I have to correct you there. The full unredacted cables are still online on various sites. Including cryptome. They have been online this entire time. Yes, no-one was harmed, but not because they put the cat back in the bag (you can’t). Once other sites had published it, WikiLeaks republished the full trove as a risk-mitigation measure so that the compromised names could quickly make themselves aware that their name was out there. WL also contacted the State Department to try and warn them of the risk. There is footage of this.
The US spent tons of money trying to find anyone who’d been harmed by Manning’s leaks but found no-one.
WikiLeaks had been drip-feeding big stories based on the cables. The compromise of the encryption key to the full unredacted archive by Luke Harding and David Leigh of the Guardian put a stop to this unfortunately.
Mountaineer@aussie.zone 4 months ago
That was an editor at The Guardian, David Leigh.
sunzu@kbin.run 4 months ago
Can anyone verify if this exchange is factually correct?
Mountaineer@aussie.zone 4 months ago
You could read David Leigh’s book, in which he published the full decryption key: www.amazon.com/…/161039061X
That’s literally how he leaked it.
The wikipedia article on it has the whole “he said - she said”:
en.wikipedia.org/…/WikiLeaks:_Inside_Julian_Assan…
Including the lie that @ChairmanMeow@programming.dev is parroting about Assange not caring about people dying.
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 4 months ago
That’s true, but Wikileaks does share at least some of the blame for making the encrypted documents accessible. They’re not immune to leaks themselves and should handle these incredibly sensitive documents accordingly. In this case, they failed to do so and an external party triggered a leak. Wikileaks should probably have deleted the documents alltogether.