The WikiLeaks website crashed
Tuesday in an apparent cyberattack after the accelerated publication of
tens of thousands of once-secret State Department cables by the
anti-secrecy organization raised new concerns about the exposure of
confidential U.S. embassy sources.
"WikiLeaks.org
is presently under attack," the group said on Twitter late Tuesday. One
hour later, the site and the cables posted there were inaccessible.
WikiLeaks
updated its Twitter account to say that it was "still under a
cyberattack" and directed followers to search for cables on a mirror
site or a separate search system, cablegatesearch.net.
The
apparent cyberattack comes after current and former American officials
said the recently released cables — and concerns over the protection of
sources — are creating a fresh source of diplomatic setbacks and
embarrassment for the Obama administration. It was not immediately clear
who was behind the attack.
The
Associated Press reviewed more than 2,000 of the cables recently
released by WikiLeaks. They contained the identities of more than 90
sources who had sought protection and whose names the cable authors had
asked to protect.
Officials said
the disclosure in the past week of more than 125,000 sensitive
documents by WikiLeaks, far more than it had earlier published, further
endangered informants and jeopardized U.S. foreign policy goals. The
officials would not comment on the authenticity of the leaked documents
but said the rate and method of the new releases, including about 50,000
in one day alone, presented new complications.
"The
United States strongly condemns any illegal disclosure of classified
information," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said. "In
addition to damaging our diplomatic efforts, it puts individuals'
security at risk, threatens our national security and undermines our
effort to work with countries to solve shared problems. We remain
concerned about these illegal disclosures and about concerns and risks
to individuals.
"We continue to
carefully monitor what becomes public and to take steps to mitigate the
damage to national security and to assist those who may be harmed by
these illegal disclosures to the extent that we can," she told
reporters.
Neither Nuland nor
other current officials would comment on specific information contained
in the compromised documents or speculate as to whether any harm caused
by the new releases would exceed that caused by the first series of
leaks, which began in November and sent the administration into a
damage-control frenzy.
WikiLeaks fired back at the criticism even as its website came under cyberattack.
"Dear governments, if you don't want your filth exposed, then stop acting like pigs. Simple," the group posted on Twitter.
Some
officials noted that the first releases had been vetted by media
organizations who scrubbed them to remove the names of contacts that
could be endangered. The latest documents have not been vetted in the
same way.
"It's picking at an
existing wound. There is the potential for further injury," said P.J.
Crowley, the former assistant secretary of state for public affairs who
resigned this year after criticizing the military's treatment of the man
suspected of leaking the cables to WikiLeaks. "It does have the
potential to create further risk for those individuals who have talked
to U.S. diplomats. It has the potential to hurt our diplomatic efforts
and it once again puts careers at risk."
Crowley
set up a crisis management team at the State Department to deal with
the matter and said officials at the time went through the entire
collection of documents they believed had been leaked and warned as many
named sources as possible, particularly in authoritarian countries,
that their identities could be revealed. A handful of them were
relocated, but Crowley said others may have been missed and some could
not be contacted because the effort would have increased the potential
for exposure.
The new releases
"could be used to intimidate activists in some of these autocratic
countries," he said. He said he believed that "any autocratic security
service worth its salt" probably already would have the complete
unredacted archive of cables but added that the new WikiLeaks releases
meant that any intelligence agency that did not "will have it in short
order."
WikiLeaks insisted it was "totally false" that any
WikiLeaks sources have been exposed and appeared to suggest the group
itself was not even responsible for releasing unredacted cables.
The
group seemed to taunt U.S. officials and detractors in yet another
Twitter message late Tuesday, asking what they will do "when it is
revealed which mainstream news organization disclosed all 251k
unredacted cables."
The AP
review included all cables classified as "confidential" or "secret,"
among the more than 50,000 recently released by WikiLeaks. In them, the
AP found the names of at least 94 sources whose identities the cable
authors asked higher-ups to "protect" or "strictly protect." Several
thousand other of the recently published cables were not classified and
did not appear to put sources in jeopardy.
The
accelerated flood of publishing partly reflects the collapse of the
unusual relationships between WikiLeaks and news organizations that
previously were cooperating with it in exchange for being given copies
of all the uncensored State Department messages.
Initially,
WikiLeaks released only a trickle of documents at a time from a trove
of a quarter-million, and only after considering advice from five news
organizations with which it chose to share all of the material. The news
organizations advised WikiLeaks on which documents to release publicly
and what redactions to make to those documents. The Associated Press was
not among those news organizations.
In
recent months, those relationships have soured noticeably. WikiLeaks
complained Tuesday that a reporter who wrote about the group's efforts
for The New York Times, one of the news organizations it was working
with closely, was a "sleazy hack job." It also said a reporter for
Guardian in Britain, another of its former partners in the release of
documents, had exhibited a "tawdry vendetta" against WikiLeaks.
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