White House forbids feds from reading WikiLeaked cables The epic collection of classified US documents exposed by WikiLeaks over the past several weeks offer little more than good gossip. But watching the response to Julian Assange and his whistle-blowing website is wonderfully entertaining. The latest act in the worldwide WikiLeaks comedy: on Friday, the White House told federal …
"PayPal has shut the account WikiLeaks used to take donations, saying that the site violated its terms of service."
"Amazon claims its decision was not in response to a government inquiry, while EveryDNS said it booted WikiLeaks because of heavy DDoS attacks directed at the site"
*Cough*bullshit*cough*
There's not the slightest shadow of doubt that Wikileaks violated the terms of service for all these services. Normally of course internet providers, having in general the morals of gutter journalists without the same sense of public responsibility, tend to ignore terms of service breaches as long as the money comes in and their noses aren't completely rubbed in it...
In this case their noses haven't been so much rubbed in the breach of terms of service as planed off with a powersaw... If they weren't seen to act they'd presumably have no chance of ever enforcing terms of service breach again, and they do want to be able to enforce terms of service in order to get rid of "customers" who are more trouble than they are worth. Which category, in any case, Wikileaks probably comes into now anyway. I imagine the trouble is way worse than the cut of the money they'll be losing...
also dropped a copy to their Investor Relations email <ir@amazon.com> as I couldn't find Bezos' or other C*O's addy (anyone know it?). Also mentioned we were looking at moving our (rather smallish) hosting from rackspace to AWS and they've just made it a bit more complicated...
Nuisance. I liked amazon.
Till now Wikileaks were in the position of a despicable media attention w**re.
This however is from a different league. I am old enough to remember the days of Brezhnev and Andropov and the negotiations of the Start treaties. There was more than one moment during that when the west was presenting information on Soviet weapons and the Soviet requested an emergency interruption so that members of their delegation (yes, members of the delegation which is supposed to negotiate the bloody treaty) can leave the room because the material exceeds their security clearance rating.
It is really sad, in fact it is despicable to see that the world has gone full circle and we now live in a world which is under the command of the Union of Soviet (Capitalist) States with Dubia being the Brezhnev and the current honcho being the Andropov of the day (the intellectual level more or less corresponds). The "Helsinki charter of human rights" is now firmly sticking out of the toilet and the KGB^H^H^HNSA^H^H^MI5/6 is in command of everyone and everything.
Bugger that gently with a chainsaw, I am feeling like after this one WikiLeaks does deserve a donation after today.
Talk about shutting the stable door after the horse has disappeared over the horizon.
The data is out there in the public domain. Ok, it might not be licensed as PD but it is there for everyone (unless your ISP is blocking your DNS...) to read and digest.
Surely it is in the best interests of every Gov dept to read everything so that they get a proper picture of the potential damage to their 'vested interests'?
Posting as Anon becasue I done want the men in beige raincoats & shades knocing at my door.
No, of course its not in the best interests of government for their staff to spend hours reading tons of largely trivial and completely out of context tosh.
Its in the best interests of every Gov dept for their staff to get on with the frigging job and do what they are paid for.
Anyone who's job might involve evaluating this stuff would necessarily have the security clearance anyway.
Boston University warned its students that posting about the leaks on social networks may look poorly when they apply to US government jobs. Getting these jobs entails a security check, which might just entail a google check for their name+wikileaks...
That I understand, this was not an official statement, just a warning to the students to be careful. What does it say about a government that merely commenting on the news may bar you from getting a government job?
If you comment about Wikileaks being a wonderful force for good against the evils of government why would you ever expect ever to get any kind of security clearance or access to anything sensitive? Simple common sense says that no organisation that would like it its data to stay private shouldn't be employing anyone who publicly says leaking data is a good thing.
Its just struck me what the long term effects of this are going to be... Its that all of you are going to be paying more tax...
I don't work with anything classified but there is a shed load of stuff I'm responsible for that's under data protection, personal data like say who's been maltreating their kids or is otherwise confidential... We've been able to resist the more paranoid elements amongst the management who'd like to lock down data to the nth degree of granularity by saying well WTF is going to want to spend their day reading all this when they've got a job to do? Of course now all it needs is for one ****wit to download everything they've got some kind of read access to and send it off to wikileaks to make themselves think they're some kind of hero fighting for freedom.
So as soon as this occurs to the paranoid element we're going to need to lock everything up a lot tighter, which means we'll have to employ a damn sight more administrators... Then we'll also have to lock down the admnistrators access to data and produce much more secure policies there, which will reduce their productivity drastically, so we'll need to employ even more admins, which is even more of your taxes down the pan. Then we'll have to lock down all portable media even more... the fact that the memory sticks and things are all encrypted doesn't matter a damn if the guy who wants to leak it has the security... So even less efficiency, more security software, which in turn is either expensive packages or loads more admins to run open source equivalents, which is yet more of your taxes down the pan to pay for all this totally non-productive crap...
Now cue
a) the huge list of downvotes from people divorced from the real world of trying to get the job done
and
b) the list of flames on how we should have been doing all this anyway and if I knew my job properly I could do it all for 5 quid and a marsbar, all from people whom its damn obvious have never been involved in running a system of any size and complexity at all...
No matter how thorough the screening process, given a couple million employees, there are simply bound to be either fuckwits, or moles, or spys.
The cost to better screen people clearly exceeds to cost of simply securing the data, so I guess that's the plan. Problem is, they know how to secure it. The issue of doing it simply takes time. the larger the infrastructure, the more difficult/time-consuming change is.
The IT techs generally know how to treat data with the respect it deserves. Sadly it's usually some fuck-wit manager or staffer that thinks nothing of hooking up MS Excel-crement with ODBC and drawing out 25GB of confidential data, dropping it onto a laptop and taking it home!
When we speak up about security and the need to protect the data, we get shat on by management telling us we're being bloody difficult!
With all due respect you do not get my commiserations here. Any system which holds any data where the unauthorised disclosure is either a "legal problem" or "commercial problem" must have highly granular access control, audit trail and someone to administer both of them.
I have done a few of these myself over the years so I know how painful it is firsthand and how big is the resistance including from management which thinks that the current means of storing and accessing information is "good enough". However it has to be done.
So in fact, Wikileaks here has shown exactly how bad the current situation is. Systems are in use which are not fit for purpose and should have never ever passed procurement. With all due respect a mere grunt somewhere on the ground should have never ever had the level of access to get this stash of documents and he should have been picked up from the access requests before he accessed the information and not from an ex-hacker ratting on him.
To drive my point further - we had that. In the days when material like this was circulated and accessed on OpenServer, Trusted Solaris and DGUX you could not cut-n-paste from a window with a higher security rating into one with a lower. Downloading data onto external media? WTF? Forget even the mentioning of the idea. There was also a time when it was a procurement rule that systems that do not support this must not ever enter the network.
So the question here is which moron circumvented the rules and allowed Micro&Soft which does not have support for this level of granularity in older versions and noone knows how to administer and if it will scale to "fed" level it in the newer ones.
Crazy suggestion, I know, but why not put all this info on that paper stuff and lock it away in heavy filing cabinets in a locked cellar? Access restricted to asking security for a key , presenting credentials and signing for it.
An effective way to to stop data trawling and it would take a truck to remove the data, never mind the effort of copying... and how many people really NEED to see that kind of data in an instant?
"... now all it needs is for one ****wit to download everything they've got some kind of read access to and send it off to wikileaks to make themselves think they're some kind of hero fighting for freedom." Who are you to say that such a leak *wouldn't be* a battle (major or minor) in the war to see that justice is done? Yes, there is going to be a fight to keep everything under wraps, but it has never really succeeded. You are perhaps too much of a pragmatist, concerned only with the difficulties you see, not the bigger picture.However, as someone else said, there is little chance that anyone is going to be bothered one way or another.
Pay Pal has a history of freezing accounts, seizing money or delaying payments, along with collecting and passing data - smart people avoid using them as an recipient of funds and especially as a forwarder of funds using credit cards.
As for the White House, no words describe their stupidity. I supported Obama, he had a once in a blue moon opportunity to change the U.S.A. for the better. He blew this opportunity, too.
I guess the numbnuts on his staff presume the people won't access the Wikilleaks.com/http://213.251.145.96 when they get home.
Threatening penalties against any employee who has read a newspaper in the past week is beyond pastiche. It is more embarrassing than any of the leaks.
I don't find circus clowns funny but I don't find then scary, but it is terrifying to learn that they run the White House
"... it is terrifying to learn that they run the White House"
You must be young, it's nearly always been clowns. To quote Guy Fawkings book, "A Brief History of Government":
"A well-known politician once gave a public lecture on various forms of government. He described democracy, monarchy, authoritarianism and anarchy. At the end a little old lady cried: "Bullshit! Government is really a flat plate to collect your money supported by a clown holding you at gunpoint." The politician smirked, saying "What is supporting the clown?" The old biddy answered, "You think you're so smart, but it's clowns all the way down!""
"Amazon claims its decision was not in response to a government inquiry."
Taking what they said literally, I think they are telling the truth. I'm sure the communication from the government wasn't in the form of an inquiry. Far more likely "get that **** off your service or something bad will happen that you won't ever be able to prove was something to do with this / say bye bye to any government contracts you might want"
We're just supposed to think that phrase means they didn't talk at all.
