Jason Ukman
The Washington Post
9/1/2011
The full, unredacted versions of more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables are floating around online after the security of a WikiLeaks database was compromised.
Thousands of the cables had previously been published, but many of those cables had been carefully redacted to protect the names of individuals who consulted with American diplomats and who could, U.S. officials said, be put at risk in their home countries if their involvement with the Americans became known.
In a lengthy message posted online late Wednesday, WikiLeaks accused the Guardian of causing the leak, saying that one of the newspaper’s investigative reporters “negligently disclosed” a decryption password in a book about the group and its founder, Julian Assange.
The Guardian, in a statement, dismissed the allegations, pointing out that the book was published last February.
“It contained a password, but no details of the location of the files, and we were told it was a temporary password which would expire and be deleted in a matter of hours,” the paper said in a statement.
The truth, according to a long, detailed account in the German daily Der Spiegel on Thursday morning, might lie somewhere in between WikiLeaks’ account and the Guardian’s…
The article continues at The Washington Post.
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