Top-secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden have revealed new details about how the United States and Britain targeted the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks after it published leaked documents about the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. According to a new article by The Intercept, Britain’s top spy agency, the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, secretly monitored visitors to a WikiLeaks website by collecting their IP addresses in real time, as well as the search terms used to reach the site. One document from 2010 shows that the National Security Agency added WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange to a “manhunting” target list, together with suspected members of al-Qaeda.
Michael Ratner talking:
what I was really shocked by was the extent the U.S. and U.K. have gone through to try and get and destroy WikiLeaks and Julian Assange and their network of supporters. I mean, it’s astounding. And it’s been going on for years. And it also, as Julian pointed out, tells us why he is in the Ecuadorean embassy and why Ecuador has given him asylum. He has every reason to heavily fear what would happen to him in this country, in the United States, if he were to be ever taken here. So I think, for me, that’s a very, very critical point, justifies every reason why Ecuador gave him asylum.
And the document you’re addressing, Amy, what they call the manhunt timeline, which is extraordinary because it groups him among, you know, a whole bunch of people who the U.S. considers terrorists, it also, interestingly, groups them—groups them among Palestinians, which is pretty interesting in itself. But to have Julian on that list as a manhunt timeline, and it says prosecute him wherever you can get him, is pretty extraordinary. It doesn’t say you necessarily need a good reason to prosecute him; it just says, basically, prosecute him. And what it’s reminiscent, to me, is of the program that took place in this country in the ’60s and the ’70s, COINTELPRO, counterintelligence procedures, when the FBI said, “We have to basically destroy the black civil rights movement, the New Left and others, and prosecute them, get them however you can, get rid of them.” And so, the manhunt timeline, even its name is chilling. But that’s what it is. It’s an effort to try and get WikiLeaks and their personnel, wherever they are in the world.
And, of course, we’ve seen some of that. You’ve had people on this show. When people cross borders who are associates with WikiLeaks, they get stopped. They get surveilled all the time. We’ve seen—we’ve seen efforts to take—to basically destroy WikiLeaks by stealing their laptops on a trip that went from Sweden to Germany. We’ve seen efforts across the board, in country after country. Germany, they surveil conferences when WikiLeaks people speak there, everywhere. So, actually, this program is not just an abstraction. This program has been implemented. And the manhunt timeline, I think, is incredibly significant, considering that the manhunt is an effort to locate, find and destroy—in some cases, kill—kill people.
Julian Assange, in his statement to the article, said that he felt that the U.S. ought to appoint a special prosecutor, not just to investigate what’s happening to WikiLeaks and a publisher and journalist, but across the board what’s happening to publishers and journalists in this entire country right now and around the world, where the U.S. is trying to basically say publishing is a crime. And that’s what they’re saying. That’s what the Obama administration is saying. And Julian is strongly suggesting, and I support, the idea of a special prosecutor to look into this.
I don’t think COINTELPRO’s occurred, on this extreme level. You had the manhunt program. You also had what they call—what do they call it? The ANTICRISIS GIRL program. And that’s the dragnet—I don’t know how it got that name.
what is that about? I mean, I don’t know. Except what it is, is whenever I search for WikiLeaks on my computer, or when I go visit the WikiLeaks site, in real time, the GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, can take in my IP address, take in what I’m searching for in real time. Now, they gave an—they did a number of slides showing how they could do this. We don’t know how extensively they’ve implemented that program, but that means that every one of us who have ever gone to a WikiLeaks site to look for a document could technically be surveilled and our IP address taken in.
Anonymous, they actually did designate as what they call a malicious foreign actor. And a malicious foreign actor, which is what they were deciding whether to designate WikiLeaks as or not—and we don’t know what the final decision was, whether WikiLeaks was designated as a malicious foreign actor, but Anonymous apparently was. And what it means is any restrictions on government surveillance of anything—my conversations, my email—are completely lifted, whether you’re an American or whatever. Any of my communications to anywhere in the world to that website, to Anonymous, going on chat rooms with Anonymous, going on tweets with Anonymous, those can be taken in and surveilled. It’s an incredibly broad power. We don’t know, as I said, if it was used against WikiLeaks. It was certainly discussed, and they asked to use it against WikiLeaks. We will know, I hope, soon, if and when a lawsuit is ever filed around these issues.
this is just obfuscation and lies by our officials, which has been consistent. Obviously, if there’s a WikiLeaks website overseas, what they’re really saying is everybody who visits that website, American or otherwise, we can surveil. So it’s complete—it’s complete B.S. This is just untrue. We are all being surveilled.
— source democracynow.org
Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a legal adviser to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.