 following wikileaks Parody: Google Translation of the Sept 2nd Guardian Editorial: "Julian Assange and WikiLeaks: no case, no need" (Guardian English to Plain English)
Nigel Parry, Translator on Duty at Google's Bangladesh Desk at the beginning of September 2011, ran the September 2nd Guardian Editorial, titled "Julian Assange and WikiLeaks: no case, no need", through Google's translator to decrypt the article from Guardian English into Plain English. No human rights workers, aid workers, foreign diplomatic allies of the United States, or informants were harmed in the process.
But we're about to claim it's someone else's bad idea, and our argument is going to be super tenuous. In this editorial, which inexplicably assumes our readers who still care about us are total morons, we will argue that old, consensually-resolved discussions about the issue of redaction that we had with Julian Assange more than a year before any of this happened, are somehow the reason for this leak—not the more obvious cause of publishing the secret password to the largest intelligence leak in human history as a chapter heading in a book with the Guardian's logo on the front cover. From the moment a hacker (or, possibly, a whistleblower) passed a vast store of US government and military records to WikiLeaks it was always on the cards that this data would eventually spill out indiscriminately into the open. This week most of it has – accelerated by WikiLeaks itself, which chose to publish the state department cables in unredacted form.TRANSLATION: When we got this massive dump of sensitive data, we immediately hired a tarot reader to foretell whether or not we would be able to store it safely. Unfortunately, despite repeated drawings from the pack, the fortune teller kept getting the Hanged Man card. So we published the password in a book, as fate was clearly aligned against us being able to safely protect the data. Where it wasn't Assange's fault, it surely was fate's fault. This paper, and the four other news organisations involved in publishing heavily edited selections from the war logs and cables last year, are united in condemning this act.TRANSLATION: When we say "this act", we are not referring to the act of publishing the secret password to the largest intelligence leak in human history as a chapter heading in a book with the Guardian's logo on the front cover. Rather we are referring to the subsequent and clearly entirely redundant release, by Wikileaks, of the information we had already insured got into the hands of every man, woman and child on the planet who wanted it. There are almost 7 billion people on the planet. We double checked this by having Guardian data journalist James Ball count every last one of them. From the start of our collaboration, it was clear to the newspapers – and apparently accepted, if reluctantly, by WikiLeaks's founder, Julian Assange – that it was necessary to redact the material in order to minimise the potential risk to vulnerable people who might be placed in harm's way by publication. That joint exercise, which ended last December, has never been shown to have placed an individual's life at risk.
It would be the Guardian who would later make the thousands of human hours spent on redaction pointless, when we published the secret password to the largest intelligence leak in human history as a chapter heading in a book with the Guardian's logo on the front cover. But this act isn't as significant as Assange being initially squirrely about the mammoth task of redacting 90,000 Afghan War files, 400,000 Iraq War files, and one quarter of a million diplomatic cables. So we're going to talk about Assange's initial reaction to that a lot, so you forget that we were the ones that screwed up here. And when we say "screwed up" we mean we published the secret password to the largest intelligence leak in human history as a chapter heading in a book...with the Guardian logo on the outside cover, because we know a thing or two about branding. But, with the well-documented rifts in the original WikiLeaks team last year, the data was not secured. One copy was obtained by Heather Brooke, the freedom of information campaigner.TRANSLATION: Another Guardian employee is a possible source of the leak since she also has "obtained" a copy of the files. It now appears that last December another WikiLeaks employee was responsible for a further leak when he placed the unredacted cables on a peer-to-peer site with an old password – motivated, it seems, by the arrest of Assange on allegations concerning his private life.TRANSLATION: A file with encryption so strong that it could have been fed into a 10 square mile server farm for 10 generations and still not have been decrypted. It is not clear that even Assange – distracted by his legal actions over the Swedish sex allegations – knew of this act.TRANSLATION: Despite the fact that we had a tiff with Julian Assange and hadn't spoken to him in like, forever, we are going to speculate on his psychological state months later and the theoretical effect of this presumed state on an act that we just admitted Assange may have been unaware of. Please overlook the tenuousness of this transparent attempt to refocus blame on someone who did not publish the secret password to the largest intelligence leak in human history as a chapter heading in a book with the Guardian's logo on the front cover. This, to be clear, was not the original file accessed by the Guardian last year, which was, as agreed with WikiLeaks, removed from a secure file server after we had obtained a copy and never compromised.TRANSLATION:
We're remaining kind of vague about the source of our employee Heather Brooke's file though. It was "obtained", m'kay? A handful of people knew of the existence of this republished file and, realising its potential for harm, they did not publish any clues as to how it might be accessed.TRANSLATION: Apart from the Guardian itself, who is not the subject of this editorial even though it published the secret password to the largest intelligence leak in human history as a chapter heading in a book with the Guardian's logo on the front cover. WikiLeaks, by contrast, tried to blame others for the leak, hinted at how it could be accessed, and then finally decided to publish it all to the world in an unredacted form.TRANSLATION: We're going to ignore the various articles by Der Frietag, Der Spiegal, Tech Crunch and WIRED which collectively stated that the file was available in a directory of old Wikileaks mirrors and said that the password was freely available on the Internet. None of these hints, which enabled the translator of this piece to find and decrypt the top secret file in less than 24 hours, are relevant. We also hope you will forget that Wikileaks only released the cables after the cables were already internationally decrypted and internationally available thanks to the Guardian's password. Some WikiLeaks devotees and extreme freedom of information advocates will applaud this act.TRANSLATION: We're going to ask you to take a giant leap of faith and pretend that is is irrelevant that the Guardian published the secret password to the largest intelligence leak in human history as a chapter heading in a book with the Guardian's logo on the front cover. But we're going to call the people who support Wikileaks "devotees". kthxbai. We don't. We join the New York Times, Der Speigel, Le Monde and El País in condemning it.TRANSLATION: Actually, Le Monde joined us after the fact, but let's not split hairs. Many of our newspapers' reporters and editors worked hard to publish material based on the cables in a responsible, comprehensible and contextualised form. We continue to believe in the validity and benefits of this collaboration in transparency. But we don't count ourselves in that tiny fringe of people who would regard themselves as information absolutists – people who believe it is right in all circumstances to make all information free to all. The public interest in all acts of disclosure has to be weighed against the potential harm that can result.TRANSLATION: This paragraph was constructed with vocabulary and phrases that communicate our dedication, responsibility, and skills as the journalists who published the secret password to the largest intelligence leak in human history as a chapter heading in a book with the Guardian's logo on the front cover. It had never been entirely clear whether Assange thought he had a consistent position on this issue. At various times he has scorned those who urged redaction;TRANSLATION: Like when he first realized how much redaction would impact the timely publication of cables that (allegedly) a young, conscience-driven army private had given himself up for crucifixion to share with the world. at others he has portrayed himself as an advocate of responsible redaction.TRANSLATION: ie. later, after we all had the redaction conversation, and Assange saw the wisdom of it because he's a smart bloke and respected our opinions on the matter. But hopefully the fact that, when he was born as a small circus child he did not have this opinion already pre-formed and tattooed on his forehead, will allow us to portray his natural process of thought and responsiveness to intelligent discussion as something irresponsible and schizophrenic, so you forget who actually published the secret password to the largest intelligence leak in human history as a chapter heading in a book with the Guardian's logo on the front cover. He shows little or no understanding of the legal constraints facing less free souls than himself,TRANSLATION: Please don't remember Assange's legal issues which we gratuitously mentioned a couple of paragraphs earlier for the purpose of demonization. Also try to forget his approaching 300 days of house arrest and the electronic ankle bracelet he has to wear, which he presumably may have noticed, and which may have alerted him to the presence of a criminal justice system. Instead imagine he's some batshit crazy InfoHippy who flits around the world two degrees south of brain death, cluelessly unaware of any reality of the criminal justice system. We are proper grown ups. Assange is an irresponsible flake and is totally unrelated to the chap who brought us the cow that paid the Guardian's rent last year. often voicing contempt for publishers constrained by the laws of particular jurisdictions.TRANSLATION: ....contempt for political systems which have legislated against freedom of the press, and the press which complies with this state-enforced lying to the public despite the existence of the global, uncensorable Internet for a couple of decades—contempt which if he didn't feel, would probably have never sat up one day while munching on a Vegamite sandwich and thought, "Blow me I should create a Wikileaks!" He is not the generous farmer that brought us the Magical WikiCow that we've milked until its titties were raw to pay our rent the last year in an era where people hardly buy print newspapers. At its best Wikileaks seemed to offer the hope of frustrating the most repressive and restrictive. But the organisation has dwindled to being the vehicle of one flawed individual – occasionally brilliant, but increasingly volatile and erratic.TRANSLATION: These two sentences also work super well to describe our own situation, in which Guardian investigative editor David Leigh (the man who published the secret password to the largest intelligence leak in human history as a chapter heading in a book) is strangely allowed to hijack the respected Guardian's mighty on and offline publishing power to blame his colossal blunder on someone else. There was no compelling need, even with the recent disclosures of the internal leak, for WikiLeaks to publish all the material in the form in which it did. Julian Assange took a clear decision this week: he must take the responsibility for that.TRANSLATION: Unlike our own David Leigh, who is yet to admit that the password had anything to do with decrypting the rogue Cablegate file. In fact, we're going to lie like the shameless propagandists we are and call this an "internal leak", despite it being clearly and unambiguously confirmed—based on information freely available on the Internet—that the cat was out of the bag on August 31st, and told directly to David Leigh by the translator of this piece: "Just to be clear: I ran the password from p139 of @DavidLeigh3's book and it opened into cables.csv #Wikileaks #FAIL" (Source) And we're lying big time about the "internal leak" because our office gopher, James Ball, acknowledged on September 1st that he'd read the August 31st article by the translator of this piece unambiguously breaking news of the worldwide leak of the data—an entire day before this editorial was published.
No case, no need. Related Links 
more from this section  • following wikileaks: Sacrificing Stratfor: How the FBI waited three weeks to close the stable door (Sunday, March 25th, 2012) • following wikileaks: Sabu the Inciter: Marveling at the FBI's Hacker Frankenstein Monster (Sunday, March 11th, 2012) • following wikileaks: Wikileaks releases "The Global Intelligence Files" (Monday, February 27th, 2012) • following wikileaks: Parody: Google Translation of the Sept 2nd Guardian Editorial: "Julian Assange and WikiLeaks: no case, no need" (Guardian English to Plain English) (Monday, September 5th, 2011) • following wikileaks: Guardian Investigative Editor David Leigh publishes top secret Cablegate password revealing names of U.S. collaborators and informants... in his book (Wednesday, August 31st, 2011) • following wikileaks: Leaked Los Angeles police documents: Radical Islamic Tattoos (Friday, June 24th, 2011) • following wikileaks: Scary Daily Telegraph report that Al-Qaida's military leader threatened nuke attack if Osama captured or killed is unsupported by Wikileaks source documents (Sunday, May 1st, 2011) • following wikileaks: The Wikileaks Story... Visually. (Friday, April 8th, 2011) • following wikileaks: Glenn Greenwald presentation for Lannan Foundation (Tuesday, March 8th, 2011) • following wikileaks: "Quantico Community Relations" Facebook Page shuts down Bradley Manning protests (Sunday, March 6th, 2011) |
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