Piffey

Until a week ago, WikiLeaks was a little known website that released information given to them by whistle-blowers in governments and corporations worldwide. With five full-time volunteers, WikiLeaks operated mostly on donations and relied on, according to a spokesperson for their site, around 800-1000 experts for “encryption, programming, and writing news releases.” (NYT)

Several governments, including Britain and the United States, have tried to shut down the site after it has published classified information in the past. The problem, or solution as some of us would say, has always been that once the information is released on the Internet it is immediately spread over the breadth of the web. Previously they have published “toxic dumping in Africa, protocols from Guantánamo Bay,” and sensitive documents from Swiss banks — just to name a few.

On Monday, WikiLeaks released the video (Collateral Murder) a United States Army helicopter circling and firing on unarmed civilians in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad. Two of the twelve killed in the attacks were employees of Reuters.

While Reuters has been attempting to gain access to the footage for the last several years using the Freedom of Information Act, WikiLeaks was able to get the original encrypted file and decrypt it over the last several months. This is where the story gets a little odd since as Bruce Schneier, security expert and blogger, points out: “Surely this isn’t NSA-level encryption. But what is it?”

All ethical, moral, and social commentary aside this easy decryption of a secure video should say something about our nation’s security. Early on this blog, links were posted to $30 Russian software that allowed you to decrypt and monitor the military’s Predator drones. Later it was also found that the monitoring software was not only being used by militants, but was also enabling them to monitor most manned planes. The Air Force uses less encryption on their data streams than a DVD. Makes you feel safe with the government having mounds of your personal data as well, right?

Although further information on the video has not surfaced, many are beginning to believe that it was encrypted similarly to the NATO document taken from the Pentagon Central Command website last February that used “progress” as the password. In this case, the video could have been encrypted using some utility that then placed a simple password on the file. Using a dictionary attack and a little time the security would have quickly crumbled.

There is an odd reversal of how things should actually be here. The devices we use daily with our legally purchased media use stronger encryption algorithms than the ones used by machines that are used to kill, machines that are intended to protect the security of a nation, and machines that are supposed to keep men alive.