By Kevin Coleman
Defense Tech Cyber Warfare Correspondent
The beltway is abuzz with talk of cyber espionage and betrayal. While not your typical spy story, the events have all the making of a great movie or novel. The act of espionage is the recently disclosed theft of 260,000 documents/cables from the State Department.
Inside sources say that Pentagon investigators, several members of our intelligence community, and third parties that played some part in the documents are in a global man-hunt for Julian Assange, the Australian born founder of Wikileaks. Intelligence sources say Wikileaks is about to publish the massive stash of classified State Department documents/ cables.
If this were to take place, it would result in serious damage to our national security. They very well could reveal “sources and methods” used by our intelligence community to collect foreign intelligence. These documents are said to have been, but remains unconfirmed by the DoD or State Department, exfiltrated by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, who was arrested earlier this month for espionage after leaking a classified video of attack-helicopter gun camera footage from Iraq.
The 260,000 documents are said to include content about multiple foreign governments and intelligence agencies in the middle-east and possibly beyond. Philip J. Crowley, the State Department’s chief spokesman confirmed that the State department is involved with the aggressive investigation, led by the Pentagon into any documents/cables that Manning may have stolen off of the interagency computer network.
The Executive Branch, State Department and American embassies and others are said to be preparing for the massive, unauthorized release of classified diplomatic communications. One report stated these documents contain “harsh evaluations of foreign leaders as well as a fairly detailed description of the inner-workings of how American’s foreign policy decisions and activities take place.
Other comments suggest that sensitive communication with Israel is also included in these documents. If that is indeed true, I am sure the Mossad is hot on the case. This is very serious.
You can see the stress on Secretary of State Clinton’s face. Many intelligence professionals have openly stated that the unprecedented race to find Wikileaks’ Julian Assange is on. Who knows, maybe he has already been found and depending on who found him, we may never hear from him again.
{ 52 comments… read them below or add one }
How in the HELL do you not secure these documents?! How come we didn't have a system in place to make sure the people we trusted with our documents could be trusted. We didn't buck around with the Commies during the cold war (which is ongoing whether you choose to believe it or not) and we shouldn't be bucking around with the muslims or the chinese!
You can only be betrayed by those you trust.
You have to trust someone to be betrayed. I never did.
Good luck running intelligence without humans to help you do it.
We are living in a new era, and under a new administration. NASA is reaching out to the muslim world. Mr. Obama says that we must show the muslims that we are their friends, and that we honor the great history of muslim scientific achievement. When we do wrong aganist a muslim, we must atone for the wrong. This was one way to atone. The Russians are now our friends and allies.
I assume he's simply extending the policy established by the Bush administration to hold hands (literally) and suckle with the house of Saud in spite of their involvement in funding and perpetrating 9/11. Why aren't you pleased that the Republican's prerogatives of the past decade have been reinforced instead of undone?
You know. ALl you liberals HATED EVRYTHING Bush did. Now that Obama is in office and extending the same policies you hide behind the excuse that Bush did it too. So why are you supporting him on the same issues you hated Bush for?
I don't support his policies; please show me where I stated anything of the sort. What I am asking is why, since Obama indeed is merely extending so many of Bush's policies unchanged, more Republicans don't support his administration? In fact, they talk like he's some socialist demon come to take their rights away! Your inconsistency is puzzling, to say the least. Perhaps for Republicans it's sufficient to simply oppose anything any Democrat does, even if it means contradicting everything you once pretended to stand for? Only you and your brethren can answer this…so why don't you take a shot?
I don't support Obama and I not even sure how you extrapolated that out of my reply. The question should be, why don't more Republicans support Obama since he's basically pulling Bush's cart anyway. It couldn't be that you only care for your party and not the country, now could it?
Your ‘hate Bush’ policies rant…… If you hate Bush, you must love Obama. If Bush couldn’t do anything right, Obama is perfect.
That is how extrapolating is done.
This is what 30 years of under investing in internet security infrastructure and personnel get you. Tough **** America, you walked right into this one.
Bob, did you even *read* the article?
Facts can only get in the way of opinions… Oh, I mean "ALl you liberals HATED EVRYTHING Bush did." Real quality commentary and deep thinking going on here these days.
Hope this analyst get's the book thrown at him. No analyst such as him should have the ability to retrieve these documents if he didn't "need to know." Makes me wonder what other folks have access too that should not.
they'll find a way to blame it all on Bush…or at least the embarassing stuff about our "allies"
The kid that gave away all that classified information did it not because he thought it would embarrass the United States, he did it because he felt like the government and the military where doing things it shouldn’t be doing. He felt like crimes where being committed in a moral and ethical sense as well as a legal sense and felt like it should be exposed.
I am not suggesting that I agree with him as I have no idea what is in those documents any more than the vast majority of readers here do. I am however suggesting that he thinking was not of betrayal but instead an act he felt was a moral/ethical imperative.
I'm sure he came about these feelings after he was busted for striking another soldier in the face and reduced in rank. The really cricitcal question was why he was allowed to keep his clearance after being reduced.
His motivations are really immaterial. The fact of the matter is that he released information to a private individual that could have incredibly damaging repercussions for national security. I find it extremely difficult to believe that an intelligence analyst didn't realize this before acting. Furthermore, someone in his position should be very aware that the world is a nasty place and that information isn't always gathered in ways we really want to talk about.
So video`s of mass murder, everyone here is happy wwith? when did america become the 4th reich
Lets hope the men in the CIA or NSA get this idiot before the Russians or Chinese do. And I won't shed a tear if he is executed for treason or locked up for life.
This idiot Julian Assange hates our soldier and any man or woman in uniform defending our nation. He hates our intelligence agencies which have silently played an important role in our defense for decades. He hates the side of America conservatives embrace and wants our country to embrace mediocrity, gut our military and defense industry, stop investing in aerospace and other technological fields. He wants America to become some sort of horrible combination of Marxist idelogy and "new-age" hippie nonsense.
You make a tremendous number of ad hominem attacks in such a small space. It's unfortunate your vitriol can't substitute for a cogent argument. You blast Assange for exposing (or facilitating the exposure of) worldwide corporate and governmental corruption while simultaneously gushing over the vital work done by our intelligence agencies. Tell me, where were our intelligence agencies on 9/10/2001? Show me where my tax dollars were properly used by the 16 to 18 bloated, trough-feeding agencies of spooks and knob-twiddlers who let our country get stabbed in the neck on 9/11. And Assange is the enemy? He's the one person who can actually peel back the curtain to expose the worthlessness of our national security establishment.
Wow, why dont you and Michel Moore go on a holiday together to Iran or north Korea.
Mabey you could do a better job at protecting this country ? I think not, you sound like
a whinny baby that has no real answers.you just want to criticize everything and everyone. The United States is not the only country that has skeletons in the closet.
So STFU. So tell me what would you do sir, better then our worthlessness national security establishment.
Well, for starters, I would have investigated why the NSA never passed along the literally thousands of pages of documents they possessed detailing the movement of the 9/11 hijackers in the days and weeks preceding the attacks. Then, I would have had publicly broadcast the results of the investigation and fired and/or prosecuted those whose criminal negligence harmed our nation. Care to come up with some solutions of your own, or will your petty name calling suffice to show the limits of your intellectual abilities? Are you saying you think the American taxpayer is getting back what they pay these agencies…if so, how do you square that with their utter failure to protect us when we needed it? Your standards are pretty low…you must be in government yourself, eh? Maybe intelligence related, I bet.
For someone that thinks of himself as " so smart " and talks about other peoples intellectual abilities where is the petty name calling that your talking about. I never called you any names. STFU is not calling you a name at all.
I wonder how you would know the NSA has thousands of pages of documents ?? Mabey because the NSA was already investigated
Yes Sir….the Clinton Administration cut the FAA budget and the budget of the CIA counterintelligence groups by 30% or more. The FBI was illequipped for its ever-increasing counter terror role and was hamstrung by rules issued from the DOJ and Attorney General Janet Reno.
Are you saying the failures of the FBI in, say, the Phoenix memo case, is…budget related? Are you saying Bush's failure to act on the Bin Laden case file is the fault of Clinton's budgets? Are you saying the NSA sitting on enough evidence to roll up this network ten times over but doing nothing to inform sister agencies as to their findings is the fault of Clinton's budgetary process? Does Clinton also bear responsibility for the hole in your head, or is that the fault of not trying hard enough in school?
The United States had almost no information from inside Afghanistan that didn't originate with "tribals" and no way to verify that information…despite knowing that OBL/UBL was training thousands and thousands of jihadists, and other terrorists in Afghan camps they knew the location of. Despite OBL/UBL's public declaration of war agains the US and US interest, and a phenomenal amount of evidence, the Clinton Administration Security gurus failed (miserably) to grasp the risk to the US imposed by OBL/UBL and, more importantly, his network. By the time of the attacks in September of 2001, OBL/UBL's network in Afghanistan had trained upwards of 20,000 terrorist.
The Clinton Administration had multiple opportunities to excise the cancer that is/was OBL/UBL and chose not to take advantage of those opportunities.
As far as Assagne goes, he deserves what he gets…as does the rock-brained GI who leaked/stole the information. All manner of excuses are made when one gets caught breaking laws, therefore, the probability that any thing said by the defendent to justify his actions isn't bullsh** is just about zero.
Thank you mike, well said
I'm referring to the movement of known terrorists inside the United States during the Bush administration, movements which were intricately tracked and logged by the NSA, which then did nothing to act upon the information, even to merely pass it along to any other security agency. If you don't know about this information, you're woefully uniformed. If you do know about and consider it immaterial, you're incredibly stupid. Which is it?
Talk about petty name calling, your an idiot & hypocrite all wrapped up in one.
Amazing somebody here actually defended this traitor. He is known to have posted cut videos designed to make it appear as if our aviation assets are shooting up civvies, when the real full videos shows all of the confirmation of what the target is our aircrews go through.
Our intelligence agencies are hindered more by red tape and Washington bureaucratic nonsense more than ever, yet much of this is the government's fault, not the fault of all of the men and women working in the intelligence community. The end of the Cold War saw some serious cuts in this department as well as Mike has mentioned.
Unreal. Will you please address how budget cuts are responsible for the NSA's failure to perform its mandated duties? They have evidence produced by wiretaps and logs of the movement, conversations, and expenditures of the main force of hijackers that date back well before 9/11. Budget cuts didn't affect their ability to collect the info…so how does it factor into them not passing it along? Your staunch desire to protect the incompetent, the negligent, the outright criminal failure on behalf of these "professionals" laughable. We pay for 18 intelligence agencies, billions a year, and you have the nerve to cry poor. Congrats, you are every politician's dream voter.
Yes Sir…. Have you forgotten about the USAF intelligence unit that was tracking the hi-jackers movements using their massive computer system (which was within a couple hours drive to where the hi-jackers were getting flight training). Or the fact that when they went to report them to the FBI they were shot down by some LEGAL BULLSH*T because they all possessed US Visa's. BTW those restrictions that prohibited them from reporting the hi-jackers were implemented during Clinton.
As for Assagne I wouldn't mind testing out my new M4 on him… Time to bring back firing squads for traitors.
Great dodge! So, care to answer the question I posed about the NSA, or just the one you want to answer? You do recall Bush was in office for nearly eight months when the attack occurred, right? Does he take any "personal responsibility" (love those Republican buzzwords) or does it all devolve back to the nearest Democrat? To read these boards it's almost as if the largest terrorist attack in the history of the world didn't occur during Bush's regime, that's kind of odd, don't you think? As for your violent revenge fantasies, that's nice. But are you forgetting Assange never stole anything, that soldier did. Ah, details, who cares right?
Look you programmed Democrat zombie, Jamie Gorelick, under Janet Reno in the Clinton administration, put up a wall that blocked intel sharing. It took Bush's Patriot Act to tear down that wall. Now go buzz around someone else's ear, you annoying gnat.
http://old.nationalreview.com/levin/levin20040415…
Can we really heap the responsibility on the President (either Democrat or Republican) when the failure was bureaucratic? You claim that NSA has no problem collecting data and I certainly won't argue with that, but what about ANALYZING that data? Do they have enough analysts to actually sift through it? I think before we crucify the agencies involved in intelligence failure, it's important for us to understand how exactly resources are apportioned. We can take all the pictures from space and UAVs we want, but you still need a person to look at it AND understand what they're looking at. So how many analysts do we have? Is it as many as we need for the sheer volume of intelligence data that the agencies collect? I want to know these answers before I'll follow anyone down the whole "the intel community was asleep at the wheel" route. They certainly COULD have been, but I want hard facts before that determination is made.
Wouldn't he have to be an American to be a traitor…???
Seeing as he is Australian – wouldn't that make you statement assinine at best!!!
"Amazing somebody here actually defended this traitor. He is known to have posted cut videos designed to make it appear as if our aviation assets are shooting up civvies, when the real full videos shows all of the confirmation of what the target is our aircrews go through."
I agree that the initial engagement was conceivably within ROE but engaging the van seems very questionable and very outside of ROE to me unless I missed some further development since the full video was released.
Just got to laugh. An intelligence community an order of magnitude bigger than the nearest competitor and you guessed it – it's understaffed.
Unlike the command economy apparatchiks that dominate the defense industry and bemoan Americas victory in the cold war, Assagne's place in history is assured. He proved the concept that corruption could be blown wide open with the crudest of tools and a tiny number of courageous whistle-blowers. What he proved is that amongst decent folk there is a realization that corruption thrives in secrecy and there is a huge pull for the information.
The next generation of tools will distribute information faster and more broadly. And those who value freedom will welcome the deluge. The apparatchiks are on the wrong side of history again.
Some punk like him giving out classified information won't be remembered by anybody in a few years. He is no different than those who give away classified tech info to the Chinese.
This all stems from some snot noze private who thought that he had stumbled across some conspiracy and decided to release classified information in bulk. He ouwld of had to of burnt everything to CD then put it on a NIPR machine. But lets looks at the examples that have been set for him. Why is ti that a senator does not get into trouble for leaking classified information. I say sentence the punk to death so he can serve as an example to others.
How does a 22 year old get a TS? Do they interview his teacher from when he was 12 years old? Seriously, are things that bad that we're that hard-up for analysts?
Why are we in Iraq again?
It happens all the time. Even back when I was an E-3 some 45 years ago I received a Top Secret Codeword clearance!
I got my first "TS" when I was 19 and flying for the NSA…….
Background checks are past 10 years or age of 18; they could only check past 4 years.
Bradley Manning should be hung for treason and that pasty skinned, crooked toothed, little albino Assange should be given a complimentary cell at a black site.
LOL Some dirt-bag actually thumb-downed this comment. Probably oblat, or one of the other America haters…
PorkRoll July 8, 2010 at 2:17 am
Look you programmed Democrat zombie, Jamie Gorelick, under Janet Reno in the Clinton administration, put up a wall that blocked intel sharing. It took Bush’s Patriot Act to tear down that wall. Now go buzz around someone else’s ear, you annoying gnat.
http://old.nationalreview.com/levin/levin20040415...
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
So you’re telling me with all the evidence right in front of him the President of the United States could do nothing? What are you people goanna do some day when you can’t find a reason to blame everything on Clinton?
So…in an "information wants to be free" sorta hackery we find seriously edited material? Disinformation-ish? Then missing people and suddenly a handful of Russian spies detected then too-rapidly-for-interrogation ejected from the country? This is deep, ugly, and a very VERY long con. It no longer matters to them to maintain the veil of Right and Duty. And Cankles is seeing perhaps for the first time in her life the enemies she has toyed with in her quest for a global village.
You know, sorta like the kind that likes to bury women and throw stones at their skulls for sport.
I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand, this could seriously harm our country and its national security, but on the other, the United States needs a big political shakeup. Too much is happening that shouldn't be happening, and no one is even noticing. Perhaps with the release of the documents, more people will take notice of the rot and decay that has been gnawing away at the nation from the inside out.
Is it legal to suppress ilegal activities even if they were classified?
Turn the situation around, "DoD? Worker HIDES evidence of ilegal killings/Corruptions etc."
Charge him with what ever laws he broke, but also charge those who broke the laws in the documents he leaked. If I was him though, I would be trying for a public trial, not a secret one.
Also, has the reporter actualy done anything ilegal, or do some of the people leaving comments here like shooting people who do legal work?
As far as I can tell Julian Assange has done nothing illegal. He is not now, nor has he ever been an American citizen, he did not himself steal anything or have any part in actually acquiring the information. The only thing he can possibly be slapped with is possessing the information, which he himself did not acquire, but that initself is nota crime.