

WikiLeaks: The Spy Files - Tsiolkovsky
http://wikileaks.org/the-spyfiles.html

======
blhack
Wow they really need to redesign the layout on that page. It took me about a
minute and a half to realize that this was more than just a blog post about
echelon.

The actual files are on the left, in that ~100px wide container.

Here are some brochures from companies that do this stuff:

[http://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/list/document-
type/brochure.ht...](http://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/list/document-
type/brochure.html)

(The 3G thing is the only part of this that is really surprising. Intercepting
wifi isn't really that impressive)

Here is a pricelist of some tech that is, I guess, being sold in Europe:

[http://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/files/0/204_GRIFFCOMM-200802-P...](http://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/files/0/204_GRIFFCOMM-200802-PRICELIST.pdf)

(Honestly none of this seems very...leaky. Isn't most of this fairly common
knowledge to anybody who even reads about hacker conferences?)

~~~
guimarin
this is more about thin-thread than it is about echelon. echelon and 'echelon
II' haven't been used since before 9.11.2001.

~~~
Zarathust
Source?

~~~
guimarin
you're joking right?

------
mithaler
Wikileaks should not be editorializing.

Feeding us a party line about a "mass surveillance industry" and "Orwell's
World" and "Selling Surveillance to Dictators" is not going to bring people to
their cause. All it does is make them look like someone with an agenda to
push, and I'm not in the habit of going to people with an obvious agenda for a
primary source about someone they don't like.

What I want is the old Wikileaks back. Anyone else remember the days when they
were actually a wiki? Whistleblowers would approach them with documents from
all manner of sources from governments to corporations to religious
institutions, they would be subjected to source verification, and then they
would be published and indexed for the world to see with minimum fanfare. Back
then, I at least got the sense that they were devoted to _aiding
whistleblowers_ , not some silly and ineffectual crusade against the US
government, no matter how right that cause may be. Can anyone really say that
that's gotten us anywhere useful?

Let us see the documents and judge for ourselves what they mean.

~~~
dsplittgerber
So sad to see this as the top comment. This has been dealth with at length -
it's just not the way the modern (media) world works anymore.

Honestly, no one would even care if there were the greatest intel of all time,
the most incriminating information, published on a free-for-all wiki without
any editorializing. This is the model Wikileaks had at the beginning - and no
one cared and things didn't change.

Many reasons, just the most important one: No media organization is going to
cover your whistleblowing (and researching and verifying and spending hundreds
of manhours before publishing it) if they cannot be sure they have an
exclusive. If there is a slight chance they'll get beat to it, they won't
touch it (with serious effort).

So: Either you editorialize and embargo stuff and work together with media
organizations. Or you don't - and no whistleblower will ever give you stuff
anymore, because it's just not going to change anything.

Actually, IMHO, Wikileaks has an obligation to whisteblowers to get the most
bang for the buck and that's just not going to happen in the old ways.

There's a reason no one in the real world knows what cryptome even is.

~~~
mithaler
So if that is the way the world works, what of note have they accomplished,
aside from drawing the ire of the US government and getting a leader martyred,
their finances blockaded, and a barrage of at-best ambivalent media attention?

The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. Change doesn't happen because a
few activists angrily demand it; it happens because of huge cultural shifts in
the minds of millions.

 _This is the model Wikileaks had at the beginning - and no one cared and
things didn't change._

That just isn't true. Read through this list, up to 2010.[0] WL _can_ get
things done more subtly. It may not attract huge mainstream headlines that
way, but _that's fine_. It should be amassing influence over years or decades,
because that's the way real successful institutions start out. Not everyone is
on Internet time--certainly not governments.

 _So: Either you editorialize and embargo stuff and work together with media
organizations. Or you don't - and no whistleblower will ever give you stuff
anymore, because it's just not going to change anything._

I believe there's a happy medium here, but if WL is your model of media
cooperation, you may want to look elsewhere, since WL has not exactly been a
good citizen from their perspectives.[1]

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_published_by_WikiLe...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_published_by_WikiLeaks)

[1] [http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/12/wikileaks-
stil...](http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/12/wikileaks-still-
squabbling-guardian/45592/#)

~~~
travem
One of the contributing factors behind the US withdrawal from Iraq are some of
the disclosures from Wikileaks. See
[http://www.salon.com/2011/10/23/wikileaks_cables_and_the_ira...](http://www.salon.com/2011/10/23/wikileaks_cables_and_the_iraq_war/singleton/)

~~~
rhizome
OT, but Salon. Man. Putting "/singleton" on the end of the URL for a 1-page is
truly the most widely-distributed codesmell I have ever seen.

------
runjake
Can anyone point us to a torrent for these files?

If not, why not? Every time the Wikileaks site(s) get taken offline for one
reason or another, we lose access to valuable data.

The bottom of the page states "courage is contagious". I'd submit that
torrents are even more contagious. Get this stuff on torrents, so it never
leaves the Internet for pete's sake!

~~~
onemoreact
It's easy to find the IP of anyone who downloads such a torrent which may or
may not be important, but would prevent many people from downloading that
information.

~~~
runjake
There's a wealth of people in countries all over the world who fail to give a
damn about this fact, myself included.

------
dangrossman
It's somewhat disconcerting that clicking through to some of these files, I
worry there's probably some government agency somewhere along the round trip
recording the fact that I've read Wikileaks documents, and that could be held
against me any time in the future.

~~~
forgottenpaswrd
"recording the fact that I've read Wikileaks documents, and that could be held
against me any time in the future."

Do you want to live in a world like this?

There are things in the world like free speech that are not free. People had
to fight for it, and in some case they died for it.

Read "The Gulag Archipelago". Solzhenitsyn talks about communism as a
minority, that knew they were a minority. So when Stalin was going to
incarcerate people, they used night, and police will take off their shoes so
nobody hear them detain their neighbors. Stalin only killed people with very
gradual steps.

People have a lot of power by their selves. Never underestimate your own
power. The power that the courage of millions of people that admits openly
that they read wikileaks and are not afraid about it.

They(the government) are the ones that should fear us, because they work for
us.

~~~
lhnz
> People have a lot of power by their selves. Never underestimate your own
> power. The power that the courage of millions of people that admits openly
> that they read wikileaks and are not afraid about it.

Thank you for stating this.

------
GHFigs
The introduction appears to mix fact, speculation, and editorializing.

For instance, under the subheading "Weaponizing Data Kills Innocent People",
it talks about "Intelligence Integration Systems, Inc" (IISi) and "Netezza",
neither of which appear in the files. In fact, the story described was covered
in the press last year[1]. The implication is that civilian deaths from drone
strikes is somehow related to this release...but it isn't.

[1]:<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/24/cia_netezza/>

------
iamwil
Is it not well known that these companies do what they do? I dunno, a lot of
the files are just brochures. It doesn't seem very leaky to me. I guess I'm
not terribly surprised. Now if they had files that point to concrete instances
of the adverse affects of these companies, that'd be more leaky.

------
nextparadigms
It seems like every other day one more of those "conspiracy theories" is
confirmed and proven true.

~~~
GHFigs
That statement is rather difficult to evaluate without knowing what such
theories you're referring to.

------
adunn
Well, I don't see Carrier IQ in the list ;)

------
fsaintjacques
Look at this file:

[http://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/files/0/110_CELLEBRITE-
UFED.pd...](http://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/files/0/110_CELLEBRITE-UFED.pdf)

Was it intended that a typical shady lawyer/congressman secret deal appears on
the left?

------
billpatrianakos
Not to minimize the seriousness of the potential for this to invade a
sovereign citizen's privacy, but this really counts as a leak?

I didn't read through all the sources but here are the problems with the slant
wiki leaks is spinning:

1\. First off, this reads like an editorial. We want facts, not spin and their
extremely biased writing takes their credibility from wherever it is to far
lower now. Orwell's World? Maybe. But let me decide that and don't try to
plant the idea. I think an organization that would spin this as anti-
government propaganda is just as bad as the some of the things they're opposed
to. Give me facts and let me decided - don't throw in opinions to guide me to
the "correct" view.

2\. I couldn't read every brochure nor do I want to but the brochures and
videos I saw weren't all that evil. At least not as evil as they want me to
believe. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to be spied on and I do see the
potential for abuse but the brochures here are things I can get by myself. The
HP brochure, the Hacker Team video, and others aren't hiding in some dark
government lab. They're out there trying to sell this stuff to the right
people! I don't come across it because I have no need for it nor am I
interested in it. But anyway, they're pretty quiet about selling this stuff
but they do know how to get heard by the right people. That doesn't mean it's
a secret. They don't make secret brochures for spy products if their products
and services are supposed to be considered sensitive information like wiki
leaks wants us to believe.

3\. Don't we all know about this? It really isn't a secret anymore that there
are companies creating software and hardware specifically meant to take over
devices and spy on people. We hope it doesn't happen to us but we know it
sometimes does. That sucks. We should know. We should make a fuss and we do.
But wiki leaks isn't sharing anything groundbreaking here. We all know about
Carrier IQ, right? Maybe CarrierIQ is a little more benign but then we also
know about the cyber attack on Iranian nuclear program via Stuxnet so we all
know it goes on, already know the abuse potential, and already know about some
but not all abuses. Nothing earth shattering again.

4\. This could have come off as a jumping off point for discussing the
seriousness of the problem in terms of how we can spot and stop the general
public from being spied on but instead they just created tinfoil hat wearing
conspiracy theorist fodder. I know it did spark some constructive discussion
but I'll be damned if it didn't sound like the stuff you can find on anti GWB
sites or "Obama is a member of the Skull and Bones, hey look at the secret
symbols on a dollar bill" type sites.

Also, I want to see The sources for where they got the information on these
spy products being used in Egypt and Lybia. If its there then it's hard to
find. And the site needs a better layout. Nothing fancy, just make it easier
to navigate and read.

I think WikiLeaks took what could have been a great jumping off point for
debate and made it into a joke with their very generous helping of spin and
what seems to be an antiestablishment agenda just for the sake of having an
antiestablishment agenda.

~~~
DanBC
> _how we can spot and stop the general public from being spied on_

You can't spot when a well-funded government secret service, with access to
communications infrastructure, is spying on the population.

> _Also, I want to see The sources for where they got the information on these
> spy products being used in Egypt and Lybia._

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. You think a site for
whistleblowers should release information about those whistleblowers?

~~~
billpatrianakos
No, I don't think they should call out whistleblowers but they don't really
say where they got the info on the secret spy rooms where all the devices were
hidden in these countries. They don't say it was whistleblowers. They just say
they know. Well let me tell you what I know:

My neighbor murdered his wife and had our other neighbor, a police officer,
cover up the crime. We now know this. How do we know thus? We just do, I'm
fucking credible, don't ask questions.

See what I mean? At least give us _something_ to go on. Even a link to a
previous article where they cover this source less information would do.

------
billpatrianakos
This discussion has gone south the more people that joined in. There's a lot
of people expressing sentiments along the lines of being fearful that they're
being tracked and that government agencies are spying on them personally.

Let's get something straight. The real issue here isn't that you're being
personally spied on. If the government is tracking you specifically and is
willing to hold the data they collect on you against you then you should play
the lottery too because you're one lucky person.

If and when data is collected it is used most often to analyze groups of
people, not individuals. It's very rare that an individual would be tracked
and that would only happen if you were influential or a true danger to them
(at least a perceived danger).

For example, let's say the government was tracking Occupy Wall Street
protesters. If they were targeting individuals then they'd be targeting the
very few "leaders" if there are any. Otherwise they'd just like to know about
you as a group. What you think, like, listen to, and read. Even so, they're
not going to come after you. They're going to use that information in a way
that allows them to spin a narrative or in some other subtle way. They just
aren't going to bust into your living room.

Also, in the rare case they collect data on an individual and actually try to
do something to you personally, they sure as hell aren't going to bring it up
in a court. You'll be black bagged or something but you're not going to go to
trial with the prosecutor coming out saying "well, we surreptitiously
collected this data from John's phone and home computer which proves he's a
terrorist". They'd be shooting themselves in the foot! They'd much rather have
you know they collect data while still retaining plausible deniability.

You can look up anything you want all day long including how to make bombs and
no one will bust in your living room until the day you somehow are in a
position to influence a large group of people.

So please everyone, let's take off our tinfoil hats, quit thinking we're
important enough to track individually, and just generally stop sounding like
conspiracy theorists. I mean, this stuff can really do damage and it isn't
right but this discussion is heading in the wrong direction with that kind of
rhetoric.

Edit: Seems everyone doesn't like what I've got to say yet only one person is
willing to say why. There's way too much group think and karma policing going
on around here.

~~~
wladimir
You're getting downvoted because you get it wrong. The problem isn't
individual tracking of criminals/spies. This is not about fear of individual
tracking, if "they" want to do that they could just as well post a stake-out
van in front of your house.

 _If and when data is collected it is used most often to analyze groups of
people, not individuals_

And that's _exactly_ the problem with the mass surveillance industry. The more
advanced the technology becomes, the easier it will be to track everyone
"individually" (recent examples CarrierIQ, malls tracking phones). It also
lowers the threshold to invading individuals privacy.

Also, Assange is concerned with companies that sell this equipment to foreign
governments with a dismal human rights record. In those countries, a wrong
word in a message can cost your life. Mass surveillance makes it possible to
easily pick out potential "enemies of the state".

~~~
rhizome
What this does is legitimize the use of stereotypes in law enforcement. They
might say it's just for "hints" or something, but at the end of the day you
have not only racial profiling being enabled through this mechanism, but
anything-profiling if the "anything" achieves a certain statistical
significance. An abstract profiler.

~~~
omouse
Indeed, it dehumanizes us and treats us as statistics.

~~~
rhizome
The thing is, it doesn't affect anybody specific...until it does, in which
case it self-validates.

