A collection of diplomatic history since 1966 to the present day. This sentence is changing the world, unintentionally. The US State Department would have given its left testicle for this code phrase until last week. Maybe they didn’t have to, because it was published in a fracking book by an arrogant ass of a journalist named David Leigh. (The password was published in February 2010! Anyone in that time could have put 2 and 2 together to have all of the cables!)
The Internet is great because I can loudly and frequently proclaim how pissed off I am that The Guardian’s journalist Leigh published the password Assange gave him for decrypting cablegate files on his USB drive (and as it turned out, the file was on the Internet too). What a terrific effing moron of the highest possible class. It’s so shockingly stupid, I can’t really think of a comparable blunder as an analogy for laymen. Put simply it’s the biggest cock-up since the US Government gave disgruntled, justice seeking army men access to secret government cables and CD burners.
It’s a contender for the biggest arrogant “oops” in human history. The amount of egg on Leigh’s face will possibly suffocate him, doing the world a favour. If someone could die of shame and ill-will, Leigh could show us how it’s done.
And knowing how little most people understand the uber drama that is the Wikileaks story, Leigh will instead fade into obscurity instead of worldwide scorn. Since before Cablegate broke into the news last year, the story that has unfolded would make the most compelling action, spy, hacker, thriller movie script ever. And it’s all TRUE and happening still right now.
For almost a year, The Guardian has been running a smear campaign against Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Detractors of Wikileaks claim they’ve endangered lives, but as Greenwald points out, the US has TAKEN lives and detractors don’t seem to care about those dead people because they don’t benefit their invalid point!
FML = Fucking Moron Leigh
Leigh made a mistake and betrayed WikiLeaks and his supposed ideals of protecting government sources, DDB betrayed Wikileaks, WikiLeaks made a mistake in trusting Leigh and DDB, and the US Government made a mistake (or three thousand). If any one of those hadn’t screwed up, then we wouldn’t be in this mess of a situation now. As Wikileaks pointed out again recently, if the US would stop committing crimes and acting like pigs (ie. murdering a family and calling in an air-strike to cover it up), there’d be no need to squeal on them.
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If you need to read more about WikiLeaks, a great place to start is anything by Greg Mitchell at The Nation.
UPDATE: Wikileaks published this video that expands on this topic:
Saskboy's Abandoned Stuff 
Ugh. And I thought Assange was a target before. He might as well be wearing a bullseye now. Bloody hell.
It seems it gets more interesting and dangerous with every twist. If it were going better for the average citizen, I’d say I love it.
I can’t believe more people watch Big Brother, than bother to follow WikiLeaks!
My sentiments exactly in your blog. But, have no fear he’ll turn up with a program on CNN or somewhere else in North America.
I’m a regular Guardian reader, and I haven’t seen much evidence of that smear campaign…in fact, the papers been relatively sympathetic throughout Assange’s extradition hearings. And since the book’s been out there for several months, one would think that someone would have changed the password, no?
Assange and co. can blame the media all they want, but the fact is that their release of unredacted documents has put Bradley Manning and a number of people who should have remained anonymous more at risk than anything the Guardian or anyone else could have done.
Jane, this explains why you are wrong, sorry.
It’s not possible to change the password on a file that could be, and was in the wild. The mistake was exposing the complete password, and Assange’s only mistake in security was trusting the Guardian and Leigh, and DDB.
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“Harding’s co-author on that book—the self-styled former senior Guardian editor David Leigh—is absent in The Snowden Files. This is good: In writing about his work with me on the WikiLeaks material, Leigh chose—over my explicit warnings—to print a confidential encryption password as a chapter heading, undoing eight months of our work (and of over a hundred other media organizations) and resulting in the dumping of hundreds of thousands of State Department cables onto the Internet without the selective redactions that had been carefully prepared for them.”
http://www.newsweek.com/assange-how-guardian-milked-edward-snowdens-story-323480