Wikileaks claims breach of archive
Group blames British reporter
LONDON – Anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks said Thursday that its massive archive of unredacted U.S. State Department cables had been exposed in a security breach which it blamed on its one-time partner, Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
In a 1,600-word-long editorial posted to the Internet, WikiLeaks accused the Guardian’s investigative reporter David Leigh of divulging the password needed to decrypt the files in a book he and another Guardian journalist, Luke Harding, published earlier this year.
WikiLeaks said that the disclosure had jeopardized the “careful work” it was doing to redact and publish the cables.
“Revolutions and reforms are in danger of being lost as the unpublished cables spread to intelligence contractors and governments before the public,” WikiLeaks said in its statement.
Leigh and the Guardian both denied wrongdoing, and the exact sequence of events WikiLeaks was referring to remained clouded in confusion.
It has long been known that WikiLeaks lost control of the cables even before they were published. One copy of the secret documents leaked to the New York Times in the fall of 2010.
Other media organizations, including the Associated Press, have since received copies independently of the self-proclaimed online whistleblower.
In comments to the AP, Leigh dismissed WikiLeaks’ claims as “time-wasting nonsense.”
He said that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had supplied him with a password needed to access the U.S. embassy cables from a server back in July of 2010 – but that Assange assured him the site would expire within a matter of hours.
“What we published much later in our book was obsolete and harmless,” Leigh said.
“We did not disclose the URL (web address) where the file was located, and in any event, Assange had told us it would no longer exist.”
Repeated attempts to reach WikiLeaks staffers for an explanation of where the file was left and how it got online were unsuccessful, although on its Twitter feed the group described one of Leigh’s previous statements as false and warned of “continuous lies to come.”