Reporters Covering WikiLeaks Had Email Hacked
The Times’ editor-in-chief Bill Keller has published a mini-memoir about the Times’ rocky six month relationship with WikiLeaks in upcoming issue of the New York Times Magazine. Like the earlier front-page profile of Assange, it paints an unflattering portrait of the group’s frontman as egotistical, thin-skinned and naive. (Though he adds that Assange possesses a certain “Peter Pan” innocence.)
More substantive is that Keller joins the recent string of accusers who claim (or at least, imply) that WikiLeaks staffers are active hackers:
When I left New York for two weeks to visit bureaus in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where we assume that communications may be monitored, I was not to be copied on message traffic about the project. I never imagined that any of this would defeat a curious snoop from the National Security Agency or Pakistani intelligence. And I was never entirely sure whether that prospect made me more nervous than the cyberwiles of WikiLeaks itself. At a point when relations between the news organizations and WikiLeaks were rocky, at least three people associated with this project had inexplicable activity in their e-mail that suggested someone was hacking into their accounts.
Keller offers no further information on the suspected hack. And though he suggests that WikiLeaks was intruding on the email accounts of its “media partners,” it’s just as likely that the Times’ hackers were U.S. or foreign government agents, who saw the Times as an easier entry point into the Cablegate data than the more security-savvy WikiLeaks staffers.
