Reception of WikiLeaks
2024: Julian Assange agreed to a plea deal with U.S. prosecutors and pleaded guilty to an Espionage Act charge of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified U.S. national defence documents in return for a sentence of time served.
[72] On 3 December 2010 the White House Office of Management and Budget sent a memorandum forbidding all unauthorised federal government employees and contractors from accessing classified documents publicly available on WikiLeaks and other websites.
WikiLeaks said that "material including video, audio, copies of private legal documents and a medical report" had surfaced in Spain and that unnamed individuals in Madrid had made an extortion attempt.
[106] Authors Michela Wrong criticised WikiLeaks for pirating her book It's Our Turn To Eat in its entirety on the grounds that Nairobi booksellers would not sell it because they were afraid of being sued under Kenya's libel laws.
[120]The Guardian called the material "one of the biggest leaks in U.S. military history...a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and NATO commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency".
[130][129] Other writers said the War Logs highlighted the danger of Iran in Iraq and "may well derail the formation of a government by implicating caretaker prime minister Nuri al-Maliki in running death squads".
[132] In an open letter to prime minister Julia Gillard, some of Australia's main media personnel said the U.S. and Australian governments' reaction to the release of diplomatic correspondence by the WikiLeaks website is "deeply troubling" and warned that they will "strongly resist any attempts to make the publication of these or similar documents illegal".
[139][non-primary source needed] The Sydney Morning Herald ran an 8 December 2010 editorial by Bryce Lowry describing Assange as "the Ned Kelly of the digital age" comparing him to a bushranger who defied colonial authorities in Australia in the nineteenth century.
[141] Richard Stengel, managing editor of Time, defended the leaks, on 13 December 2010, arguing that although the release of classified materials harms American security, he noted the right of news organizations to publish those documents under the First Amendment.
[154] Max Fisher, the associate director of The Atlantic, argued that Stratfor has a poor reputation "among foreign policy writers, analysts, and practitioners" and that as a result Anonymous and Wikileaks have exaggerated the significance of the information they released.
On July 25, 2016, Anne Applebaum, columnist for the Washington Post, wrote that:... with the exception of a few people on Twitter and a handful of print journalists, most of those covering this story, especially on television, are not interested in the nature of the hackers, and they are not asking why the Russians apparently chose to pass the emails on to WikiLeaks at this particular moment, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention.
[167] Glen Caplin, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said, "By dribbling these out every day WikiLeaks is proving they are nothing but a propaganda arm of the Kremlin with a political agenda doing [Vladimir] Putin's dirty work to help elect Donald Trump.
"[169][170] On 7 March 2017, Nathan White, Senior Legislative Manager at the Internet advocacy group Access Now, writes:[171] Today, our digital security has been compromised because the CIA has been stockpiling vulnerabilities rather than working with companies to patch them.
This leak proves the inherent digital risk of stockpiling vulnerabilities rather than fixing them.On 8 March 2017, Lee Mathews, a contributor to Forbes, wrote that most of the hacking techniques described in Vault 7 were already known to many cybersecurity experts.
"[182] Ben Buchanan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center and author of the book The Cybersecurity Dilemma said the SORM system "has been known for some time, though the documents seem to provide additional technical specifications".
[183][184] In a joint statement, The Guardian, El País, New York Times and Der Spiegel said they "deplore the decision of WikiLeaks to publish the unredacted state department cables, which may put sources at risk" and "we cannot defend the needless publication of the complete data - indeed, we are united in condemning it".
[193] According to The Times (London), WikiLeaks and its members have complained about continuing harassment and surveillance by law enforcement and intelligence organisations, including extended detention, seizure of computers, veiled threats, "covert following and hidden photography".
[213] Datacell, the Iceland-based IT company controlled by Swiss investors that enabled WikiLeaks to accept credit card donations, announced that it would take legal action against Visa Europe and MasterCard, in order to resume allowing payments to the website.
In a joint press release, the organisations stated: "The closure by VISA Europe and MasterCard of Datcell's access to the payment card networks in order to stop donations to WikiLeaks violates the competition rules of the European Community.
Accordingly, the Fund for the Defense of Net Neutrality (FDNN) had agreed to channel contributions via Carte Bleue, and WikiLeaks claimed that contractual obligation would prevent Visa and MasterCard blocking participation with such transactions.
"[245][non-primary source needed]Following the November 2010 leak of United States diplomatic cables, The Atlantic, in a staff editorial, opined "Wikileaks is a powerful new way for reporters and human rights advocates to leverage global information technology systems to break the heavy veil of government and corporate secrecy that is slowly suffocating the American press."
ISOC also called for appropriate action to "pursue and prosecute entities (if any) that acted maliciously to take it [WikiLeaks] off the air" because suppressing communication would merely serve to "undermine the integrity of the global Internet and its operation".
Snowden, Assange, Manning, philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie wrote "WikiLeaks rises up against the assumption that a democratic state should accept non-democratic spheres, outside the law, where arbitrary decisions reign.
"[341] On 7 October 2016, an hour after the media had begun to dedicate wall-to-wall coverage of the revelation that Trump had bragged on video about sexually harassing women, WikiLeaks began to release emails hacked from the personal account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
[351] In February 2011, David Leigh said that "[b]ecause America is after him and because Sarah Palin wants him hunted down like Osama bin Laden and so forth, he's turning round to the Russians who are quite enjoying the discomfiture of the United States ... he's palling up with them and giving material to very unsuitable people".
[376][377] In September 2016, the Daily Dot wrote that according to leaked court documents and a chatlog, a WikiLeaks release excluded evidence of a €2 billion transaction between the Syrian government and a government-owned Russian bank.
[341] In September 2018, The Guardian reported that Russian diplomats had secret talks with people close to Julian Assange in 2017 with plans to help him flee the UK Several possible destinations were suggested, including Russia.
[418] In an August 2010 open letter, the non-governmental organisation Reporters Without Borders praised WikiLeaks' past usefulness in exposing "serious violations of human rights and civil liberties" but criticised the group over a perceived absence of editorial control, stating "Journalistic work involves the selection of information.
[393] An analysis by the Associated Press found that WikiLeaks had in one of its mass-disclosures published "the personal information of hundreds of people – including sick children, rape victims and mental health patients".
Others identify the partners of women suffering from sexually transmitted diseases including HIV and Hepatitis C."[393] Two individuals named in the DNC leaks were targeted by identity thieves following WikiLeaks' release of their Social Security and credit card information.
