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28.10.10
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On The Source
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By Tom Balmforth
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A Russian secret services expert on Tuesday warned WikiLeaks that the “right team” of people could simply shut down the whistleblower Web site forever, but denied that WikiLeaks poses a threat to Russia after its founder revealed that Russia is next on its hit list. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Monday warned that “Russian readers will find out a lot of new things about their country” through his Web site, which has left Western governments red-faced after reams of classified documents were published on the Internet.
“Preliminary analysis shows that there is no threat posed to Russia by Julian Assange’s resource. You have to understand that if there is the desire and the right team, it’s possible to shut it down forever,” an expert from the FSB’s Center for Information Security was quoted by Life News as saying on Tuesday.
Links between hacker cells and the FSB made in the past lend credence to this thinly veiled secret services threat. In his recent book on Russia’s secret services, investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov details how the Russian FSB “maintain a sophisticated alliance with unofficial hackers, such as those who carry out cyber attacks on the Web sites of enemies of the state,” drawing attention to hacker forums such as Informacia.ru.
Given Russia’s notoriously malleable extremism legislation, which Wikimedia (despite its name, not affiliated to WikiLeaks) recently fell foul of, it is hard to imagine that classified information on Russia from WikiLeaks could pass as anything short of “extreme.” Indeed, a Gazeta.Ru editorial yesterday pointed out precisely this contradiction in the claim that WikiLeaks is “no threat posed to Russia.”
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told the Izvestia news daily that he has already amassed “kompromat” on the Russian “government” and “businessmen,” although he admitted it is “not as much as I’d like” in an interview on Monday, two days after his site published almost 400,000 classified U.S. military field reports from Iraq.
Both the British and the American governments have urged the whistleblower to stop publishing reams of classified documents because they claim it is undermining the war effort and putting the lives of civilians and soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan at risk, charges which Assange denies.
Speaking to the Kommersant daily on Monday, Assange and his assistant Kristin Hrafnsson said the whistleblower Web site plans to publish 15,000 more documents on the war on Afghanistan, and then turn its full attention to Russia and China. According to Assange, “the despotic regimes of Russia, China and Central Asia” were the original focus of his project when he was pitching it to potential investors four years ago. “We’ve spent a lot of time working on the Afghanistan and Iraq dossiers, but as soon as we’re done with them we can get started on different regions,” Hrafnsson told Izvestia. “I think the Russian readers will find out a lot of new things about their country.”
Language barrier
While Assange did admit that there are problems with obtaining intelligence in foreign countries, his professed collaboration with the “Americans” will likely worry the Russian security establishment. “The fact that the majority of your sites post information only in Russian limits our capabilities. However, the Americans are helping us, they are giving us a lot of material on Russia,” Assange told Izvestia.
Any role played by American officials in publishing secret Russian documents – whether real of perceived – would certainly shake the still unsure foundations of the Washington-Moscow reset. But at the same time, obtaining Russian secret documents through the Americans would undercut the credibility of that intelligence.
“Clearly there is overwhelming circumstantial evidence to show that the WikiLeaks about the U.S. armed forces are genuine. They come from someone within the armed forces, from someone who had access to them,” said Anatol Lieven, the director of war studies at Kings College London. But Russian secrets, on the other hand, leaked and then passed to WikiLeaks through the United States, would not have that same cache of being genuine. They would easily be seen through the old Cold War prism, which would obstruct any serious public discussion of the documents because their authenticity would constantly be in question. “And even if the material was genuine, I can easily see how the Russian government would be able to say ‘look, come off it. It’s obvious the Americans have just cooked this up this stuff’,” said Lieven.
No country for discussion
Speaking to The Christian Science Monitor yesterday, Andrei Soldatov said that the problem for WikiLeaks would not be actually leaking information on Russia, but rather that leaking that information would not stimulate any public discussion in Russia’s muzzled media.
Soldatov drew attention to a Web site that in June published what it claimed was leaked FSB correspondence detailing intelligence operations in the CIS, including in Turkmenistan and Ukraine. The site called Lubyankapravda.com, hosted in the United States, has since gone offline, but during its three-week existence won no media attention. Because of what Soldatov blamed on the lack of media freedom in Russia, the FSB correspondence was never authenticated through public discussion, precluding the possibility of analyzing its claims. “It is no accident that I am not quoting details from these documents. The point is that there is one big difference between these documents and the WikiLeaks collection. Unlike the American reports, the FSB correspondence, although it was put out on the Internet, never did land in the public sphere,” Andrei Soldatov wrote in an August article posted on his Agentura.ru Web site.
Lieven said that discussion in the mass media of WikiLeaks dossiers on Russia was unrealistic, although it was more possible in the print media, which has comparative freedom within certain boundaries. “The problem has always been direct attacks on Vladimir Putin or Dmitry Medvedev, or those directly compromising state security. I’m sure if you started leaking stuff about the Russian armed forces similar to what’s been leaked about the American armed forces, I think something very nasty might happen to you,” said Lieven.
Public discussion of meaningful security leaks in Russia’s closed media climate seems unlikely, despite the smattering of speculative debate taking place in the print press this week. A Foreign Policy blog post yesterday optimistically suggested that the rising use of the Internet in Russia could mitigate the paucity of traditional media discussion. It will, of course, also depend heavily on what the documents are.
Russia itself waded into the WikiLeaks debacle today when its Foreign Ministry spokesman publically urged Washington to investigate the rights abuses carried out by U.S. military personnel detailed in the leaks. For the time being, at least, WikiLeaks are a problem for the American and British governments. |
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