Wikileaks - Page 30

Can the world’s most elaborate censorship system put the clamps on the Internet’s most prolific source of confidential information?

A day after WikiLeaks began to release a quarter-million diplomatic cables sent from U.S. embassies, propaganda authorities in Beijing appear to be trying to control how much of the content of those cables leaks through to the Chinese public.

As of Monday evening in Beijing, the WikiLeaks “Cablegate” page was blocked by China’s Great Firewall—a rudimentary first-step on China’s censorship checklist.

More significantly, Chinese news media have received orders not to report on the Wikileaks dump, according to two people familiar with the situation at state broadcaster CCTV and online news portal Sohu.com. That fits with rumors of a WikiLeak news block that circulated among China-based Twitter users earlier on Monday.

The government almost never publicly explains the reasoning behind news bans, so it’s unclear if censors object to specific material contained in the cables or are leery of the WikiLeaks concept more generally.

According to WikiLeaks’ calculations, China appears in more than 8,300 of the cables—good enough for fifth place, behind Israel and just ahead of Afghanistan. The U.S. Embassy in Beijing accounts for 3,300 of the roughly 250,000 cables WikiLeaks claims to have in its possession. Six of the Beijing embassy cables have been released on the site so far.

Contained in the cables are assertions that could make things awkward between China and the U.S., including suggestions that China ignored a U.S. request to stop transfers of ballistic missile technology Tehran and offered Kyrgyzstan $3 billion to close a U.S. airbase there.

Another cable, not yet released on the website but seen by the Guardian, quotes an unnamed source saying China’s Politburo—the powerful governing group within the Communist Party-–directed hacking attacks against Google after one of its members searched his own name on the U.S. company’s site and didn’t like what he saw.

But in a country where “dissemination of state secrets” is a serious crime, the news block might just be a sign of unease with the concept of a website dedicated to exposing government communications.

In 2005, Chinese journalist Shi Tao was sentenced to ten years in prison for allegedly using his Yahoo account to provide “top level state secrets” to foreign news organizations.

Last year, the government arrested four employees of Australian mining company Rio Tinto on state secrets charges, although they were later tried and convicted on the lesser charge of stealing commercial secrets.

The block may also just be prophylactic—a way for censors to temporarily quash a story until they decide what parts of it they want revealed.

So far, a rush of initial Chinese reports on the leak—including a special section dedicated to them on the popular NetEase news portal—remain available through searches on Baidu and Google, although none of the coverage appears to deal with the China-related cables.

If the conversation on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging service, is any indication, some of the China-related information has still managed to slip through.

“WikiLeaks is so powerful,” one user wrote. “I finally understand why the Chinese government needs to build so many ports and railways in those “xxstan” countries.”

“This times WikiLeaks not only embarrassed the U.S., but also China,” wrote another. “Whether the Iran issue or the Kyrgyzstan thing, it’s all a lesson that China should be a responsible power and not just sit around watching other countries make fools of themselves.”

The Pentagon on Sunday announced new approaches for how it would safeguard information in the wake of the leak of documents from WikiLeaks, amid allegations that the Obama administration went too far in improving information-sharing across the government.

The Defense Department’s new initiatives, which include both short- and long-term solutions, aim to prevent the potential for another theft of classified information. For example, officials said they were disabling all “write” capability to removable media such as thumb drives or disks, on DoD classified computers, “as a temporary technical solution to mitigate the future risks of personnel moving classified data to unclassified systems.”

The department will also limit the number of computer systems authorized to move data from a classified system to an unclassified one, according to an outline of the new rules the Pentagon released Sunday. And the department is developing procedures “to monitor and detect suspicious, unusual or anomalous user behavior” that is akin to the ways credit card companies watch card user behavior to spot fraud. The initiatives follow two reviews directed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates in August that stemmed from the first WikiLeaks leak over the summer.

“The bottom line,” said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman of the new measures, is “it is now much more difficult for a determined actor to get access to and move information outside of authorized channels.”

The WikiLeaks debacle is forcing the Pentagon to refine measures that were put in place after 9/11 to encourage more information-sharing. The 9/11 Commission directed that the government work harder to share information across the bureaucracy – not “stovepipe” or compartmentalize it.

“The security concerns need to be weighed against the costs,” the 9/11 Commission report said. “There is no punishment s for not sharing information. Agencies uphold a ‘need-to-know’ culture of information protection rather than promoting a ‘need-to-share’ culture of integration.”

Whitman acknowledged that it was important to strike a proper balance.

“As we have now seen with the theft of huge amounts of classified data and the Wikileaks compromises, these efforts to give diplomatic, military, law enforcement and intelligence specialists quicker and easier access to greater amounts of data have had unintended consequences – making our sensitive data more vulnerable to compromise.”

But the administration is already being criticized for allowing the leak in the first place. A Republican lawmaker Sunday said the WikiLeaks release was a failure of the administration to safeguard information that was critical to diplomatic relations and national security. Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, said that in the post 9/11 push to “connect the dots” and expand information-sharing between agencies – the administration went too far.

“What we did is we created an environment that enabled this stuff to be stolen by putting it all in one place,” Hoekstra told POLITICO. “You have to ask yourself a question, why would a private first class, sitting in Baghdad, have access to this kind of information?”

Government officials believe that PFC Bradley Manning is the main culprit behind the leaking of information to WikiLeaks. He was charged in June in connection with another leak.

Hoekstra said the disclosure of the documents is an embarrassment to the administration and represents a “critical failure by the Pentagon and intelligence community” to protect sensitive information. He called for hearings to determine what happened.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1110/45650.html#ixzz16hAtXyEA