Zetter

Another incompetent MSM moron.

Get It Try It

Reading about the kerfuffle over the recent murder in Tehran brings one to the eager but incompetent Andy Greenberg of Forbes and from there to the unforgettable Kim Zetter of Wired. Greenberg's dismissal of the slurs of the Daily Mail is superficial and unresearched at best. But his tossing the ball back to Wired is even worse and puts the final nails in the coffin of what the WikiLeaks twitter feed condemned as 'incompetent morons'. That's not hyperbole - they are incompetent. And continuing to publish such rubbish qualifies them as morons.

Why is Andy still hurting? Cablegate2. Andy didn't do the research then either. From Wired - which seems to be Andy's main if not sole reference in the topic:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/09/wikileaks-unredacted-cables

Let's review briefly. David Leigh pressured Julian Assange to let him see the big kahuna - Cablegate. Assange finally relented and gave Leigh a partial encryption key on a slip of paper.

Assange then told Leigh the key was not complete. Leigh had to insert another unwritten word into that encryption key at the appropriate offset.

This was all excellently obfuscated in the media because mainstream journalists, along with their readers, are stupid. And the goal of modern mainstream journalism is to make readers more stupid and more confused than ever.

Leigh got the notorious and hated Luke Harding to help him write a kill piece on WikiLeaks. And one of them came up with the brilliant idea of publishing the entire encryption key including the part that was never to be written.

Harding and Leigh set about deliberately (and diabolically) to destroy confidence in WikiLeaks and they didn't give a damn how many people got hurt or killed in the process.

Think for a moment what must have been going through the mind of Julian Assange when he heard about this. Think of what everyone on WikiLeaks staff must have been thinking. Fearing. For months on end. Did David Leigh shed a tear? Did he recall a print or two of his morbid book?

Was there any reason to publish the whole blasted thing? Did it serve to up sales? No. The move had only one possible motive: destruction. Harm WikiLeaks and damn the torpedoes and anyone exposed by the remaining unredacted cables.

The WikiLeaks media partners were responsible for protecting both the innocent and sometimes even the guilty. They opted for tranches of cables. It's their versions of the cables, once redacted, that are published at the WikiLeaks website.

But leave it to the bumbling Herbert Snorrason to finally read the Leigh book on a plane flight home - and do what? Do what when one realises the awful truth that's out there? Run to Julian? Run to fellow countryman Kristinn? No - run to the one person more bent on revenge than anyone else. The primordial 'loose cannon' Daniel Domscheit-Berg. Who's just come home from a fiasco outside Berlin where he was exposed as a charlatan and a fraud and dismissed from the famed Chaos Computer Club.

Domscheit-Berg's never been particularly stable (or normal) and now things were even worse. DDB took Snorrason's news with aplomb. Did DDB worry about innocent people coming to harm? No - he went straight to the offices of Der Freitag and told them all he knew. DDB knew the location of the Cablegate tranche. Snorrason had the encryption key as Leigh and his mutt Harding had printed it. They had all they needed to summon up an Armageddon.

Stop for a second. Catch your breath. Compare this unfolding story with that of the famed insurance file. Everyone has that file! Everyone! It's been downloaded millions of times! But has anyone cracked it? No! It's encrypted with AES-256 which is nigh on impossible to crack. And it sure hasn't succeeded with the insurance file! So where does that leave Leigh, Greenburg, Zetter, Harding, and all the other incompetent morons of the MSM?

Leigh's and Harding's book tries to deliberately cloud the issue of the difference between a password and an encryption key. The sequence of events in Leigh's book is deliberately inaccurate so as to confuse and cloud the mind of the reader. You don't need a password (or key) to download and both Leigh and Harding knew it. But the readership wouldn't.

Think again about Ellingham. Think of what was going through the minds of Julian Assange and everyone else there. Think about the lack of sleep. For those people care about people. They care about humanity. They're not in it for money or glory like the Greenburgs, Leighs, Hardings, and Zetters of this world. They can live like paupers and die like paupers. They don't care. They care about one thing only: human justice. Think about the tossing and turning as they realised what Leigh, Harding, Snorrason, DDB, and others were up to. Think about how they must have chewed the fat about it, tried to work out what to do, how to save lives, protect those who the mainstream didn't care about protecting.

The decision they made was of course the right one. The Cablegate file was 'out there' just like the insurance file. There was no way to put it back in the bottle. The security was great - David Leigh and Luke Harding deliberately jeopardised the lives of countless innocent people. ← Read that again.

Now to our friend Zetter. Enough's been written already about this moron. But a few more words may prove useful. Check the link above again.

The passphrases and passwords have it.

Here are some further gems:

'The 1.73 GB file and passphrase were published Thursday on Cryptome'

'WikiLeaks had given the Guardian access to the file, along with the passphrase'

'The full database of cables was to have been released piecemeal through Nov 29 of this year' (That's not related but it's just so stupid it had to be included)

'It has so far published about 144,000 cables, most of them unclassified' (No Zetter. That batch were all unclassified. As anyone downloading them could see.)

'WikiLeaks blames the Guardian for disclosing the password in a book' (Now it's a password. Surely this qualifies Zetter as an incompetent moron?)

'The paper notes that although the Guardian's book did reveal the passphrase, it did not reveal the location of the file, and that Assange had told the paper that 'it was a temporary password which would expire and be deleted in a matter of hours. It was a meaningless piece of information to anyone except the person(s) who created the database'.'

This is such utter and complete bullshit that it has to be down to malice that Zetter wrote it. You don't tell people to never write down a missing part of an encryption key if it's only good for a few hours, you incompetent moron.

And once again, it's an encryption key - not a passphrase or a password. As Zetter knows.

From then on it's all downhill. 'Assange had told the paper that the file, which was placed in a subdirectory on a WikiLeaks server, would remain online only a short time, after which it would be removed.' Again utter bullshit. This presumes the file's removal has something to do with security. Again: think of the insurance file. You're watching Leigh covering his regrettably unchastised backside and getting help from the great Zetter.

What is known (as demonstrated by this site) is that the file was stored in an unlisted directory on the WikiLeaks servers and the servers of the thousands of WikiLeaks mirrors, using a trick involving the hypertext access configuration file. But there is no security through obscurity and Julian Assange if anyone knows this. The difference is Julian Assange wasn't trying to bamboozle anyone or hurt anyone. That had to be left to the likes of Leigh and Zetter.

See Also
Justice4Assange.com
Assange Defence Fund
WikiLeaks: Support WikiLeaks
The Police Protocol (Translated)
Rixstep: JA/WL (Assange/WikiLeaks)
Rixstep: Assange/WikiLeaks RSS Feed
Radsoft: Assange/WikiLeaks RSS Feed