"Wikileaks sirve al ciudadano"
Ellsberg, que filtró documentos sobre la guerra de Vietnam, sufrió acoso como Julian Assange
Álvaro De Cózar12.12.2010
Foto - Daniel Ellsberg, el hombre que filtró los Papeles del Pentágono a The New York Times en 1971.- AFP
Todos los ataques que reciben ahora Assange y Wikileaks fueron dirigidos contra mí cuando publiqué los Papeles del Pentágono". Es uno de los últimos mensajes de Daniel Ellsberg en Twitter. El más famoso filtrador de todos los tiempos ha estado muy activo en Internet esta semana. La red de mensajes cortos le ha servido para convertirse en uno de los mayores partidarios del fundador de Wikileaks, detenido en Londres y acusado de delitos sexuales en Suecia. También le ha ayudado a difundir sus recuerdos de aquellos años y contar cómo se convirtió de la noche a la mañana en un héroe de la libertad de prensa.
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Él fue lo que los ingleses llaman un whistleblower (denunciante); literalmente, el tipo que hace sonar las alarmas; el que avisa. Él fue quien avisó de que la mayor parte de lo que su Gobierno había contado sobre la guerra de Vietnam era una sarta de mentiras.
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"Recuerdo perfectamente la fecha en que decidí que los documentos debían publicarse. Fue el 30 de septiembre de 1969", dice Ellsberg al otro lado del teléfono. "Ese día, el Ejército retiró los cargos contra seis boinas verdes acusados de matar a un traductor al que creían agente doble. La CIA les denunció ante los mandos del Ejército pero todo se amañó para que nadie testificara. Yo conocía todas las mentiras del proceso y decidí que no quería formar parte de ese sistema". Al día siguiente, Ellsberg comenzó a fotocopiar las 7.000 páginas de documentos que después se conocerían como los Papeles del Pentágono.
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Ellsberg formaba parte de un equipo de analistas que llevaba desde 1967 preparando un informe enciclopédico sobre Vietnam, encargado por el secretario de Defensa, Robert McNamara. Cuando empezó a colaborar en el trabajo, todavía era un tipo convencido de la necesidad de la guerra y de sus medias verdades. Para McNamara, una especie de dios en el Departamento de Defensa, había encontrado, por ejemplo, argumentos para atacar al Vietcong con las fotos de sus atrocidades. Era un tipo listo y con imaginación para dar ideas y encontrar respuestas a las preguntas que se hacían sus jefes; una rueda dentada que encajaba perfectamente con el resto de la maquinaria de guerra estadounidense.
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Probablemente el desgaste de Ellsberg comenzara mientras escuchaba las extremadamente optimistas declaraciones del entonces presidente de Estados Unidos, Lyndon B. Johnson, sobre la Guerra de Vietnam. La ofensiva vietnamita del Têt en 1968, que acabó en el corazón del mismo Saigón, había hecho desvanecer el mito de que Estados Unidos ganaba la guerra.
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Ellsberg estaba harto de guardar secretos y empezó a filtrarlos. Primero a políticos que no mostraron sensibilidad por el tema y luego al periódico The New York Times. Al igual que han hecho los diarios que están publicando el Cablegate -entre ellos EL PAÍS- la dirección del Times guardó el asunto en el más estricto secreto. Se llevaron los papeles a la suite del Hilton y allí los estudiaron. Los papeles probaban las mentiras sistemáticas sobre Vietnam, no solo a la opinión pública sino también al Congreso de Estados Unidos. Sobre todo, demostraban las artimañas de la Administración Johnson para hacer creer a todo el mundo que Vietnam era un peligro y no había más remedio que atacarlo.
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Los primeros artículos se publicaron el 13 de junio de 1971. Los intentos por parar las rotativas del Times cuajaron poco después, pero The Washington Post tomó el relevo. Sucedió lo mismo, se prohibió la publicación y otro periódico se hizo con los papeles. El Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times... 17 periódicos en total publicaron los informes. El 1 de julio, el Tribunal Supremo fallaba a favor de la prensa.
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Dos días antes, Ellsberg se había entregado y había admitido ser quien filtró los documentos. Kissinger dijo de él que era "el hombre más peligroso de Estados Unidos". "Hoy me habrían llamado terrorista", comenta Ellsberg, que señala que eso mismo es lo que han llamado a Assange y a Bradley Manning, el soldado de inteligencia que, según el Departamento de Estado, filtró los documentos a Wikileaks. "Si ha sido Manning, cosa que aún está por ver, yo me identifico con él. Defiendo a Wikileaks porque creo en el servicio que está haciendo a los ciudadanos".
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"El primer día de la publicación del Cablegate, me sorprendió que lo que publicó el Times no parecía de mucha importancia", señala. "El grado de confidencialidad de los papeles no es muy alto, pero sin embargo, sí que he visto historias que me han llamado la atención, como la de ese juez español, Garzón, y el hecho de que Estados Unidos tratase de frenar su investigación sobre Guantánamo".
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La semana ha sido larga para Ellsberg. Tiene 79 años y no ha parado de atender a medios y publicar artículos y comunicados como el que ha difundido para pedir el boicoteo a Amazon por dejar de hospedar a la página de Wikileaks en su servidor. Al mismo tiempo, ha seguido con sus mensajes en Twitter. Algunos de ellos son continuamente reenviados por muchos de sus casi 8.000 seguidores: "La mayoría de operaciones encubiertas merece ser divulgada por la prensa libre"; "he esperado 40 años para la publicación de documentos de esta escala"; "debería haber unos Papeles del Pentágono cada año"; "acabo de votar a Assange como personaje del año en la encuesta de la revista Time".
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"Es hora de que este país deje de tratar como héroes nacionales a los que roban secretos y los publican en periódicos". La frase es del presidente Nixon y aparece recogida en un documental sobre la vida de Ellsberg titulado con la sentencia de Henry Kissinger: El hombre más peligroso de América (2009). La declaración de Nixon bien podría sustituir muchas de las cosas que se han dicho estos días de Assange o Manning.
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Otro paralelismo con el Cablegate es la creación de una unidad específica para abordar las publicaciones. Clinton ha creado el War Room (sala de guerra) mientras que Nixon se inclinó por la unidad de los fontaneros, llamada así porque debían encargarse de las filtrac iones. Ese paso, según The New York Times, condujo al escándalo del caso Watergate y, en última instancia, a la dimisión del presidente. La manía de Nixon por grabar todo acabó sirviendo para tener un testimonio interesante sobre lo que un medio de comunicación puede suponer para un Gobierno.
Kissinger dijo de él que era "el hombre más peligroso de América". "Hoy me habrían llamado terrorista", dice Ellsberg
www.elpais.esManifestaciones mundiales en apoyo al fundador de Wikileak
En ocho ciudades españolas también se están produciendo concentraciones bajo el lema «contra el terrorismo de Estado y los enemigos de la libertad»
Madrid 11.12.2010
Foto - Momentos de la concentración por Wikileaks en Madrid
La organización «
Free Wikileaks» en apoyo al fundador de Julian Assange, el fundador de la plataforma detenido en Londres el pasado 7 de diciembre, ha comenzado a manifestarse hoy en ciudades de todo el mundo, bajo el lema «contra el terrorismo de Estado y los enemigos de la libertad».
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España no ha sido una excepción, y desde la 18:00 de este sábado hay convocadas concentraciones frente a la embajada británica de Madrid, los consulados del mismo país en Barcelona y Alicante, frente al Ayuntamiento de Sevilla, ante el consulado de Suecia en Valencia, en el Banco de España de Zaragoza y en la plaza de la Constitución de Málaga.
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Estas capitales españolas se unen así a las manifestaciones que se están celebrando en otras ciudades de América Latina y Europa como como Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Bogotá, Lima o Ciudad de México, en cuyas respectivas embajadas del Reino Unido también se han convocado concentraciones para esta tarde.
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En el manifiesto hecho público «Free Wikileaks» en su web (
http://freewikileaks.eu/), la organización pide la puesta en libertad de Assange -detenido en Reino Unido por una presunta agresión sexual-, el restablecimiento del dominio de Wikileaks (
http://mirror.wikileaks.info/), la reposición de la cuenta de Assange en la entidad suiza PostFinance o la restauración de los servicios que prestaban VISA y Mastercard a Wikileaks.
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Declaraciones de «Free Wikileaks»«Expresamos nuestro deseo -indica el comunicado- de que cesen las acciones orquestadas por parte de todos aquellos poderes gubernamentales que mediante coacciones y ataques están librando un conflicto contra dicha organización, temerosos del uso que ciudadanos anónimos hacen de su legitimo derecho a la libertad de expresión y al esclarecimiento y difusión de la verdad».
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Según los organizadores en defensa de Assange, la actual situación legal en la que se encuentra el fundador de Wikileaks se debe a un movimiento con el objetivo de desprestigiarle y facilitar, de esta forma, su extradicción a Estados Unidos para que sea juzgado por la revelación de los cables con información de la política exterior estadounidense.
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Piden una condena «por los actos de terrorismo de Estado que Wikileaks ha descubierto»
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El manifiesto demanda asimismo la apertura de «un proceso judicial contra aquellos responsables, que si se demostrase la veracidad de los hechos, cometieron crímenes o graves delitos revelados por filtraciones publicadas en Wikileaks».
El manifiesto concluye exigiendo una «repulsa por parte de todos nuestros dirigentes por los actos de terrorismo de Estado que Wikileaks ha descubierto».
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Los promotores de esta movilización reclaman que el Reino Unido deje en libertad a Assange, actualmente detenido en Londres, que está pendiente de una posible extradición a Suecia por un supuesto delito de abusos sexuales.
www.abc.es/
WikiLeaks cables: Anonymous declares online war against companies
Shadowy group of 'hactivists' targets big US websites for Operation Payback as firms face web onslaught
Josh Halliday10
.12.2010
Foto - A 'hacktivist' claiming to be participating in Operation Payback, in New York. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features
It is being described as the first great cyber war: an online collision between some of the world's greatest brands and a little-known, poorly understood group of "hacktivists" trying to bring down companies from the comfort of their bedrooms.
The hacker group behind the attacks goes by the name of Anonymous. This week it declared its goal to be "infowar" and said: "In war, there are bystanders that get hit."
As the name suggests, Anonymous is not a group with high-profile members. Its composition is multinational: a 16-year-old Dutch boy was arrested this week on suspicion of bringing down the websites of MasterCard and Visa in support of
WikiLeaks. The family computer he is suspected of using has been seized.
Although its attacks seem co-ordinated, it is not clear who is leading the group and its members have only the faintest of ideas about its goals. Its most audacious effort, an attempt to bring down Amazon, was thwarted after members could not agree which site to attack next.
Described by one insider as "complex, puerile, bizarre and chaotic", Anonymous propelled itself into the public consciousness this week with a succession of attacks on major US institutions – but it has been striking fear into the heart of Scientologists and copyright enforcement agencies for years. Earlier this year, members forced the Ministry of Sound websites offline after the dance music group tried to prevent piracy of its catalogue.
Anonymous was born on the influential internet messageboard 4chan, a forum popular with hackers and gamers, in 2003. The group's name is a nod to 4chan's early days, when any individuals who posted to its forums and chose not to identify themselves were automatically dubbed "Anonymous". But the ephemeral group, which picks up causes "whenever it feels like it", has now "gone beyond 4chan into something bigger", an active Anonymous member told the Guardian.
Anonymous has no command structure. Members communicate using secure chat-rooms, the location of which constantly move to evade detection. The movement works through "organised chaos" where individuals post ideas and new targets to attack, and wait to see the response. Eventually popular ideas generate action.
The technique is simple. Members target a website with repeated requests to load its pages until the site under attack can no longer cope. A site can be hit with thousands of requests a second, and this week MasterCard was among the companies that found its website could not cope.
These are known as "distributed denial of service attacks" – DDoS, an acronym that is ubiquitous in the hacker community. Those wanting to participate download a special software package – LOIC, or low orbit ion cannon – which takes only a few minutes to be ready to use.
Coldblood, a British member, set up chat servers for Anonymous so the group could plan attacks on the Church of Scientology in January 2008 when it attempted to remove from the internet parts of an interview with Tom Cruise, its most famous member.
"The Scientology stuff was a couple of thousand people at its peak. But we've just seen it spiral into what it is now. It's actually astounding me that it's grown this quickly," says Coldblood.
Downloads of the LOIC software have grown 60-fold, from 390 to 23,479 in the last week.
For the targets, which this week also included the Swedish prosecution authority – which is pursuing sexual assault cases against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange – and the PayPal payments system, it can mean their business is halted for hours if not days.
The Anonymous movement is approaching a tipping point in its campaign. So unwieldy, reactive and vitriolic is the group that members often turn their weaponry on each other. Factions "attack each other regularly," Coldblood says.
The group can swell and contract, splinter and re-form – then muster an illegal attack that severely disables expensively administered websites owned by multinational corporations. It is the newest form of anarchic rebellion.
"It is political activism to an extent," the 22-year-old hacker explains. "But lots of the people just do it for a laugh really – there's the whole mentality of 'did it for the lulz'." Lulz, for the uninitiated, is short for laugh out loud misspelt, but its meaning is closer to schadenfreude.
However, Coldblood believes that the days of sheer anarchism are numbered, and that Anonymous is becoming more organised. "Now it's moved more to the political side, which wants to take things a bit more seriously. It already has effectively split inside but it hasn't on the outside. You cut one section off and it'll grow back."
When their sites go down, multinational victims can do little but wait for the bombardment to subside – and invest in more attack-proof servers. Microsoft will next week release a tranche of security updates in an attempt to stem the propagation of DDoS attacks.
More than 1,000 sites are mirroring WikiLeaks to ensure it stays online in the face of capitulation attempts. The "infowar" has pitted amateur hackers against some of the western world's greatest institutions. But a more significant, perhaps fearsome, war would be one that succeeded in marshalling the full muscle and might of Anonymous behind its campaigns.
www.guardian.uk/
After the WikiLeaks cyber war, what now for the web?
As hackers join the battle between WikiLeaks and the US government, Conservative blogger Iain Dale and open access campaigner Jim Killock take sides. Susanna Rustin moderates Susanna Rustin11.12.2010Foto - Conservative blogger Iain Dale, left, and digital rights campaigner Jim Killock. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian This week saw the unprecedented escalation of hostilities between the US government and
WikiLeaks, with hackers wading in to support the whistleblowing website by targeting companies - PayPal, MasterCard, Amazon – that had co-operated with US attempts to shut it down. Do these events signal a new era of information warfare? And what are the implications for the future of the
internet?
Susanna Rustin: Are we going to see much more of this kind of activism?
Jim Killock: I think it will be quite limited. I think the people who have done it have already realised their mistake – they're meant to be standing up in favour of openness and freedom of speech, and they're trying to stop people from doing things on the internet. But governments in this case have behaved like children themselves. Governments need to respect the rule of law, and what they've done here is make private telephone calls to companies and got them to remove services from an organisation that has not, at this point, been convicted of anything, it's not even been taken to court. What they've done may not even be illegal in US law. Essentially what we have is an attempt by governments to have private law enforcement, and that is childish. It is not responsible.
Iain Dale: It's not childish, because governments are responsible for their own national security. They can't take these sites down themselves, so they have to get the internet service providers (ISPs) to do it. What else can they do?
JK: There are plenty of cases where government does very legitimate "notice and takedown" or straightforward takedown, whether that's criminal activity, fraud sites for instance, child pornography sites, right down to copyright offences. If it's something very serious, like fraud, it tends to be a very quick judicial process. Here there is an absence of judicial process. If the Americans have got that wrong, then they need to work out how to redress their legal system, and not go round bullying …
ID: The problem is, we're in uncharted waters – this has never happened before. No organisation, company or pressure group has ever released this kind of information in this quantity. I'm all in favour of freedom of information, but there are limits. If there was a journalistic reason for this, then fine, but there isn't. They've done it because they could, simple as that. Obviously there are lots of interesting things in what they've released – although a lot of it is gossip – but if you're a government and you think your national security is compromised, you are going to act quickly.
JK: That sounds reasonable …
ID: Good!
JK: But what I'm saying is that governments are not being responsible. If the US wants people to respect the law, it needs to respect the law itself, and it's not – it's making private phonecalls to private companies. I'm worried we could end up with a situation where we increasingly see private enforcement of law rather than due process.
ID: The logic of this is quite worrying. All governments want to regulate the internet, but not a single one has ever found a way of doing it, with the possible exception of the Chinese.
JK: I really don't agree with that. There are plenty of examples of regulation. And why is it that WikiLeaks is being targeted, rather than the Guardian, for instance? The Guardian is publishing the same material, why aren't they being attacked, why not the New York Times? I think WikiLeaks is seen as something they can get at. They don't like that particular set-up, so they will go for it.
ID: The other interesting thing is that supporters of WikiLeaks have been able to attack sites like MasterCard. You would think MasterCard would have the most sophisticated security systems in place, and yet people can bring their site down. I always think with these sorts of things, if you've done it once, you will then do it again, because you can. I think these attacks on major corporations and their websites are likely to proliferate over the next few years. I've been quite shocked at how seemingly easy it's been.
JK: I think the reason WikiLeaks was trying to get on to Amazon [servers] was because they were suffering similar attacks, presumably from a government who was embarrassed by this. So there is a solution, which is to use high-powered, distributed web posting. That makes the big sites less vulnerable, so there is an imbalance of power. But the question for the groups who have targeted Mastercard and so on is: have they acted responsibly? Have they communicated their message that the internet needs to be open, and there needs to be transparency? I think they've been shown to be rather immature.
ID: You can argue that WikiLeaks has behaved in the same way.
JK: There is a fundamental question about reputation. In today's society, where there is greater transparency, you need, whoever you are, to maintain and develop your reputation. That is how you maintain trust and gain respect, so if WikiLeaks or the US government have damaged their reputations in their activities, people will react to that. A really stupid decision was made by the US government to centralise all their data and make it extremely accessible to everybody, on the basis that information sharing was needed after 9/11, and that approach has come back to bite them, because it's become very easy for one person at a fairly low level in their apparatus to expose nearly all their documents. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of how the technology works. Governments always think like this – they're constantly thinking a big database will solve all the problems. Well no, actually what you do is you create massive potential for huge leaks of data.
ID: But there is a balance. Who has a right to know what? If you're saying we have a right to know everything the state is doing on our behalf, it's quite difficult to argue then that there's a total right to privacy for the individual.
JK: Freedom of expression is balanced against things like libel or racial hatred, and it should be down to courts to decide whose rights are being infringed. What is dangerous at the moment is the acceptance that it will be down to ISPs, or possibly the police, to decide where the line is drawn or, in the case of WikiLeaks, government officials in the US deciding to ring around the relevant ISPs.
SR: More leaks seem inevitable. Do you welcome this new era of transparency?
ID: You can't answer that question with a yes or no. WikiLeaks is not acting as a journalistic filter, it's just doing it because it can. If you have a world of 200 nation states, you have to have something called diplomacy, and that whole system has been fundamentally undermined.
JK: The question was, is this changed environment a good or a bad thing? And I think it is a good thing. I don't think we'll see leaks on this scale again – you have to blame the US government for putting such a stupid system in place in which it was possible to leak all their
www.guardian.uk/ 
