THE CABLES

AFRICA/MIDDLE EAST

When Sens. John McCain and Joe Lieberman met Muammar al-Qaddafi in 2009 -- and promised to help him get military equipment from the United States.

The Obama administration urged McCain and Lieberman not to bring up the Lockerbie bomber at the meeting. (They did anyway.)

Qaddafi's weird inauguration letter to Barack Obama.

FP contributor Issandr El Amrani's WikiLeaks debut.

The U.S. Embassy in Manama requested talking points for answering questions about an allegedly tortured Bahraini Guantanamo detainee in 2005.

AMERICAS

Meet the Coast Guard officer who serves as a back-channel emissary to Havana.

ASIA

U.S. diplomats worry that China is dropping the ball on pollution monitoring and nuclear safety.

A U.S. diplomat went undercover as a Korean tourist to visit a Chinese tiger farm.

Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou told U.S. embassy officials in 2009 that People's Liberation Army activity in the Taiwan Strait could push Taiwan and China toward political talks.

An April Fools Day cable from the U.S. Embassy in Delhi.

THE NEWS

WikiLeaks drops a giant tranche of nearly 100,000 new cables -- we're still working through them -- and is reportedly unhappy with the media's mounting disinterest in its work. (A bit of advice from your humble Wikiblogger: Not releasing thousands of cables during the fall of Tripoli might help.)

WikiLeaks dissident Daniel Domscheit-Berg tells Wired he destroyed thousands of WikiLeaks documents "in order to ensure that the sources are not compromised."

THE CABLES

EUROPE

Russian intelligence services used dirty tricks to intimidate American democracy-promotion NGO workers.

MIDDLE EAST

U.S. embassy officials in Damascus asked the Bush and Obama administrations to sanction Syria, to no avail.

THE NEWS

The U.S. Congress confirms Earl Wayne as the replacement for the United States' WikiLeaks-ousted ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual.

Vaughan Smith (above right, with Assange in January), who's hosting Assange under the terms of his release, says the WikiLeaks founder "is like a moody teenager … hunted by pushy groupies."

THE BIG PICTURE

What WikiLeaks has in common with Rupert Murdoch.

A graphic novel tells the story of WikiLeaks (in Italian).

THE CABLES

AMERICAS

The hand of U.S. officials in Haitian politics from 2004 to 2006.

ASIA

The United States is anxious about China's growing influence in Cambodia.

EUROPE

U.S. officials worried that Norway was unprepared for a terrorist attack.

Lithuania's wayward press.

THE NEWS

Is Prince Andrew the latest WikiLeaks casualty?

Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, under investigation by President Robert Mugabe's government for his statements in WikiLeaks cables, is cleared.

Fourteen people are arrested for a cyberattack on PayPal in solidarity with WikiLeaks.

How two LulzSec hackers got caught.

Julian Assange lawyer Mark Stephens may have been a target of News of the World's phone hacking.

Slavoj Zizek: Julian Assange "is like the boy who tells us the emperor is naked."

The U.S. Library of Congress no longer classifies WikiLeaks as an "extremist" website.

THE CABLES

AMERICAS

Members of Haiti's elite complained to the U.S. Embassy in 2005 about eroding security in the country.

ASIA

A Taliban representative told U.S. officials in 1996 that the Taliban had shut down "Arab" training camps in Afghanistan, and had no idea where Osama bin Laden was. A U.S. embassy official met with a Taliban representative the following year to discuss the Afghan drug trade and the group's sheltering of bin Laden.

A 1999 State Department meeting with future Afghan President Hamid Karzai, identified here as the "son of an important Afghan tribal leader."

The U.S. Embassy in Islamabad sizing up the Taliban's Mullah Omar, circa 1997.

Beijing was unhappy about North Korean nuclear tests in 2006, but powerless to stop them.

The Japanese island of Okinawa, host to a longstanding U.S. military presence, is tilting toward China and away from the United States.

MIDDLE EAST

Bahrain's recent crackdown on its Shiite minority came out of Saudi Arabia's playbook.

THE NEWS

Julian Assange is reportedly backing off of plans to publish his memoirs.

WikiLeaks briefly manages to accept donations via Visa and MasterCard before the companies shut them down again. (WikiLeaks is threatening to sue them in response.)

A medic in Britain's Royal Navy has been sentenced to seven months' detention for refusing to train on account of WikiLeaks-inspired moral objections.

An excellent telling of the sad saga of Pfc. Bradley Manning from New York. (The online friend whose chats with Manning provide much of the new information in the piece has also made their correspondence available for download.)

THE CABLES

AFRICA

U.S. diplomats condemned the "appalling greed" of Moroccan King Mohammed VI's inner circle.

AMERICAS

The George W. Bush administration supported Catholic clergy in Venezuela who protested against Hugo Chávez (and defied the pope in so doing).

A 2008 survey found that half of Cubans couldn't identify any of the major dissidents on the island that receive U.S. backing.

ASIA

Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman was an influential player in Obama's China policy during his tenure as ambassador.

Andrew MacGregor Marshall, who quit Reuters over a WikiLeaks-related disagreement, is self-publishing his reporting based on his own trove of Thailand-related cables.

Gaming out the internal power dynamics of China's Politburo Standing Committee.

THE NEWS

Julian Assange revamps his legal team.

GOP presidential hopeful and former Arizona Gov. Gary Johnson is pretty much the only Republican willing to defend WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks thinks Bitcoin is too dodgy for donations.

Remember those cameras that Assange supporters claimed were being used to spy on him? They're actually there to monitor traffic.

THE BIG PICTURE

Has WikiLeaks ushered in an era of no government secrets?

THE CABLES

AMERICAS

The U.S. government, Chevron, and Exxon Mobil joined forces to kill a Venezuelan oil deal in Haiti.

ASIA

The frightening state of the developing world's nuclear energy programs.

China told U.S. officials it wasn't selling nuclear reactors to Pakistan, then did it anyway.

EUROPE

The British government worried that Russian gas behemoth Gazprom was being run by spies.

THE NEWS

Julian Assange says WikiLeaks "played a significant role" in the Arab Spring, but that "there are no official allegations in the public domain" of anyone being hurt by the site's document dumps.

HBO has a WikiLeaks film in the works. CNN has a documentary airing this weekend.

President Barack Obama nominates a replacement for the WikiLeaks-deposed U.S. ambassador to Mexico.

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the U.S. government to officially release WikiLeaked cables about the war on terror.

Al Jazeera's WikiLeaks-inspired document-sharing site isn't much safer than the Wall Street Journal's.

The Swedish Bar Association chastises Assange's lawyer.

Of course you want to know what Jesse Ventura thinks about WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks has caught a lot of grief from the media in the past year for its relative lack of concern for safeguarding the identities of individuals put at risk by its document dumps, so the organization is entitled to at least a small measure of Schadenfreude over the flak the Wall Street Journal has been getting today over the rollout of its own online drop box for leaked documents. The Journal site, SafeHouse, is the first of several WikiLeaks-inspired ventures that media organizations are launching (the New York Times and the Guardian, among others, have their own in the works) with the none-too-subtle aim of reaping the benefits of WikiLeaks without having to deal with its mercurial management.

But as Gawker's Adrian Chen has reported, SafeHouse has at least a couple of bugs that would make a would-be leaker think twice about taking Rupert Murdoch over Julian Assange. The first is a legal one: Uploading documents to SafeHouse requires signing off on terms of use under which the Journal "reserve[s] the right to disclose any information about you to law enforcement authorities or to a requesting third party, without notice in order to comply with any applicable laws and/or requests under legal process, to operate our systems properly, to protect the property or rights of Dow Jones or any affiliated companies, and to safeguard the interests of others."

In practice, this isn't necessarily any less protection than a newspaper source would have under other circumstances in the United States -- most states don't have shield laws for journalists, and leakers basically have to take it on faith that the reporters they talk to are willing to go to jail if necessary to protect their anonymity (and reporters have a good track record of doing exactly that). All the same, it's a little chilling to see it in writing.

The second problem is on the technical end of things. As the Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal reports, the Journal did build a number of safeguards into its submitting system:

SafeHouse runs on its own servers, separate from the servers that run the WSJ.com. File transfers occur through an encrypted connection and the documents themselves are encrypted, too. (Only a few Journal staffers will have the keys to unlock them.) Finally, the time that uploaded documents spend stored on computers with connections to the public Internet will be minimized by "a fairly complicated" internal document flow system.

But SafeHouse has taken a lot of heat from Internet security types on Twitter today for design flaws that make it less secure for anonymous users than the Journal suggests. Many of them have been pointed out by Internet anonymity guru Jacob Appelbaum -- who, it should be noted, has worked closely with WikiLeaks for years -- and are well-summarized here by Forbes's Andy Greenberg. Among other things, Appelbaum argues that users switching between unencrypted and encrypted versions of SafeHouse are vulnerable to programs that trick users into continuing to use the unencrypted version, rendering their data potentially accessible to third parties. None of the problems that have been pointed out are un-fixable kinks, but they're a reminder that the buyer has to beware in the age of radical transparency.

Update: The Journal has posted a response to criticism of SafeHouse:

We take these issues very seriously. Development for eliminating the flash dependency, which is required for Tor compatibility, is complete, and we expect to implement the update within 48 hours. In addition, our system has been updated to limit the types of less secure connections it will accept. As is standard procedure, we will continue to assess new specifications and analyze any potential situation that may impact the privacy of our users.

Our priority is to ensure that SafeHouse fulfills its mission as a secure location that provides sources with access to highly skilled, experienced journalists.

Regarding source protection language in the Terms of Use:

There is nothing more sacred than our sources; we are committed to protecting them to the fullest extent possible under the law. Because there is no way to predict the breadth of information that might be submitted through SafeHouse, the terms of use reserve certain rights in order to provide flexibility to react to extraordinary circumstances. But as always, our number one priority is protecting our sources.

THE CABLES

AMERICAS

U.S. diplomats accuse Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino (above) of links to Colombia's FARC guerrillas. (Patino denies it.)

ASIA

The U.S. government plays cat and mouse with Chinese hackers.

MIDDLE EAST

Basically everyone is terrified of Yemen becoming Al Qaeda's home base.

Israeli military leaders told U.S. officials they decided against striking Iran's nuclear facilities in 2005.

The chief of Israel's Mossad grapples with a changing Middle East.

THE NEWS

An interview with an intelligence school classmate of Manning's.

The friends of WikiLeaks targeted by a U.S. Justice Department suit are fighting back.

The United Nations representative for torture reprimands the U.S. government for blocking access to Pfc. Bradley Manning. The German Parliament's human rights committee also protests Manning's treatment, as does President Barack Obama's law school mentor.

Julian Assange and New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller go toe-to-toe, or at least toe-to-Skype. (These days, Assange is a bigger fan of Indian newspapers than American ones.)

Computer science students use the WikiLeaks cables as data to graphically map U.S. diplomatic relations.

Muammar al-Qaddafi's Ukrainian nurse (or one of them, at least) tells all.

Julian Assange has another court date. This one's for a two-day hearing in Britain's High Court, which will consider Assange's appeal of the February ruling that paved the way for his extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges. The BBC reports that Assange is still at the country estate of the journalist Vaughan Smith, to which he was released on bail in December. Other than that, he's been laying low -- as has WikiLeaks, which hasn't posted a new State Department cable in nearly two weeks. (They're occasionally cropping up elsewhere, however.)

WikiLeaks has claimed another WikiLoser: U.S. Ambassador Heather Hodges, who was kicked out of Ecuador today over a cable detailing alleged corruption in President Rafael Correa's government. "It is unfortunate that the published documents on WikiLeaks have made it impossible to continue collaborating with the current ambassador to Quito, but we hope to work with a new ambassador," Ecuador's Washington embassy said in a statement today, according to the Associated Press.

The offending cable, which was signed by Hodges (above, with Correa in happier times) in July 2009 and published on Monday by the Spanish newspaper El Pais, concerns Jaime Hurtado, the former commanding general of Ecuador's National Police. "The Embassy has multiple reports that indicate [Hurtado] used his positions to extort bribes, facilitate human trafficking, misappropriate public funds, obstruct investigations and prosecutions of corrupt colleagues, and engage in other corrupt acts for personal enrichment," Hodges wrote.

Hodges is the third U.S. ambassador to be forced out of an embassy post by an inconvenient cable; Carlos Pascual resigned from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City last month, and Gene Cretz was called back from Tripoli in January (though he's back in action now that the U.S. government is somewhat less concerned about Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi's feelings). Of course, it's also worth noting that Correa -- like his regional allies -- drops U.S. diplomats like they're going out of style.

As you've probably heard, U.S. Ambassador Carlos Pascual stepped down from his post in Mexico City over the weekend following his WikiLeaks-based falling out with Mexican President Felipe Calderón. In noting his departure, we thought it would be worth looking back over the arc of the U.S. State Department's slow-rolling PR catastrophe -- now rounding out its fourth month -- and tallying the casualties. The results are here.

The WikiLeaks unfortunates are a pretty varied group -- the expected array of diplomatic officials and WikiLeaks associates, plus a few politicians, a CEO, a university administrator, and a dictator -- and it's hard to draw much of a trend line through the circumstances of their respective scandals. The first and last of them were both genuine scandals: A German party official passing documents to American embassy officials, the prime minister of India's party allegedly buying votes with chests full of rupees.

But what strikes me as most noteworthy is how un-noteworthy most of the cables that got a lot of these people in trouble really were. U.S. ambassadors were pulled from their posts for noting that Mexico's drug war was going badly and that Muammar al-Qaddafi was rather eccentric. The fact that Tunisia's Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was a fantastically corrupt ruler was not exactly news to anyone in Tunisia. Europe's still-incomplete satellite system really is a boondoggle. There have been a few bombshells in the WikiLeaks cables -- some of them literal -- but these weren't them. They were significant only because they confirmed that the U.S. government knew what everyone else knew.

Things just got even worse for Pfc. Bradley Manning, the alleged source for WikiLeaks' cache of U.S. military and State Department documents. The Army announced today that it has filed 22 new charges against Manning, in addition to the 12 counts he was initially charged with after his arrest in May.

Wired's Threat Level blog reports that the charges, which were filed Tuesday, "include aiding the enemy, theft of public property or records, computer fraud, transmitting defense information and wrongly causing intelligence to be published on the internet knowing it would be accessible to the enemy." Although the first charge is a capital offense, the Army has said it will not seek the death penalty. Even so, Manning is still looking at the possibility of life in prison. (Politico has the charge sheet here.)

Manning's lawyer, David E. Coombs, said in a blog post today that he and Manning had been expecting the additional charges for several weeks:

The decision to prefer charges is an individual one by PFC Manning's commander.  The nature of the charges and the number of specifications under each reflects his determination, in consultation with his Staff Judge Advocate's office, of the possible offenses in this case.  Ultimately, the Article 32 Investigating Officer will determine which, if any, of these additional charges and specifications should be referred to a court-martial.

As Threat Level notes, the capital offense charge could play into the deliberation over WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges, which Assange's lawyers are in the process of appealing. A British judge ruled in favor of the extradition last week, and his ruling made virtually no mention of the political context of the case, effectively dismissing as implausible Assange's lawyers' arguments that an extradition -- even on unrelated charges -- would pave the way for their client's extradition to the United States on capital charges. Now that Manning has been charged with a capital offense, such arguments will be harder to dismiss.

Proceedings against Manning, meanwhile, are still on hold pending a psychiatric review sought by his lawyers. Politico reports that that review is expected to be completed in the next two to six weeks.

A British judge has authorized WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's extradition to Sweden on rape charges. From the Australian:

The Australian founder of the WikiLeaks website instantly appealed to the British High Court against last night's verdict in the Belmarsh Magistrates Court, but Judge Howard Riddell had earlier made it clear he had no doubt about the validity of Sweden's extradition case.

Mr Assange had faced being extradited within 10 days and held in jail in Stockholm with no possibility of bail but his barrister, Geoffrey Robertson QC, signalled an appeal process that could take many months.

The New York Times has the text of the ruling here. Riddell makes no explicit mention of the broader context of the case, or the frequent claims by Assange and his lawyers that extradition on the sex assault charges is the first step toward extradicting Assange to the United States over WikiLeaks' U.S. government document leaks. Pretty much all there is is a pro forma note on p. 26 in which Riddell says he believes neither Assange's arrest warrant or prosecution was the result of considerations about his political opinions.

Assange's lawyers said immediately that they planned to appeal the decision.

THE CABLES

AFRICA

U.S. diplomats in 2008 called the Libyan city where protests erupted this week "a locus of extremist activity" not really under the control of Muammar Qaddafi's government.

ASIA

What U.S. diplomats have to say about Xi Jinping, China's next leader.

EUROPE

NATO on Russia's military: Meh.

MIDDLE EAST

Inside the United States' cozy relationship with Bahrain.

Bahrain's king told U.S. officials that his country's opposition was trained by Hezbollah.

THE NEWS

The U.S. government's WikiLeaks probe makes its courtroom debut in the United States.

WikiLeaks defector Daniel Domscheit-Berg's (above) book, Inside WikiLeaks, is out in English. WikiLeaks is threatening to sue him.

The preposterously complex hacking and counter-hacking saga engulfing WikiLeaks' online allies.

Australia wants to make sure Julian Assange is treated justly in Sweden.

Anonymous is now going after Iran.

THE BIG PICTURE

Free speech advocate and celebrity attorney Alan Dershowitz, now Julian Assange's lawyer, tells FP why WikiLeaks is "the Pentagon Papers case for the 21st Century."

Hillary Clinton's tricky balancing act on WikiLeaks and Internet freedom.

WikiLeaks' Asia cables could be a whole lot worse.