Julian Assange’s careless handling of sensitive classified material has put the lives of governments operatives, human rights activists, and possibly even Assange himself in jeopardy. The WikiLeaks founder faces charges in Australia after 251,287 U.S. State Department cables were made public in their complete unredacted form. Among those exposed is an Australian intelligence officer, according to The Independent.
The cables consist of communications between the State Department and U.S. Embassies around the world from Dec. 28, 1966, to Feb. 28, 2010. Al Jazeera has published them in their entirety, and is encouraging readers to help ferret out the most fascinating parts so the paper can turn them into stories. “Our journalists want you to help find the stories contained in them,” they quip, as if this were the search for a secret decoder ring in a box of Cracker Jacks.
Meanwhile, a similar hunt is underway at Amnesty International. “We’re going through files to check that our own staff and partners we work with are not at risk,” relates media director Mike Blakemore . While Blakemore has praise for past WikiLeaks releases which have “shown a light on human rights abuses,” he acknowledges that there have been concerns about what “precautions” Assange’s team were taking to ensure “people aren’t at risk.”
Newnation published a complete timeline of the events leading to the release of these classified documents. In a nutshell, Assange and his news media partners — The New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El Pais — have been milking these documents for stories since early 2010. Initially the source documents were kept off line, and any parts used to create news stories were scrubbed to protect individuals in sensitive positions
During the summer of 2010 Assange placed the documents on the WikiLeaks server in a hidden subdirectory. He wanted to ensure that the cables would not be lost, by placing them on a server that has mirrored backups – essentially multiple backups to destination servers in different locations.
He also wanted to make them available to Guardian journalist, David Leigh, who disseminated information to the partner newspapers, and who was also co-writing a book on WikiLeaks during this time. That book would be the undoing of both Leigh and Assange.
This is where the story becomes truly difficult to believe. The files were password protected, and for some unknown reason Leigh decided to publish the password in his book, “WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy,” released in 2011.
Assange blames Leigh for exposing the data, and Leigh insists that Assange told him the password would be changed, making it “obsolete” information. This raises the question, why publish it at all if it’s obsolete? At best Assange was careless. At worst, people could die, and U.S. military operations in Afghanistan could be compromised.