Wikileaks releases new material

This post was originally posted on Freedom4All, you can view the original in the Freedom4all archive

After much fanfare, Wikileaks has released a new batch of material. However, as others have noted, the new material is not exactly earth shattering. 

So what have Wikileaks released? 

The diplomatic cables obtained by Wikileaks include material claiming that; 

• Hilary Clinton asked US Diplomats to gather passwords and encryption keys of top UN Officials
• Negative Comments regarding the UK, Berlusconi (“feckless, vain and ineffective as a modern european leader“), Sarkozy (“Naked Emperor“) and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (“Hitler“)
• Colonel Gaddafi rarely travels without his voluptuous blonde nurse
• China was involved in the attack that compromised Google’s servers last December. 

All told, whilst some may be embarrassing, there’s nothing truly earth shattering there. Given the fanfare preceding the release of these documents, we here at Freedom4All are quite disappointed. 

The media, Governments and Wikileaks themselves have been telling us for quite some time just how secret and damaging these docs could be. In reality, we’ve got a small collection of trivia ready for the next pub quiz! 

It’s important to have organisations monitoring the behaviour of Governments around the world, and Wikileaks was once invaluable for that. However, given the blatant self-promotion leading up to this anti-climax, we can’t help wonder if 

Wikileaks should hang up their hats. 

Cryptome has been running for far longer, doesn’t participate in flagrant self-promotion and is far more responsible about the content it published (redacting, for example, the names of informants in Afghanistan). 

For those wishing to trawl through the Wikileaks docs, you can find them here.