Siberia. An air of mild paranoia pervaded the starkly white living quarters, dubbed “the Bunker”, where 12 volunteers were to work round the clock for four days on Project B — Assange’s codename for the Iraq video.

At the centre of the operation, hunched over two computers, sat the lanky figure of Assange. According to Raffi Khatchadourian, a writer granted unprecedented access, beneath the activist’s practised sang-froid is an energetic intensity — and a chronic absent-mindedness.

“He is ... the kind of person who will forget to reserve a plane ticket, or reserve a plane ticket and forget to pay for it, or pay for the ticket and forget to go to the airport,” Khatchadourian writes in the current issue of The New Yorker. “People around him seem to want to care for him; they make sure that he is where he needs to be and that he has not left all his clothes in the dryer before moving on.” It is a surprising shortcoming for a man always on the run.

Project B was time-consuming because Assange and his squad had to analyse raw video and edit it into a short film, build a website to display it, conceive a media campaign and prepare documentation for the footage.

Tired and unshaven, Assange appeared to work non-stop. But what for others might be an ordeal has become a way of life for him: “I spent two months in one room in Paris without leaving. People were handing me food.”

An eclectic crowd rallied to Assange’s banner. A Dutch activist, hacker and businessman named Rop Gonggrijp became alarmed at Assange’s fearful behaviour and decided to step in and become the Bunker’s “manager”.

“Julian can deal with incredibly little sleep and a hell of a lot of chaos, but even he has his limits and I could see he was stretching himself,” Gonggrijp says. “I decided to come out and make things sane again.”

Another lieutenant was Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic artist and parliamentarian wearing a T-shirt printed with skulls. “We’re all paranoid schizophrenics,” she says.

Until now only the bare details of Assange’s background have been published to the evident approval of the fugitive who has even refused to confirm his age on the basis that “I prefer to keep the bastards guessing”. Khatchadourian has managed to throw more light on the life of the WikiLeaks founder, including his prematurely white hair.

Assange was born in Townsville, on Australia’s northeastern coast, the son of nonconformists always on the move with travelling theatrical productions. Largely home-taught, he judged his childhood was “pretty Tom Sawyer”.

His mother went on the run with her young son from the age of 11-16, fleeing an abusive boyfriend. Then Assange, whose hacking had brought him to the attention of the police, himself went to ground with his 16-year-old girlfriend in Melbourne, where she fell pregnant. The two married and soon afterwards had a son.

Assange was eventually arrested and charged with 31 cases of hacking and related crimes; he admitted 25 and was let off with a fine. Meanwhile, he fought a harrowing custody battle with his wife. Nearly three dozen legal hearings and appeals left Assange with post-traumatic stress disorder, his mother believes. Assange’s hair, which had been dark brown, became blanched.

On the last day of Project B, Assange’s hair was so unkempt that he asked Jonsdottir to cut it while he was typing a press release. With the mission completed, the house was scrupulously cleaned before Assange set off to drop his bombshell at a press conference in Washington on April 5. True to form, there was a mix-up over his ticket at the airport. After it transpired that he had bought the ticket but forgot to confirm the purchase, he bought another.

The press conference and video were a sensation. Now Assange has another leak in mind, codenamed Project G, that he is developing at a secret location, much to the Pentagon’s evident alarm. The prospect apparently fills him with “devilish” glee.

At one point in the Bunker he began to recite from the folk poem celebrating Guy Fawkes: “Remember, remember, the fifth of November.” Whatever he is planning, the reverberations are bound to be heard far and wide.

From the Raw Story

Daniel Ellsberg fears a US hit on Wikileaks founder Julian Assange

By Muriel Kane
Friday, June 11th, 2010 -- 7:17 pm


Daniel Ellsberg, who gained fame when he leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971 in hopes of ending the Vietnam War, told MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan on Friday that he not only sees a parallel between himself and the person who recently leaked a video of an assault by US forces on Iraqi civilians but also fears for the safety of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who published the video.

Army specialist Bradley Manning was recently arrested in the case, and according to reporter Philip Shenon, the Pentagon is "desperately" seeking Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in hopes of preventing further damaging revelations.

Noting that since his own prosecution under the Espionage Act "for revealing information to the American public" almost 40 years ago there had been only two other similar indictments prior to the current administration, Ellsberg stated angrily, "President Obama, who came in promising transparency in government and to end the excessive secrecy has totally violated that pledge. ... That's really not the kind of change I voted for when I voted for him."

Philip Shenon, who was appearing along with Ellsberg, told Ratigan that Assange "was supposed to appear this evening at a panel in Las Vegas ... but he apparently canceled on them at the last minute. ... He said last week at [a] New York gathering that he had been instructed by his lawyers not to return to the United States."

"I was supposed to do a dialogue with him at that conference," Ellsberg added, "and the explanation he used was that he understood that it was not safe for him to come to this country."

"I think it's worth mentioning a very new and ominous development in our country," Ellsberg continued. "I think he would not be safe even physically, entirely, wherever he is. ... We have a president who has announced that he feels he has the right to use special operations operatives against anyone abroad that he thinks is associated with terrorism."

Recalling that he himself had been the intended target of a CIA hit squad in 1972, Ellsberg suggested, "As I look at Assange's case, their worry that he will reveal current threats, I would have to say, puts his well-being, his physical life, in some danger. And I say that with anguish. ... I think Assange would do well to keep his whereabouts unknown."

Video of the complete Dylan Ratigan segment with Daniel Ellsberg can be see here.

From the New York Times

Obama Takes a Hard Line Against Leaks to Press

By SCOTT SHANE
Published: June 11, 2010


WASHINGTON — Hired in 2001 by the National Security Agency to help it catch up with the e-mail and cellphone revolution, Thomas A. Drake became convinced that the government’s eavesdroppers were squandering hundreds of millions of dollars on failed programs while ignoring a promising alternative.

He took his concerns everywhere inside the secret world: to his bosses, to the agency’s inspector general, to the Defense Department’s inspector general and to the Congressional intelligence committees. But he felt his message was not getting through.

So he contacted a reporter for The Baltimore Sun.

Today, because of that decision, Mr. Drake, 53, a veteran intelligence bureaucrat who collected early computers, faces years in prison on 10 felony charges involving the mishandling of classified information and obstruction of justice.

The indictment of Mr. Drake was the latest evidence that the Obama administration is proving more aggressive than the Bush administration in seeking to punish unauthorized leaks.

In 17 months in office, President Obama has already outdone every previous president in pursuing leak prosecutions. His administration has taken actions that might have provoked sharp political criticism for his predecessor, George W. Bush, who was often in public fights with the press.

Mr. Drake was charged in April; in May, an F.B.I. translator was sentenced to 20 months in prison for providing classified documents to a blogger; this week, the Pentagon confirmed the arrest of a 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst suspected of passing a classified video of an American military helicopter shooting Baghdad civilians to the Web site Wikileaks.org.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has renewed a subpoena in a case involving an alleged leak of classified information on a bungled attempt to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program that was described in “State of War,” a 2006 book by James Risen. The author is a reporter for The New York Times. And several press disclosures since Mr. Obama took office have been referred to the Justice Department for investigation, officials said, though it is uncertain whether they will result in criminal cases.

As secret programs proliferated after the 2001 terrorist attacks, Bush administration officials, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, were outspoken in denouncing press disclosures about the C.I.A.’s secret prisons and brutal interrogation techniques, and the security agency’s eavesdropping inside the United States without warrants.

In fact, Mr. Drake initially drew the attention of investigators because the government believed he might have been a source for the December 2005 article in The Times that revealed the wiretapping program.

Describing for the first time the scale of the Bush administration’s hunt for the sources of The Times article, former officials say 5 prosecutors and 25 F.B.I. agents were assigned to the case. The homes of three other security agency employees and a Congressional aide were searched before investigators raided Mr. Drake’s suburban house in November 2007. By then, a series of articles by Siobhan Gorman in The Baltimore Sun had quoted N.S.A. insiders about the agency’s billion-dollar struggles to remake its lagging technology, and panicky intelligence bosses spoke of a “culture of leaking.”

Though the inquiries began under President Bush, it has fallen to Mr. Obama and his attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., to decide whether to prosecute. They have shown no hesitation, even though Mr. Drake is not accused of disclosing the N.S.A.’s most contentious program, that of eavesdropping without warrants.

The Drake case epitomizes the politically charged debate over secrecy and democracy in a capital where the watchdog press is an institution even older than the spy bureaucracy, and where every White House makes its own calculated disclosures of classified information to reporters.

Steven Aftergood, head of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, who has long tracked the uneasy commerce in secrets between government officials and the press, said Mr. Drake might have fallen afoul of a bipartisan sense in recent years that leaks have gotten out of hand and need to be deterred. By several accounts, Mr. Obama has been outraged by some leaks, too.

“I think this administration, like every other administration, is driven to distraction by leaking,” Mr. Aftergood said. “And Congress wants a few scalps, too. On a bipartisan basis, they want these prosecutions to proceed.”

Though he is charged under the Espionage Act, Mr. Drake appears to be a classic whistle-blower whose goal was to strengthen the N.S.A.’s ability to catch terrorists, not undermine it. His alleged revelations to Ms. Gorman focused not on the highly secret intelligence the security agency gathers but on what he viewed as its mistaken decisions on costly technology programs called Trailblazer, Turbulence and ThinThread.

“The Baltimore Sun stories simply confirmed that the agency was ineptly managed in some respects,” said Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian and author of “The Secret Sentry,” a history of the N.S.A. Such revelations hardly damaged national security, Mr. Aid said.

Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit group that defends whistle-blowers, said the Espionage Act, written in 1917 for the pursuit of spies, should not be used to punish those who expose government missteps. “What gets lost in the calculus is that there’s a huge public interest in the disclosure of waste, fraud and abuse,” Ms. Radack said. “Hiding it behind alleged classification is not acceptable.”

Yet the government asserts that Mr. Drake was brazen in mishandling and sharing the classified information he had sworn to protect. He is accused of taking secret N.S.A. reports home, setting up an encrypted e-mail account to send tips to Ms. Gorman, collecting more data for her from unwitting agency colleagues, and then obstructing justice by deleting and shredding documents.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, author of “Necessary Secrets,” a book proposing criminal penalties not just for leakers but for journalists who print classified material, said that whatever his intentions, Mr. Drake must be punished.

“The system is plagued by leaks,” said Mr. Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative research organization. “When you catch someone, you should make an example of them.”

A spokesman for the Justice Department, Matthew A. Miller, said the Drake case was not intended to deter government employees from reporting problems. “Whistle-blowers are the key to many, many department investigations — we don’t retaliate against them, we encourage them,” Mr. Miller said. “This indictment was brought on the merits, and nothing else.”

Though Mr. Obama began his presidency with a pledge of transparency, his aides have warned of a crackdown on leakers. In a November speech, the top lawyer for the intelligence agencies, Robert S. Litt, decried “leaks of classified information that have caused specific and identifiable losses of intelligence capabilities.” He promised action “in the coming months.”

Prosecutions like those of Mr. Drake; the F.B.I. translator, Shamai Leibowitz; and potentially Specialist Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst, who has not yet been charged, have only a handful of precedents in American history. Among them are the cases of Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department consultant who gave the Pentagon Papers to The Times in 1971, and Samuel L. Morison, a Navy analyst who passed satellite photographs to Jane’s Defense Weekly in 1984.

Under President Bush, no one was convicted for disclosing secrets directly to the press. But Lawrence A. Franklin, a Defense Department official, served 10 months of home detention for sharing classified information with officials of a pro-Israel lobbying group, and I. Lewis Libby Jr., a top aide to Mr. Cheney, was convicted of perjury for lying about his statements to journalists about an undercover C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame Wilson.

The F.B.I. has opened about a dozen investigations a year in recent years of unauthorized disclosures of classified information, according to a bureau accounting to Congress in 2007.

But most such inquiries are swiftly dropped, usually because hundreds of government employees had access to the leaked information and identifying the source seems impossible. Often even a determined hunt fails to find the source, and agencies sometimes oppose prosecution for fear that even more secrets will be disclosed at a trial.

By Justice Department rules, investigators may seek to question a journalist about his sources only after exhausting other options and with the approval of the attorney general. Subpoenas have been issued for reporters roughly once a year over the last two decades, according to Justice Department statistics, but such actions are invariably fought by news organizations and spark political debate over the First Amendment.

The reporter in the Drake case, Ms. Gorman, who now works at The Wall Street Journal, was never contacted by the Justice Department, according to two people briefed on the investigation. With Mr. Drake’s own statements to the F.B.I. in five initial months of cooperation, along with his confiscated computers and documents, investigators believed they could prove their case without her. Prosecutors further simplified their task by choosing to charge Mr. Drake not with transferring classified material to Ms. Gorman but with a different part of the espionage statute: illegal “retention” of classified information.

An Air Force veteran who drove an electric car, Mr. Drake has long worked on the boundary between technology and management. After years as an N.S.A. contractor, he was hired as an employee and turned up for his first day of work on Sept. 11, 2001. His title at the time hints at the baffling layers of N.S.A. bureaucracy, with more than 30,000 employees at the Fort Meade, Md., headquarters alone: “Senior Change Leader/Chief, Change Leadership & Communications Office, Signals Intelligence Directorate.”

Chris Frappier, a close friend since high school in Vermont, described Mr. Drake then as fascinated by technology and international affairs, socially awkward, with “an incredible sense of duty and honor.”

When he read the indictment, said Mr. Frappier, now a legal investigator in Vermont, he recognized his old friend.

“It’s just so Tom,” Mr. Frappier said. “He saw something he thought was wrong, and he thought it had to be stopped.”

According to two former intelligence officials, Mr. Drake became a champion of ThinThread, a pilot technology program designed to filter the flood of telephone, e-mail and Web traffic that the N.S.A. collects. He believed it offered effective privacy protections for Americans, too.

But agency leaders rejected ThinThread and chose instead a rival program called Trailblazer, which was later judged an expensive failure and abandoned. Mr. Drake and some allies kept pressing the case for ThinThread but were rebuffed, according to former agency officials.

“It was a pretty sharp battle within the agency,” said a former senior intelligence official. “The ThinThread guys were a very vocal minority.”

One former N.S.A. consultant recalled “alarmist memos and e-mails” from Mr. Drake, including one that declared of the agency: “The place is almost completely corrupted.”

Mr. Drake, whom friends describe as a dogged, sometimes obsessive man, took his complaints about ThinThread and other matters to a series of internal watchdogs. He developed a close relationship with intelligence committee staff members, including Diane S. Roark, who tracked the security agency for the House Intelligence Committee. She discussed with Mr. Drake the possibility of contacting Ms. Gorman, according to people who know Ms. Roark.

The subsequent investigation, which included a search of Ms. Roark’s house, devastated Mr. Drake, his wife — herself an N.S.A. contractor — and their teenage son.

“For Tom Drake, a man who loves his country and has devoted most of his life to serving it, this is particularly painful,” said his lawyer, James Wyda, the federal public defender for Maryland. “We feel that the government is wrong on both the facts alleged and the principles at stake in such a prosecution.”

Forced in 2008 out of his job at the National Defense University, where the security agency had assigned him, Mr. Drake took a teaching job at Strayer University. He lost that job after the indictment and now works at an Apple computer store. He spends his evenings, friends say, preparing his defense and pondering the problems of N.S.A., which still preoccupy him.

From the Independent

Pentagon rushes to block release of classified files on Wikileaks

By Jerome Taylor
Saturday, 12 June 2010


It has the ingredients of a spy thriller: an American military analyst turned whistleblower; 260,000 classified government documents; and rumours that the world's most powerful country is hunting a former hacker whom it believes is about to publish them.

Pentagon and State Department officials are desperately trying to discover whether Bradley Manning, a US army intelligence officer currently under arrest in Kuwait, has leaked highly sensitive embassy cables to Wikileaks.org, an online community of some 800 volunteer cyber experts, activists, journalists and lawyers which has become a thorn in the side of governments and corrupt corporations across the globe.

Reports in the US say officials are seeking to apprehend Julian Assange, the website's founder who has pioneered the release of the kind of information the mainstream media are either unwilling or unable to publish.

Manning, 22, an intelligence analyst from Potomac, Maryland, who had been serving in Iraq, was revealed earlier this week as the source behind a highly damning leak earlier in the year that showed harrowing cockpit footage of an American Apache helicopter gunning down unarmed civilians in Baghdad three years ago.

But the Apache video may have proven to be one leak too far. Adrian Lamo, a former US hacker turned journalist who had been conversing with Manning online and later gave up his name to the authorities, said he also claimed to have handed 260,000 classified US embassy messages to Wikileaks.

According to Mr Lamo, Manning said the documents showed "almost-criminal political back dealings" made by US embassies in the Middle East which, if true, would cause enormous embarrassment to key allies in a notoriously volatile area of the world. Mr Lamo claims Manning said that "Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public".

If those responsible for the site wanted any confirmation that the US military have them in their sights, they only need to look at their own website. In March this year Wikileaks published a leaked 32-page intelligence report which described the site as a "threat to the US Army". The report added: "The possibility that current employees or moles within [the Department of Defence] or elsewhere in the US government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out."

The site has previously shown that it is prepared to publish sensitive documents from US embassies. In January Wikileaks posted a classified cable from the US embassy in Reykjavik which described a meeting between embassy chief Sam Watson, the British Ambassador, Ian Whiting, and members of the Icelandic government.

In an interview with the BBC news website – the only one he has given since Manning was arrested – Mr Assange refused to confirm whether the intelligence analyst was the source of the Apache video. He also said he had no knowledge of the 260,000 further files that Manning claimed to have leaked.

But while Mr Assange may be shunning media interviews, he seems to be making no attempt to keep a low profile. Yesterday afternoon, the site's Twitter page announced that Mr Assange would be appearing in Las Vegas later in the day for a panel discussion about protecting anonymous sources – appearing alongside former CIA agent Valerie Plame and Leonard Downie Jr, a former editor of the Washington Post who supervised much of the paper's coverage of the Watergate scandal.

An earlier tweet suggested Wikileaks would not look kindly upon any US government interference. "Any signs of unacceptable behaviour by the Pentagon or its agents towards this press will be viewed dimly," the post said.


Website that breaks news

*Although Wikileaks is nominally hosted in Sweden, it fiercely protects both itself and the identity of its sources by routing all leaks through a series of servers around the world, which makes them virtually impossible to trace or shut down. "It's a very effective measure to mask who a whistleblower is and where they are connecting from," says Rik Fergusson, a cyber security expert at Trend Micro. "The only way to track it is in real time, which is almost impossible."

*Founded in 2006 by Australian-born former hacker Julian Assange, it has no paid staff and relies on volunteers and donations.

*In the past four years the site has released, among other items, the British National Party's membership list, detailed US military procedures for handling prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Sarah Palin's emails, the University of East Anglia's "Climategate emails" and 570,000 pager messages intercepted after the 11 September terrorist attacks.

*Wikileaks claims its next big scoop will be to publish video footage of an air strike in Afghanistan that killed scores of civilians.