An incident, commonly referred to as Cablegate, began on 28 November 2010Wikileaks "Secret US Embassy Cables" when WikiLeaks began releasing classified cables that had been sent to the U.S. State Department by 274 of its consulates, embassies, and diplomatic missions around the world. Dated between December 1966 and February 2010, the cables contain diplomatic analysis from world leaders, and the diplomats' assessment of host countries and their officials.Welch, Dylan. "US red-faced as 'CABLEGATE' sparks global diplomatic crisis, courtesy of WikiLeaks" , Sydney Morning Herald, 29 November 2010.
On 30 July 2013, Chelsea Manning was convicted for theft of the cables and violations of the Espionage Act in a court martial proceeding and sentenced to thirty-five years imprisonment. She was released on 17 May 2017, after seven years total confinement, after her sentence had been commuted by President Barack Obama earlier that year.
Sequence of leaks The first document, the so-called Reykjavik 13 cable, was released by WikiLeaks on 18 February 2010, and was followed by the release of State Department profiles of Icelandic politicians a month later.Myers, Steven Lee. "Charges for Soldier Accused of Leak" , The New York Times, 6 July 2010. Also see Nicks, Denver. "Private Manning and the Making of Wikileaks" , This Land, 23 September 2010. Later that year, Julian Assange, WikiLeaks' editor-in-chief, reached an agreement with media partners in Europe and the United States to publish the rest of the cables in redacted form, removing the names of sources and others in vulnerable positions. On 28 November, the first 220 cables were published under this agreement by (Spain), (Germany), (France), The Guardian (United Kingdom), and The New York Times (United States).Shane, Scott and Lehren, Andrew W. "Leaked Cables Offer Raw Look at U.S. Diplomacy" The New York Times, 28 November 2010. WikiLeaks had planned to release the rest over several months; 2,017 had been published as of 11 January 2011.
The remaining cables were published in September 2011 after a series of events compromised the security of a WikiLeaks file containing the cables. This included WikiLeaks volunteers placing an encrypted file containing all WikiLeaks data online as "insurance" in July 2010, in case something happened to the organization.Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. Inside WikiLeaks. Doubleday 2011, pp. 192–195. In February 2011 David Leigh of The Guardian published the encryption passphrase in a book; he had received it from Assange so he could access a copy of the Cablegate file, and believed the passphrase was a temporary one, unique to that file. In August 2011, German weekly Der Freitag published some of these details, enabling others to piece the information together and decrypt the Cablegate files. The cables were then available online, fully unredacted. In response, WikiLeaks decided on 1 September 2011 to publish all 251,287 unedited documents.Greenwald, Glenn. "Facts and myths in the WikiLeaks/Guardian saga", Salon, 2 September 2011. from the original on 7 March 2012. Stöcker, Christian. "A Dispatch Disaster in Six Acts", Der Spiegel, 1 September 2011. Archived from the original on 7 March 2012. Mackey, Robert et al. "All Leaked U.S. Cables Were Made Available Online as WikiLeaks Splintered", The New York Times, 1 September 2011. Archived from the original on 7 March 2012.
The publication of the cables was the third in a series of U.S. classified document leaks distributed by WikiLeaks in 2010, following the Afghan War documents leak in July, and the Iraq War documents leak in October. Over 130,000 of the cables are unclassified, some 100,000 are labeled "confidential", around 15,000 have the higher classification "secret", and none are classified as "top secret" on the classification scale.
Background In June 2010, the magazine Wired reported that the U.S. State Department and embassy personnel were concerned that Chelsea Manning, a United States Army soldier charged with the unauthorized download of classified material while stationed in Iraq, had leaked diplomatic cables. WikiLeaks rejected the report as inaccurate: "Allegations in Wired that we have been sent 260,000 classified U.S. embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect".Staff writer (6 June 2010). "Allegations in Wired that we have been sent 260,000 classified US embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect." . WikiLeaks (via Twitter). Retrieved 4 December 2010.
However, during that same month (June 2010), The Guardian had been offered "half a million military dispatches from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. There might be more after that, including an immense bundle of confidential diplomatic cables", and Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian had contacted Bill Keller, editor of The New York Times, to see if he would be interested in sharing the dissemination of the information.
Manning was suspected to have uploaded all that was obtained to WikiLeaks, which chose to release the material in stages so as to have the greatest possible impact.
According to The Guardian, all the diplomatic cables were marked "Sipdis", denoting "secret internet protocol distribution", which means they had been distributed via the closed U.S. SIPRNet, the U.S. Department of Defense's classified version of the civilian internet. More than three million U.S. government personnel and soldiers have access to this network.Borger, Julian; Leigh, David. (28 November 2010). "Siprnet: Where America Stores Its Secret Cables – Defence Department's Hidden Internet Is Meant To Be Secure, But Millions of Officials and Soldiers Have Access" . The Guardian. Accessed 12 December 2010. "The US general accounting office identified 3,067,000 people cleared to "secret" and above in a 1993 study." Documents marked "top secret" are not included in the system. Such a large quantity of secret information was available to a wide audience because, as The Guardian alleged, after the 11 September attacks an increased focus had been placed on sharing information since gaps in intra-governmental information sharing had been exposed. More specifically, the diplomatic, military, law enforcement, and intelligence communities would be able to do their jobs better with this easy access to analytic and operative information. A spokesman said that in the previous weeks and months additional measures had been taken to improve the security of the system and prevent leaks.
On 22 November, an announcement was made via WikiLeaks' Twitter feed that the next release would be "7× the size of the Iraq War Logs". U.S. authorities and the media had speculated, at the time, that they could contain diplomatic cables. Prior to the expected leak, the government of the United Kingdom (UK) sent a DA-Notice to UK newspapers, which requested advance notice from newspapers regarding the expected publication. Index on Censorship pointed out that "there is no obligation on [the] media to comply". Under the terms of a DA-Notice, "[n]ewspaper editors would speak to [the] Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee prior to publication". The Guardian was revealed to have been the source of the copy of the documents given to The New York Times in order to prevent the British government from obtaining any injunction against its publication.Calderone, Michael (28 November 2010). "The Guardian Gave State Dept. Cables to the NY Times" Yahoo! News. Retrieved 3 December 2010. The Pakistani newspaper Dawn stated that the U.S. newspapers The New York Times and The Washington Post were expected to publish parts of the diplomatic cables on 28 November, including 94 Pakistan-related documents.
On 26 November, Assange sent a letter to the U.S. Department of State, via his lawyer Jennifer Robinson, inviting them to "privately nominate any specific instances (record numbers or names) where it considers the publication of information would put individual persons at significant risk of harm that has not already been addressed". Harold Koh, the Legal Adviser of the Department of State, rejected the proposal, stating: "We will not engage in a negotiation regarding the further release or dissemination of illegally obtained U.S. Government classified materials". Koh added that the material was acquired illegally and "as long as WikiLeaks holds such material, the violation of the law is ongoing". Assange responded by writing back to the U.S. State Department that "you have chosen to respond in a manner which leads me to conclude that the supposed risks are entirely fanciful and you are instead concerned to suppress evidence of human rights abuse and other criminal behaviour". Ahead of the leak, United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other American officials contacted governments in several countries about the impending release.
Release November 2010 release of redacted cables The five newspapers that had obtained an advance copy of all leaked cables began releasing the cables on 28 November 2010, and WikiLeaks made the cables selected by these newspapers and redacted by their journalists available on its website. "They are releasing the documents we selected", s managing editor, Sylvie Kauffmann, said in an interview.Staff writer (3 December 2010). "Respected Media Outlets Collaborate with WikiLeaks". Associated Press (via Fox News). Retrieved 13 May 2018.
WikiLeaks aimed to release the cables in phases over several months due to their global scope and significance."The embassy cables will be released in stages over the next few months. The subject matter of these cables is of such importance, and the geographical spread so broad, that to do otherwise would not do this material justice". See: The first batch of leaks released comprised 220 cables. Further cables were subsequently made available on the WikiLeaks website. The full set of cables published by WikiLeaks can be browsed and searched by a variety of websites.The history of the release can be viewed at Cablegatesearch.net and Cablegate torrent release history . See Greenwald, Glenn (10 December 2010). "The Media's Authoritarianism and WikiLeaks" . Salon.com. Retrieved 12 December 2010.
Contents + Contents of the 251,287 cablesSubjectDocumentsExternal political relations145,451Internal government affairs122,896Human rights55,211Economic conditions49,044Terrorists and terrorism28,801UN Security Council6,532
The contents of the U.S. diplomatic cables leak describe in detail events and incidents surrounding international affairs from 274 embassies dating from 28 December 1966 to 28 February 2010. The diplomatic cables revealed numerous unguarded comments and revelations: US diplomats gathering personal information about Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, and other top UN officials; critiques and praises about the host countries of various U.S. embassies, discussion and resolutions towards ending ongoing tension in the Middle East, efforts for and resistance against nuclear disarmament, actions in the war on terror, assessments of other threats around the world, dealings between various countries, U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence efforts, U.S. support of dictatorship and other diplomatic actions.