Wikileaks

Sarah Palin has apparently been using a personal email account for State of Alaska business (perhaps following Republican precedent on how to avoid subpoenas?), and it’s been compromised. Wikileaks has the documents. UPDATE (September 19, 2008): The screenshots used by the attacker showed that he used ctunnel as his web proxy, and contained enough information to identify his source IP in ctunnel’s logs. As pointed out by commenter Schtacky, it looks like they’ve identified the culprit, who used some Google research and Yahoo’s password recovery feature to change the password on the account to break in. This shows the problem with choosing “security questions” for password recovery that have answers which are easily publicly available. I hope that this kid’s actions don’t sabotage the corruption case against Palin that may have been supported by evidence in her Yahoo email, evidence that is now tainted by the fact that it was compromised (and subsequently deleted). ...

As reported in Wired’s blog: Wikileaks, the whistleblower site that recently leaked documents related to prisons in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, was taken offline last week by its U.S. host after posting documents that implicate a Cayman Islands bank in money laundering and tax evasion activities. In a pretty extraordinary ex-parte move, the Julius Baer Bank and Trust got Dynadot, the U.S. hosting company and domain registrar for Wikileaks, to agree not only to take down the Wikileaks site but also to “lock the wikileaks.org domain name to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar.” A judge in the U.S. District Court for Northern California signed off on the stipulation between the two parties last week without giving Wikileaks a chance to address the issue in court. ...

The unclassified, for official use only, operations manual for U.S. soldiers stationed at Guantanamo Bay has been leaked to the Internet on the Wikileaks.org website, which is being crushed by traffic at the moment. The manual allegedly contradicts U.S. military claims that the International Committee of the Red Cross has not been denied access to some parts of the facility at Guantanamo. The manual unsurprisingly prohibits soldiers from subjecting prisoners to “abuse, or any form of corporal punishment,” since specific interrogation procedures are no doubt covered in separate classified documents. Still, it’s a good thing to see in writing. A Reuters story at Yahoo has more specifics, and I’m sure we’ll see mirrored copies of the document appearing elsewhere to reduce the load on Wikileaks.org. ...