US diplomatic cables released

[Broomstick]

Tell you what - why don't we just assume this response was based on you being a tad emotional about this instead of actually being a response?

If you stop and think about it, getting people emotional was part of the plan - WikiLeaks seems to want people to get pissed off enough about some of this stuff to put a stop to it. That means getting people riled up. If folks read WikiLeaks and just shrugged their shoulders then nothing would change, would it?

That would also tie in with some of the hype around stuff that, when you actually read it, isn't that inflammatory.

And btw, if Germany was so complicit in this, why did the CIA need to charter private planes and file false flight plans to the German authorities?

It could be as simple as standard operating procedures - US agencies do that in the US all the time, private charter flights with possible false flight plans. I say "possible" because in the US, unlike a lot of Europe, not all flights even require flight plans. Or it could be they were deliberately hiding stuff, but really, it could be just as simple as that's the way paranoid assholes do everything whether needed or not.

[Broomstick]

Arms trafficking, money laundering, personal enrichment, protection for gangsters, extortion and kickbacks, suitcases full of money and secret offshore bank accounts in Cyprus: the cables paint a bleak picture of a political system in which bribery alone totals an estimated $300bn a year, and in which it is often hard to distinguish between the activities of the government and organised crime.

Sounds like Chicago.

Russia's foreign intelligence chief said yesterday that he would order his spies to study the cables relating to Russia. Mikhail Fradkov, the head of Russia's foreign intelligence service (SVR), told the ITAR-TASS news agency: "There are many issues which have been revealed by the disclosure by WikiLeaks – this is material for analysis. We shall report our conclusions to the leadership of the country."

Yes, well, I'm sure they hope no one leaks their frank (confidential) assessments to WikiLeaks...

[Skgoa]

I don't think Wikileaks will be hindered by Assange being disappeared. According to quite a few rumors and accounts by people who left wikileaks, he seems to be an asshole and several (former) members of wikileaks have come out publicly disagreeing with his strategy of concentrating on the documents they got from Manning.

Tell you what - why don't we just assume this response was based on you being a tad emotional about this instead of actually being a response?

If you stop and think about it, getting people emotional was part of the plan - WikiLeaks seems to want people to get pissed off enough about some of this stuff to put a stop to it. That means getting people riled up. If folks read WikiLeaks and just shrugged their shoulders then nothing would change, would it?

That would also tie in with some of the hype around stuff that, when you actually read it, isn't that inflammatory.

When they started wikileaks, they thought it would be enough to just get the information out into the open and the media and/or the public would react accordingly... (Hence the "wiki" in the name.) Yeah, that didn't work out. Turns out almost nobody cares when its just a big pile of more or less interesting information without context or even basic formating.
So they switched over to "journalistic" methods, often compiling several documents into a narrative. The way the "collateral murder" video was presented was the logical next step and the big dumps of documents we've been seing since then were the conclussion of that evolution. IMHO these cables would have been just put on the website without much of an announcement, if the media actually picked up on these kinds of things without the hype.

[Thanas]

Tell you what - why don't we just assume this response was based on you being a tad emotional about this instead of actually being a response?

If you stop and think about it, getting people emotional was part of the plan - WikiLeaks seems to want people to get pissed off enough about some of this stuff to put a stop to it. That means getting people riled up. If folks read WikiLeaks and just shrugged their shoulders then nothing would change, would it?

Nice attempt at moving the goalposts here. I am not having it - on this board you are expected to behave in a reasonable manner, not do what you and Purnell did, of which only the fact that I was involved in the debate saved it from a mod smackdown.

Quite frankly, the conduct of a lot of people, including you, in this thread has been irrational and not up to standards. I expected more, especially from a minimod.

That would also tie in with some of the hype around stuff that, when you actually read it, isn't that inflammatory.

That depends on how high your standards are. I myself find a lot of the stuff - like the USA bribing states to unload detainees on them - pretty sick. Or the way they were threatening Germany over not to bring charges against the USA torturers.

Also, the DNA sampling.

It could be as simple as standard operating procedures - US agencies do that in the US all the time, private charter flights with possible false flight plans. I say "possible" because in the US, unlike a lot of Europe, not all flights even require flight plans. Or it could be they were deliberately hiding stuff, but really, it could be just as simple as that's the way paranoid assholes do everything whether needed or not.

So again, more assumptions and little in the way of argument. BTW, I still require you to prove where exactly the USA provided Germany in the way of transport notifications, torture notification etc. where they were shipping what and what they were doing to German citizens.

[Thanas]

Oh, btw, apparently Assange is a terrorist.

It is time that the Obama administration treats WikiLeaks for what it is — a terrorist organization whose continued operation threatens our security,” said Rep. Candice Miller (R-Mich.), a member of the House Homeland Security Committee. “Shut down WikiLeaks, which represents a far greater threat to our national security than the sale of fake Louis Vuitton purses.

I especially like the title of that story. Apparently, the author is concerned that wikileaks might "escape justice". Right.

Even though, what Assange did might not even be illegal according to US law itself.

“They’re not going to be able to threaten or touch Julian Assange,” said Gabriel Schoenfeld of the Hudson Institute and author of “Necessary Secrets.” Besides problems extraditing him, he added, “there’s the inherent First Amendment problems in the Espionage Act.”

However, experts on whistleblower leaks and Internet security issues said the Obama administration faces a daunting, perhaps insurmountable series of legal and practical challenges if they want to shut WikiLeaks down.

“The reason the government hasn’t acted to take down WikiLeaks is it knows, as does every First Amendment scholar, that would run afoul of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Pentagon Papers case,” said Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He was referring to the landmark 1971 Supreme Court ruling that rejected the Nixon administration’s attempt to stop the New York Times from printing leaked, high-level military reports on the Vietnam War.

“Under the First Amendment, the legal presumption is strongly in favor of free speech and against prior restraint,” Bankston said. “The government would have the burden of demonstrating serious, really imminent harm, and would have to do so for each document it wants to enjoin.”

[...]On Monday, Holder told reporters, in essence, that the Australian’s citizenship wouldn’t protect him from being charged with any crime. And on Wednesday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, during an interview on NBC’s “Today,” called Assange “somebody that has been an accomplice in a great security breach that threatens the people that do good work on behalf of keeping this country safe.”

In an interview with Fox News, Gibbs appeared to lump Assange together with government officials who leak classified information. “Those people are criminals, and they'll be punished as such,” Gibbs said.

The White House fact sheet announcing Travers’s appointment also flatly called the actions of WikiLeaks “unlawful.”

But the law-and-order rhetoric didn’t impress critics like Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), who said Wednesday that Holder must tell Congress “about what charges the government intends to pursue against the WikiLeaks founder. If the Department of Justice has no legal tool to do so, it needs to be upfront with Congress and the American people.”

Gibbs also fought Wednesday against the impression that the entire U.S. government was cowering in the face of an assault from a sole Internet guru.

“We are stronger than one guy with one website,” Gibbs said on Fox News yesterday. “We should never be afraid of one guy that plopped down $35 and bought a Web address. ... We're not scared of one guy with one keyboard and a laptop."

Oh, really?

[Shroom Man 777]

So, you're telling me he's just exercising his constitutional right to bear secrets, like how another amendment of the sacred Constitution's articles of colonization talk about the holy right to bear arms? So, this means what he is doing is actually legal, and a right no less, as written down by the Founding Fathers and enshrined by the doctrine of their papal infallibility. Hail the American Constitution's articles of colonization, so say we all!

Goddamn those activist judges!

[Koolaidkirby]

I don't think Wikileaks will be hindered by Assange being disappeared. According to quite a few rumors and accounts by people who left wikileaks, he seems to be an asshole and several (former) members of wikileaks have come out publicly disagreeing with his strategy of concentrating on the documents they got from Manning.

actually I saw this one covered in one of his interviews and its apparently a smear

only one person has ever left wikileaks since its founding and he was fired, which tends to leave a person bitter.

[Tribun]

Two new developments.

First off, the UK only appeared to completely ban cluster bombs, instead conspired with the US to make secret agreements for "loopholes". Of course they try to deny it, but the things seems to be pretty clear.
The Article

The UK kept quiet about a loophole allowing the US to continue storing banned cluster bombs on its territory, a leaked US diplomatic cable suggests.

A senior Foreign Office official is quoted in the message, sent in May 2009 and published by the Wikileaks website.

It suggested not formally agreeing an exception for "specific missions" until after the UK Parliament ratified the ban - thus avoiding debate among MPs.

The Foreign Office insists it never deliberately failed to inform MPs.

Dropped from the air or fired from the ground, cluster munitions release small bomblets over a wide area. Critics say they have a devastating humanitarian impact - most victims are civilians; a third are children.

Britain was among more than 90 countries which signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) in December 2008. The treaty bans the use of cluster bombs and prohibits signatories from assisting other countries to use, stockpile or transfer them.

The then prime minister, Gordon Brown, hailed the treaty as a "major breakthrough".

'Temporary exception'

But the US - along with other major military powers such as Russia, China, India and Pakistan - was not a signatory. And that clearly put the UK in an awkward position with a key ally.

Britain leases the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia to the US, where the Americans have a major base in which cluster bombs are stored. Britain's public stance is that the US military has until 2013 to remove them.

In April this year, the then minister for international defence and security, Baroness Taylor of Bolton, assured Parliament: "I can confirm that the US has identified its cluster munitions on UK territory as exceeding its worldwide operational planning requirements. Therefore, these cluster munitions will be removed from sites in the UK in 2010 and from all UK territories by 2013."

But one of the cables released by the whistle-blowing website, Wikileaks, and reported by the Guardian shows the Foreign Office suggested a loophole to allow the US to keep cluster bombs on British soil should be kept from Parliament.

The cable reveals that the UK offered the Americans "temporary storage exception for specific missions". No details are given, but it is clear that this was something the government was keen to keep quiet.

The cable quotes a senior Foreign Office official as noting: "It would be better for the USG [US government] and HMG [Her Majesty's Government] not to reach final agreement on this temporary agreement understanding until after the CCM ratification process is completed in Parliament, so that they can tell parliamentarians that they have requested the USG to remove its cluster munitions by 2013, without complicating/muddying the debate by having to indicate that this request is open to exceptions."

'Concern'

The cable also reveals that most of the US cluster munitions are being stored on US vessels off Diego Garcia, apparently to circumvent the ban on the weapons remaining on British soil after 2013.

It states that the head of the Foreign Office's Security Policy Group, Nicolas Pickard, "reconfirmed that off-shore storage on US ships would still be permitted".

Responding to the leaked cable, Thomas Nash from the campaign group, Cluster Munition Coalition, told the BBC: "The UK has banned cluster bombs entirely and is bound never to assist with use of cluster munitions by any country ever again. Along with 107 other countries, the UK condemned the use of cluster bombs in the final declaration of the first meeting of state parties to the cluster bomb ban in Lao PDR [People's Democratic Republic] last month.

"The cable also raises concern about respect for Parliament and for democratic practices on the part of the UK government. The so-called exceptions in the UK law should never be used and cluster bombs should never be anywhere near Diego Garcia again," he added.

"If any 'authorisations' are contemplated by the secretary of state, they should be subject to strict parliamentary scrutiny."

A Foreign Office spokesman responded to the publication of the cable by saying: "We reject any allegation that the FCO deliberately misled or failed in our obligation to inform Parliament."

In other news, German foreign minister Westerwelle and his party had been spied on and the informer is now known to them. Surprise, it actually is someone pretty high, who practically does all the office work the his boss has no time for, essentially running the office (Though that's not in this article).
The Article

An employee in Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle’s parliamentary office was identified as a source for information divulged to the U.S. Embassy and exposed by WikiLeaks.org, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported.

The worker, identified as 42-year-old Helmut M., revealed results of government coalition talks following Chancellor Angela Merkel electoral victory last year that were later detailed in diplomatic cables to Washington, the newspaper said, without saying where it got the information. Helmut M. was moved to other duties, it said.

An employee in Westerwelle’s parliamentary office referred calls to the Free Democratic Party press office, which didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

It starts to become real interesting.

[Broomstick]

Tell you what - why don't we just assume this response was based on you being a tad emotional about this instead of actually being a response?

If you stop and think about it, getting people emotional was part of the plan - WikiLeaks seems to want people to get pissed off enough about some of this stuff to put a stop to it. That means getting people riled up. If folks read WikiLeaks and just shrugged their shoulders then nothing would change, would it?

Nice attempt at moving the goalposts here. I am not having it - on this board you are expected to behave in a reasonable manner, not do what you and Purnell did, of which only the fact that I was involved in the debate saved it from a mod smackdown.

That was intended as an observation after several days of thinking about the situation, not as a moving of the goalposts. I try to be more clear next time when I'm doing something like that.

That would also tie in with some of the hype around stuff that, when you actually read it, isn't that inflammatory.

That depends on how high your standards are. I myself find a lot of the stuff - like the USA bribing states to unload detainees on them - pretty sick. Or the way they were threatening Germany over not to bring charges against the USA torturers.

Also, the DNA sampling.

I said "some", not all. And I agree, some other things are pretty sick. Among the sickest, which I assume you're unaware of, is the US media with the help of the government generated sound bites trying to focus attention on the innocuous stuff rather than the meaty stuff like trying to "bribe" (in some cases I would have used the word "intimidation", not "bribery"). The spin doctors are trying even harder to spin.

It could be as simple as standard operating procedures - US agencies do that in the US all the time, private charter flights with possible false flight plans. I say "possible" because in the US, unlike a lot of Europe, not all flights even require flight plans. Or it could be they were deliberately hiding stuff, but really, it could be just as simple as that's the way paranoid assholes do everything whether needed or not.

So again, more assumptions and little in the way of argument.

Actually, Thanas, I can speak authoritatively on flight plan requirements for the US. There are separate regulations governing government flights in this country. There is a long history in the US of the government using chartered flights to ferry people around, both for secret government work and for transport of those viewed as criminals. For internal offenders, the latter eventually became "Con-Air", more formally known as the Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation System, with the major hub for prisoner transport in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma which is off limits for civilian pilots. The biggest customers are the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, but JPATS also serves both the military and state level police. They transport 250,000 people a year (that they admit to). A pilot knows one of these flights is in the area when they hear the callsign "Justice ###" over the radio. The US government really does this. I'm not privy to much more detail than that as I'm not in law enforcement, but suffice to say this sort of thing appears in the US regs and the JPATS hubs and terminals are clearly listed in published information for pilots as being off-limits to civilians. I speculated that this might play into what the CIA was doing elsewhere as it would to some extent just be an extension of what is already done in the US.

You asked a question, I provided what may be a partial explanation - not an "argument" or an "assumption" so much as a speculation based on my knowledge and experience with the added caveat I might even be wrong. Unless, of course, you simply discredit anything I may have to say on the matter even after being absent a couple days and thus having an opportunity to think things over.

I was just attempting to share some information on direct question. Otherwise, I'm not commenting on the rest of that because you said you wanted the matter dropped. If you've changed your mind and want to re-open that particular sub-topic then say so, but otherwise I don't feel I can reply without running afoul of your directive as moderator.

[Broomstick]

Oh, btw, apparently Assange is a terrorist.

Yes, that's been bandied about here in the US since a couple days before the leaks hit the web.

I especially like the title of that story. Apparently, the author is concerned that wikileaks might "escape justice". Right.

Even though, what Assange did might not even be illegal according to US law itself.

You are quite correct - that was settled back in the early '70's with the publication of the Pentagon Papers in The New York Times and The Washington post, which matter went all the way to the Supreme Court as noted in the quoted article. The first amendment protects American media when publishing such information, and the US has no legal jurisdiction outside its borders. So... if WikiLeaks is on a US server it should receive First Amendment protection here. This has also been pointed out in the media since the leaks hit the web, although the current government is trying very hard to shout down that inconvenient fact.

““We are stronger than one guy with one website,” Gibbs said on Fox News yesterday. “We should never be afraid of one guy that plopped down $35 and bought a Web address. ... We're not scared of one guy with one keyboard and a laptop."[/i]

Oh, really?

I recall hearing similar bluster from the Nixon administration when the Watergate scandal was working its way through The Washington Post.

We'll see how it all plays out - though Assange would be wise not to schedule any vacation time in US holdings. Last I hear, Britain was "aware" of his current location in the UK, but was making no motion to arrest him or extradite on any charges.

Assange is not a terrorist. He is annoying and inconvenient to the current power elite who are trying to paint him as a threat.

So, you're telling me he's just exercising his constitutional right to bear secrets, like how another amendment of the sacred Constitution's articles of colonization talk about the holy right to bear arms? So, this means what he is doing is actually legal, and a right no less, as written down by the Founding Fathers and enshrined by the doctrine of their papal infallibility. Hail the American Constitution's articles of colonization, so say we all!

Goddamn those activist judges!

Well, since Assange isn't a US citizen there are those who would argue he doesn't have "constitutional rights"... but in that case US law shouldn't apply to him anyway, right?

Either way, there's no LEGAL basis to shut him down. Which is why the US government is trying spin and propaganda, it's the only overt method open to them.

[Broomstick]

I don't think Wikileaks will be hindered by Assange being disappeared. According to quite a few rumors and accounts by people who left wikileaks, he seems to be an asshole and several (former) members of wikileaks have come out publicly disagreeing with his strategy of concentrating on the documents they got from Manning.

actually I saw this one covered in one of his interviews and its apparently a smear

Anything negative said about Assange right now should be taken with a grain of salt, and a large one, as it's nothing new to smear someone out of favor.

[Thanas]

I was just attempting to share some information on direct question. Otherwise, I'm not commenting on the rest of that because you said you wanted the matter dropped. If you've changed your mind and want to re-open that particular sub-topic then say so, but otherwise I don't feel I can reply without running afoul of your directive as moderator.

It was not a moderator directive as I do not give directives when I am involved in a discussion myself.

[weemadando]

The recent analysis of some of the Spain related cables is interesting.

The Guardian has a decent breakdown of it:

The US directly interfered in the Spanish judicial system in order to weaken, divert or kill investigations and cases involving renditions through Spain and incidents involving Spanish citizens, not to mention international cases as Spain's courts claim universal jurisdiction for human rights offences.

[K. A. Pital]

Somehow, the image of the Russian mafia going after Assange with an army of hackers come to mind if Wikileaks ever tried anything like releasing Russian files.

Tough luck. The oligarchs might be omnipotent in Russia, but they're bums and nobodies outside of Russia, with few capabilities to actually reach someone, especially someone in hiding like Assange.

[Thanas]

While the US media is blowing its top, European respected media like the ARD are handing out direkt links to wikileaks to allow users to access the material.

[Julhelm]

Turns out the US was actively rigging the Norwegian fighter deal (where the JSF "competed" with Gripen) by not only bribing government officials but also denying SAAB the AESA radar for the Gripen until after the deal was done. Who woulda thunk it?

[Broomstick]

While the US media is blowing its top, European respected media like the ARD are handing out direkt links to wikileaks to allow users to access the material.

I've been finding direct links to WikiLeaks on US media - but it tends to be local outlets, not the big media ones. Which goes along with what I've seen over the past few years, that sometimes the smaller outlets have better reporting than the big ones. Such links are certainly not universal, either.

The New York Times is publishing articles about the legal issues involved, why they are publishing/linking to documents, and summarizing as well as grouping documents, which makes them more accessible to many. But they seem an exception and not the rule. This is in contrast to other US media, which seems more interested in airing politicos screaming about betrayal and revenge.

As usual - the information is out there for Americans, but only those that actually want to do a little "work" in the sense of looking beyond screaming headlines.

[Phantasee]

Well, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel were the three papers that have an inside line to Wikileaks, and got the leaks first, remember.

[Uraniun235]

Clamping down:

United States: The Office of Management and Budget today directed all federal agencies to bar employees from accessing the Wikileaks web site. Talking Points Memo obtained a copy of letter sent out by OMB, which "directed the agencies to immediately tell their employees to 'safeguard classified information' by not accessing Wikileaks over the Internet.

Classified information, the OMB notes, 'remains classified ... until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. Government authority.' Employees may not view classified info over a non-classified system (i.e., the Internet), the OMB says, 'as doing so risks that material still classified will be placed onto non-classified systems.'"

...

Update 1: Gawker reports that "U.S. soldiers in Iraq who try to read about the Wikileaks disclosures—or read coverage of them in mainstream news sites—on unclassified networks get a page warning them that they're about to break the law.[...]

A tipster wrote to tell us that 'the Army's unclassified, NIPRNET network in Iraq has blocked every major news website because of the Wikileaks issue,' going on to say that Foxnews.com, CNN.com, MSNBC.com, the Huffington Post, and a variety of other sites are blocked on the Army's unclassified network."

Update 2: US corporations are getting in on the censorship game too. We are informed that HP sent out a letter to all employees warning them not to visits the WikiLeaks website. Will HP censor The New York Times as well?

Canada: The Montreal Gazette reports that "Defence Department staff have been warned against using government computers to sift through secret documents released by WikiLeaks. An email dubbed 'Wikileaks Notice' in the subject line says military computers are 'not to be used to visit the Wikileaks site or any other websites containing such information.'"

Update 3: Australia: We were also informed that a letter was sent out on the Australian defence network yesterday, warning employees not to access WikiLeaks, which would be considered a security breach.

Well, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel were the three papers that have an inside line to Wikileaks, and got the leaks first, remember.

NYT didn't get this round of leaks first, none of the American outlets did.

[Phantasee]

How exactly are they supposed to do damage control if they don't know what the damage is? Are they waiting for the angry phone calls and letters?

[ShadowDragon8685]

How exactly are they supposed to do damage control if they don't know what the damage is? Are they waiting for the angry phone calls and letters?

It's probably more that they're terrified shitless that somebody who knows what he's looking for (IE, an insider,) can search WikiLeaks rapidly to find some horrifically damaging nuggets of information that's already "out there," so to speak, and then secondarily whistle-blow it without actually leaking anything. (Whistle reverb?)

Or they're just being tyrannical morons...

[Alyeska]

I wonder when the media as a whole is going grow some balls and start supporting Wikileaks on Free Press and Free Speech grounds.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm not sure exposing diplomatic messages is covered under free speech. It's a troublesome question for me, because on the one hand I think it's reasonable for governments to expect confidentiality if they're to have diplomacy at all... but on the other hand I think it absolutely necessary for the public to have a clear enough picture of what the government is doing to make intelligent decisions about whether or not to support it.

[Alyeska]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers

I beg to differ.

[Night_stalker]

WikiLeaks has lost a major source of revenue after the online payment service provider PayPal cut off its account used to collect donations, saying the website is engaged in illegal activity.
The announcement also came as WikiLeaks is struggling to keep its website accessible after service providers such as Amazon dropped contracts, and governments and hackers continued to hound the organization.
The weekend move by PayPal came as WikiLeaks' release of hundreds of thousands of United States diplomatic cables brought commercial organizations on the Internet that have business ties with the organization under more scrutiny.
WikiLeaks also is under legal pressure in several countries, including the U.S., and a former colleague of founder Julian Assange has said he will launch of a competing platform.
Donating money to WikiLeaks via PayPal was not possible anymore on Saturday, generating an error message saying: "This recipient is currently unable to receive money."
PayPal said in a blog posting that cutting off WikiLeaks' account was prompted by a violation of the service provider's policy, "which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity."
The short notice was dated Friday, and a spokeswoman for PayPal Germany declined on Saturday to elaborate and referred to the official blog posting.
WikiLeaks confirmed the latest trouble in its Twitter account, saying: "PayPal bans WikiLeaks after U.S. government pressure."
WikiLeaks has embarrassed Washington and foreign leaders by releasing a trove of brutally frank U.S. diplomatic cables.
PayPal, a subsidiary of U.S.-based online marketplace operator EBay Inc., offers online payment services that are one of several ways WikiLeaks collects donations — and until now was probably the most secure and convenient way to support the organization.
The other options listed on WikiLeaks' website are through mail to an Australian post office box, through bank transfers to accounts in Switzerland, Germany or Iceland, as well as through one "credit card processing partner" in Switzerland.
WikiLeaks' PayPal account redirects users to a German foundation which provides the organization with the money. The Wau Holland Foundation, named after a German hacker, confirmed Saturday in a Twitter message that its PayPal account had been taken down because of the "financial support to WikiLeaks."
The foundation's president, Winfried Motzkus, earlier this week was quoted by the local newspaper Neue Westfaelische in his hometown of Bielefeld as saying that Wau Holland has collected euro750,000 ($1 million) for WikiLeaks, covering the organization's expenses.
WikiLeaks' recent releases seem to have been a boon for the foundation, which had previously described itself as the organization's main financial backer.
On its website, the foundation said "the huge and in this form unique amount of donations has caused the delay of issuing contribution receipts" — which allow Germans to deduct donations from their taxes.
Messages left for the foundation and for Motzkus were not immediately answered.
While WikiLeaks vows to make the world a more transparent place, very little is known about its day-to-day functioning. It has no headquarters, few if any paid staff and its finances remain opaque.
Wau Holland's vice president, Hendrik Heye Fulda, last month told the German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung that WikiLeaks operates on a tight annual budget of about $200,000. Fulda could not be reached for comment Saturday.
Meanwhile, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former WikiLeaks' spokesman, has announced plans to launch a new and more transparent platform on his own, German news magazine Focus reported.
It will provide the technical infrastructure for anonymous postings and allow informants to choose themselves how and by whom to publish the information, Focus quoted Domscheit-Berg as saying. The 32-year-old Domscheit-Berg, who also has used the name Daniel Schmitt, said he will soon publish a book about his time with Assange at the website.
On Friday, WikiLeaks was forced to move from one website to another as governments and hackers hounded the organization, trying to deprive it of a direct line to the public.
EveryDNS, a company based in Manchester, New Hampshire, stopped directing traffic to the website wikileaks.org late Thursday, saying cyber attacks threatened the rest of its network.
But while wikileaks.org remained unreachable Saturday, it has found new homes. Its German website wikileaks.de was reachable Saturday, and so was its Swiss domain.
The Swiss address directs traffic to servers in France, where political pressure quickly mounted with Industry Minister Eric Besson on Friday, saying it was unacceptable to host a site that "violates the secret of diplomatic relations."
The web hosting company OVH confirmed that it had been hosting WikiLeaks since early Thursday, after a client asked for a "dedicated server with ... protection against attacks," adding it was now up to the courts to decide on the legality of hosting the site on French soil.
French newspaper Le Monde — which was among the publications that were granted full access to the diplomatic cables beforehand — said in one of its online articles Saturday it could not provide links to the relevant cables "as a result of the computer attacks WikiLeaks has suffered and the refusal of some Internet hosts and countries to take in the site."
Media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders on Saturday condemned the personal attacks on Assange and "the blocking, cyber-attacks and political pressure" in what it called the first "attempt at the international community level to censor a website dedicated to the principle of transparency."
WikiLeaks has been brought down numerous times this week by what appear to be denial-of-service attacks. In a typical such attack, remote computers commandeered by rogue programs bombard a website with so many data packets that it becomes overwhelmed and unavailable to visitors. Pinpointing the culprits is difficult. The attacks are relatively easy to mount and can be performed by amateurs.
The attacks started Sunday, just before WikiLeaks released the diplomatic cables. To deal with the flood of traffic, WikiLeaks moved to Amazon.com's Web hosting facility.
But Amazon booted WikiLeaks from the site on Wednesday after U.S. congressional staffers started asking the company about its relationship to WikiLeaks.
The U.S. is currently conducting a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks' release of the diplomatic cables.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101204/ap_ ... /wikileaks


So, according to the article, the US is considering accessing diplomatic cables as criminal activities, so it's probably not covered by free speech. Would accessing them be illegal? I mean, trey are technically covered by diplomatic immunity, due to their being in the diplomatic bag, so would accessing them be illegal?