A Leaker Inside WikiLeaks?

(11AM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)

The United States diplomatic cables leak (also known as Cablegate) began on 28 November 2010 when WikiLeaks – an international new media non-profit organisation that publishes submissions of private, secret and classified media from anonymous news sources and news leaks – started to publish classified documents of detailed correspondence between the U.S. State Department and its diplomatic missions around the world, releasing further documents every day.

Five major newspapers around the world have been publishing articles based on the leaks, by agreement with Wikileaks. The publication of the U.S. embassy cables is the third in a series of U.S. classified document “mega-leaks” distributed by WikiLeaks in 2010, following the Afghan War documents leak in July, and the Iraq War documents leak in October. The contents of the cables describe international affairs from 300 embassies dated from 1966-2010, containing diplomatic analysis of world leaders, an assessment of host countries, and a discussion about international and domestic issues.



The first 220 of the 251,287 documents were published on 28 November, with simultaneous press coverage from El País (Spain), Le Monde (France), Der Spiegel (Germany), The Guardian (United Kingdom), and The New York Times (United States). Over 130,000 of the documents are unclassified, some 100,000 are labeled “confidential”, about 15,000 documents have the higher classification “secret”, and none are classified as “top secret” on the classification scale. As of 16 December 2010, 1,532 individual cables had been released. WikiLeaks plans to release all the cables in phases over several months at a pace of about 80 cables per day. (wikipedia – For the contents of released cables, see Contents of the United States diplomatic cables leak.)

Now, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten appears in a short article December 21 to be saying that it has obtained access, absent any agreement with WikiLeaks, to all of the 251,287 “CableGate” documents, and will begin publishing all of them over the coming weeks and months.

Aftenposten publishes only in Norwegian, however a Google English translation of the article reads as follows:

Website Wikileaks has published thousands of secret stamped documents. The latest leak is comprised of documents from the U.S. Foreign Service. Aftenposten has no clauses have access to all the 250,000 documents from the last leak.

[…]

The next days, weeks and months we will go through the massive material, and continuously publish news stories both online and paper.

To make our review more efficient, we would like tips from our readers.

Is there anything you wonder where you think the answer may lie in the messages that have been leaked to Wikileaks?

Tip us on [email protected]

Hat Tip to LodinLepp at DailyKos.

I can almost hear  the sounds of desk drawers being hurriedly emptied and running footsteps in the halls of the U.S. State Department, from here…

Australia’s Herald Sun confirms the story today, stating:

Norway’s main business newspaper Dagens Naerings reported that Oslo-based Aftenposten became the only media organization in the world to gain direct access to all the documents. It allows them to dodge WikiLeaks’ current strategy of drip-feeding the cables to preferred partners The New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and El Pais.

WikiLeaks has so far chosen to publish fewer than two thousand of the 251,287 cables. But its tight control on the release of further documents has been undermined by the Norwegian leak.

Aftenposten news editor Ole Erik Almlid told Dagens Naerings: “We’re free to do what we want with these documents … We’re free to publish the documents or not publish the documents, we can publish on the internet or on paper. We are handling these documents just like all other journalistic material to which we have gained access.”

Meanwhile the near panic inside the U.S. Obama Administration over WikiLeaks continuing releases of documents leaked to the organization from a variety of sources continues to grow, with the White House labelling Julian Assange a “terrorist”, and Agence France-Presse reporting today on confirmation that WikiLeaks’ next target is the Bank of America:

WikiLeaks has enraged Washington by releasing thousands of US diplomatic cables and US Vice President Joe Biden described Assange as a “hi-tech terrorist”.

US officials are believed to be considering how to indict Assange for espionage.

In an interview with The Times on Tuesday, Assange compared WikiLeaks’ “persecution” to that endured by Jews in the US in the 1950s.

Assange also confirmed that WikiLeaks was holding a vast amount of material about Bank of America which it intends to release early next year.

“We don’t want the bank to suffer unless it’s called for,” Assange told The Times. “But if its management is operating in a responsive way there will be resignations,” he said, without giving details about the material.

Shares in Bank of America have fallen amid speculation that it was a WikiLeaks target.