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The censor hit! More...
These pages used to live at a TUE address but were killed
by the censor.
All cables leaked
(2011-08-31) Various sources have now leaked that
ACollectionOfHistorySince_1966_ToThe_PresentDay#. “That’s the password,”
he said. “But you have to add one extra word when you type it in.
You have to put in the word ‘Diplomatic’ before the word ‘History’
and that the file containing all cables is xyz/z.gpg.
Downloading the corresponding torrent yields an encrypted 368881482-byte file.
The above password decodes it to a file in 7z format.
From this one extracts cables.csv, 1730507223 bytes,
with all 251287 cables. The time stamp is 2010-04-13 01:22:28 GMT.
Keeping track of which news sources have published what parts
is no longer necessary. It is still interesting to see what
redactions were made by these news sources. Also, to see
that even these "original" cables are somewhat redacted.
Leak
Release
Status
|
Wikileaks
The Wikileaks cable leak is of enormous importance
for our understanding of how the world functions today. These pages
however do not talk about politics, but only about the raw data.
On 2010-11-28 five newspapers and the Wikileaks organisation
started publishing from a collection of about a quarter of a million
diplomatic cables sent from the various U.S. embassies
to the U.S. State Department or vice versa.
Initially the five newspapers together published say a hundred
cables a day, but a month later that had become a dozen a day
or even less. Wikileaks mostly only publishes what was first
published elsewhere, so also the Wikileaks stream of publications
is a trickle now (2011-01-11).
On the other hand, several other newspapers have obtained copies,
and each publishes some material that is interesting in the local
context. So far Wikileaks has not republished this, so that there
no longer is a single point with all information. Here some pointers
or copies.
Wikileaks
The Guardian
The Telegraph
Al-Akhbar
El País
20minutos
El Comercio Perú
El Comercio (Ecuador)
NY Times
NOS
Aftenposten
RusRep
Counterpunch
Politiken
Der Spiegel
The Age
Wellington
Today the
official
wikileaks
website
and
torrent
contain 143912 cables. Thirty-six more cables have been published earlier
but are not in the present release.
Release history.
Altogether I have seen 144605 cables today, 657 only published elsewhere.
This page provides pointers.
Places to look for cables can be found at
whereiswikileaks and
leakylinks.
Interfaces for searching the official cables are
cablesearch and
cablegatesearch and
dazzlepod and
KABELS.
For historical information and comparisons, see
privetbank
and cablegatesearch.
Here we give pointers to more than a thousand further cables.
Time stamps
A Wikileaks programming error caused the minutes field of all
time stamps to be equal to the hour field in a 12-hour system
(so that one sees cables sent 23:11 and released 17:05).
This happens in the Wikileaks releases, not in the releases
by the Wikileaks partners, the correct data is available.
The Guardian has made a table available (in Google
fusion
tables and as
ZIP
file) with one record for each cable. It gives lines like
2/28/10,Embassy Tokyo,"1-10-5 Akasaka Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-8420 Japan","ENRG, EPET, ETTC, IR, PREL, JA"
or
2010-02-28T23:25:00Z,Embassy Tokyo,"ENRG, EPET, ETTC, IR, PREL, JA"
with date, origin and tags (but no contents). Sometimes this suffices
to determine the date a cable was sent.
This Guardian data base has 251286 data lines (and a header line).
But Wikileaks announced 251287 cables.
Separately published statistics about origins / dates show
a cable from Beijing / 2010 missing from this data base.
A file Cableheaders.zip with headers found
elsewhere shows that the missing line is
1/26/10,Embassy Beijing,Jon Huntsman
No. 55 An Jia Lou Lu 100600,"ECON, PGOV, PHUM, PREL, EINV, CH"
and that it has number 245489.
Now it is clear that the cable that was hidden in this way is 10BEIJING207,
the one about Google hacking directed by the Chinese government.
Compare
NYTimes
and
El País
and
The Guardian
and
Wikileaks.
In order to protect the privacy or personal safety or job security
of people mentioned in the cables, names have often been redacted
in the published versions.
But there are also cases where general political discussions have
been removed. (An example:
09ALGIERS1077.)
Some cables were published in several versions, some more, some less
redacted. We give
a list of changed cables and release dates,
a discussion of the changes, and
a comparison between less and more
redacted versions.
Original redaction
The cables.csv file that contains all cables already seems
to have redactions, or at least strings XXX.
However, these occurrences seem all
harmless.
Corruption
Some cables are somewhat
corrupted
by single-bit errors or dropped characters.
Both 09CONAKRY766 and 09BRUSSELS196 have garbage in their headers,
in fact almost identical garbage. Also 06TRIPOLI358, 06TRIPOLI561,
07TRIPOLI169, 07TRIPOLI426, 07TRIPOLI487 and 07TRIPOLI834
start with mutually similar garbage (...__nameid_version1.0...).
Newspapers
Various newspapers have published several hundred additional cables.
The index
of cables published by The Guardian shows 40 cables not found elsewhere
(namely
79TEHRAN11319,
85LONDON24287,
90PRETORIA7087,
99ISLAMABAD495,
01VATICAN4258,
01VATICAN6619,
03NASSAU1635,
05KATHMANDU2811,
06TELAVIV3910,
06TELAVIV4256,
07MOSCOW3625,
07RIYADH1950,
08DUBLIN228,
09BAGHDAD553,
09BANGKOK3066,
09DOHA414,
09DOHA432,
09DOHA677,
09ISLAMABAD364,
09KABUL131,
09KABUL321,
09KABUL1592,
09KABUL2597,
09KABUL2681,
09KINGSTON666,
09KINGSTON761,
09MADRID870,
09MBABANE107,
09MOSCOW980,
09NASSAU527,
09NASSAU560,
09RANGOON502,
09RIGA594,
09UNVIEVIENNA331,
09UNVIEVIENNA457,
09UNVIEVIENNA478,
09VANCOUVER31,
10ISLAMABAD301,
10RPODUBAI23,
10STATE6439).
There are many minor differences with Wikileaks releases of the same cables.
For example, the
Wikileaks
version of 10ATHENS57 lacks a SUBJECT line, while the
The
Guardian version has one.
Between 2011-01-31 and 2011-02-04, The Telegraph published
1251 cables,
of which 443 have not yet been published by Wikileaks today.
Among these are
654 cables
from London (403 not yet published by Wikileaks),
429 cables
about Libya (5 new:
08TRIPOLI391,
09TRIPOLI1,
09TRIPOLI131,
09TRIPOLI148,
09TRIPOLI775),
60 cables
on smuggling of nuclear material, radioactivity and similar (2 new:
08STATE44438
and
09STATE96945),
23 cables
about Iran,
22 cables
about Somalia,
15 cables
about BP,
8 cables
about 9/11,
7 cables
about China, and
6 cables
on UK terrorism.
152 cables from the Lebanese
newspaper الأخبار, not published elsewhere. In some cases these
give unredacted versions where Wikileaks published redacted cables.
Don't be afraid of the
cover page in Arabic. Click on the flags to get English abstracts,
on the abstracts to get full cables. All of this was rescued from
Google cache: due to a DDOS attack the paper was unable to host this
material.
70 cables from the Spanish
newspaper El País,
not published elsewhere.
The Spanish "20 minutos" got the cables from Aftensposten
and started publishing on 2011-02-08. The first few:
08MADRID73,
09MADRID224,
09MADRID1052,
09MADRID1075,
09MADRID1207,
10MADRID78.
There is also a
small section from 10PARIS151.
Spanish text
and 44 original cables:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27.
Not yet published by Wikileaks:
06LIMA1534,
06LIMA3571,
06LIMA4516,
06LIMA4621,
08LIMA1348,
08LIMA1733,
09LIMA146.
Among the cables found here
there is one that was not yet published by Wikileaks,
due to a mistake.
The New York Times published 15 cables not found elsewhere.
(This site has 168 entries today, 6 repeated, 162 different cables.
Its cable labeled 99BEIJING999 is really 10BEIJING207 (see above).
Of these, 145 are in the Wikileaks torrent.
The remaining 17 are
04AMMAN1471, 04AMMAN9085, 04ANKARA2680, 05CAIRO6908, 06RIYADH8234,
07DARESSALAAM1249, 08ASHGABAT1079, 08MANAMA47, 08TUNIS568, 08TUNIS962,
09BRASILIA795, 09CAIRO119, 09CAIRO604, 09DAMASCUS429, 10ANKARA74,
10KATHMANDU163, 10TEGUCIGALPA169.)
18 cables, mostly from The Hague
and USNATO, not yet published by Wikileaks.
A
survey of all (180+) wikileaks cables related to The Netherlands,
published by NOS.
Also
NRC
and
RTL
have pages with links to the cables they published.
258 cables from the
Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, not published elsewhere.
Of these, 37 are about the "peace process" in
Sri Lanka.
Svenska Dagbladet
07BAGHDAD3074.
117 cables from the Russian
newspaper Русский Репортёр on the Russia-Georgia conflict.
There has been some discussion about whether
these cables represent the truth. But of course none of the cables
represents the Truth - these cables contain what their authors wrote.
In the case of the Russia-Georgia conflict the ambassador in Tbilisi
originally only had information from the government of Georgia, and
only later obtained information from other sources, and the tone changes
and the cables refer to the "fog of war".
I see no reason to doubt the authenticity.
Counterpunch published
11 cables about
Israel's operation Cast Lead in Gaza.
29 cables from the Danish
newspaper
Politiken.
9 Cables published by the German magazine Der Spiegel.
05ALMATY3603,
06MUNICH397,
08BAGHDAD537,
08BAGHDAD1784,
08BERLIN1467,
08BERLIN1705,
08TIRANA411,
09ISLAMABAD2716,
09TRIPOLI748.
24
Cables from CANBERRA published by the Australian newspaper The Age.
The NZ Herald obtained and published a large number of cables from Wellington.
Others made (part of) this information available in more easily accessible
form.
Here 247 cables from WELLINGTON
derived from a
613-page PDF
made by Bryce Edwards.
At the site of the New Zealand news website
Scoop
one can find a collection of
117 cables
from Wellington (15 of which do not occur elsewhere).
Komsomolskaya Pravda
17 cables on the "soldier"
protests in Tallinn. And
06MOSCOW10861,
10MOSCOW304,
10MOSCOW305
on opposition and human rights in Russia.
Steinberg Recherche
Maybe obtained via Der Spiegel, an alleged version of
09BERLIN1504.
Naviny
Some cables (today 7) are found at
naviny.
(Namely 04BRUSSELS4944, 05ISTANBUL38, 05ISTANBUL329, 05MINSK851,
05PRAGUE337, 05PRAGUE356, 05PRAGUE470.)
It is unclear whether these are authentic.
Various people have claimed things "according to Wikileaks cables"
without producing any such cables. There was an
episode
in which Pakistani newspapers were hoaxed.
The cable
10ASTANA267
is fake (it talks about Wikileaks and differs from the
corresponding cables.csv one). In fact it looks like
a newspaper article. (The correct version was released 2010-12-15 14:20.
The bad version replaced it 2011-05-02 23:01.)
Non-fakes
Earlier I assumed that
10LJUBLJANA6
was fake, mostly because its reference "LJUBLJANA 385" was not referenced
and in the future. However, this cable occurs in cables.csv.
Earlier I read in
The Australian
(in an article by Abraham Rabinovitch)
A Wikileaks cable in 2006 from the then US ambassador in Cairo, Francis Ricciardone, mentioned a 274-page report by an opposition group outlining corruption accusations against the Mubarak family. The ambassador said the report was evidence of growing public anger that defied the danger of a government backlash.
and wondered which cable that might be, since none of the released cables
from Cairo contained the number 274.
(It is 06CAIRO7190.)
Reuters
refers to
a 2007-12-11 cable from the U.S. Shanghai consulate (about an
"extraordinarily intrusive" audit of Citibank Shanghai).
No such cable was known.
(It is 07SHANGHAI784.)