Wikileaks accuses The Guardian of leaking unredacted cables

WHISTLEBLOWING WEB SITE Wikileaks has accused a journalist working for The Guardian of leaking the password to its encrypted file of unredacted US diplomatic cables.

"A Guardian journalist has, in a previously undetected act of gross negligence or malice, and in violation of a signed security agreement with the Guardian's editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, disclosed top secret decryption passwords to the entire, unredacted, Wikileaks Cablegate archive," Wikileaks wrote.

Earlier this week it was revealed that Wikileaks' entire collection of over 250,000 US State Department cables was leaked online after both the encrypted file and the encryption key were shared. These files are not censored to remove the names of informants, an approach that Wikileaks previously took in an effort to protect lives. Now it appears that those lives could be in jeopardy, a criticism that was leveled at it from day one by the US government.

Wikileaks alleges that The Guardian was behind the leak of the unredacted US cables because it published a password in its book, Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, in February.

However, The Guardian denies this, saying that the password was "a meaningless piece of information to anyone except the person who created the database", according to French news agency AFP. The Guardian said that it did not upload the encrypted file of unredacted cables to Bittorrent, which can be accessed with this password, and it said that it was told the password was temporary.

Wikileaks objected to this, saying, "It is false that the passphrase was temporary or was ever described as such. That is not how PGP files work. Ask any expert."

Wikileaks said it has spoken with the US State Department and "commenced pre-litigation action", suggesting that a long legal battle could commence between it and The Guardian.

It appears that the case will focus on the violation of the security agreement between the two, but the fact that nothing happened from February until now suggests that the leak had little to do with The Guardian's publication of the password and more to do with the sharing of the encrypted file online in the first place.

How that got on Bittorrent networks remains to be seen, but allegedly Wikileaks founder Julian Assange accidentally uploaded it to the web in a cache of old files. If this is the case, then the blame cannot rest solely with The Guardian. µ