WikiLeaks US embassy cables: live updates
• Assange lawyer prepare for US spying charge
• Pakistani newspapers apologise for cable hoaxes
• Pfizer used dirty tricks to avoid clinical trial payout
• Assange sent to segregation unit with limited internet
• Full coverage of the WikiLeaks cables
• Pakistani newspapers apologise for cable hoaxes
• Pfizer used dirty tricks to avoid clinical trial payout
• Assange sent to segregation unit with limited internet
• Full coverage of the WikiLeaks cables
7.31am: Big business as well as nation states are now facing damaging headlines from the leak of classified US embassy cables.
Yesterday it was Shell's turn in the spotlight, today it is the world biggest pharmaceutical company Pfizer. And once again, Nigeria is at the centre of the allegations.
The latest cables shows Pfizer hired investigators to find evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general to persuade him to drop legal action over a drug trial for children with meningitis.
Meanwhile, there were lots more interesting WikiLeaks-related developments overnight.
The cable reports a meeting between Pfizer's country manager, Enrico Liggeri, and US officials at the Abuja embassy on 9 April 2009. It states: "According to Liggeri, Pfizer had hired investigators to uncover corruption links to federal attorney general Michael Aondoakaa to expose him and put pressure on him to drop the federal cases. He said Pfizer's investigators were passing this information to local media."
Last night our Islamabad correspondent Declan Walsh revealed that fake cables were circulating in Pakistan, in what looked like the first case of WikiLeaks being exploited for propaganda purposes.They claimed US diplomats described senior Indian generals as vain, egotistical and genocidal.
Today leading Pakistani newspapers have acknowledged they were hoaxed. Here's one apology:
The Express Tribune deeply regrets publishing this story without due verification and apologises profusely for any inconvenience caused to our valued readers.
Who circulated the fake cables? Who could possible want to portray India in a bad light? The Times of India notes that the reports originated from some local websites "known for their close connections with certain intelligence agencies".
Other developments include:• The American ambassador to London denounced the leaks as "reckless". Writing in today's Guardian Louis Susman writes: "This is not whistleblowing. There is nothing laudable about endangering innocent people. There is nothing brave about sabotaging the peaceful relations between nations on which our common security depends."
• Julian Assange has been transferred to the segregation unit in Wandsworth prison with limited internet access. He also distanced WikiLeaksfrom cyber attacks on MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and other organisations.
• Swedish media and politicians have rejected speculation that political pressure from abroad was exerted on the country's justice system to secure Assange's arrest and extradition. Martin Valfridsson, a spokesman for the Swedish minister of justice, Beatrice Ask, said yesterday the suggestion was "completely wrong".
• Newly released cables revealed that China is losing patience with the failure of the Burmese regime to reform, and disclosed US fears that Europe will cave in to Serbian pressure to partition Kosovo.
• The US is taking steps to stop further leaks. Wired magazine reports that troops are being stopped from using CDs, DVDs, thumb drives, and every other form of removable media - or risk a court martial.
• A 16-year-old Dutch boy was arrested on suspicion of being involved in the cyber attack against Visa and Mastercard (see 6.57pm).
• Brazil's former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has spoken out in support of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange (5.21pm).
Here are the other WikiLeaks headlines from today's paper.• Julian Assange has been transferred to the segregation unit in Wandsworth prison with limited internet access. He also distanced WikiLeaksfrom cyber attacks on MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and other organisations.
• Swedish media and politicians have rejected speculation that political pressure from abroad was exerted on the country's justice system to secure Assange's arrest and extradition. Martin Valfridsson, a spokesman for the Swedish minister of justice, Beatrice Ask, said yesterday the suggestion was "completely wrong".
• Newly released cables revealed that China is losing patience with the failure of the Burmese regime to reform, and disclosed US fears that Europe will cave in to Serbian pressure to partition Kosovo.
• The US is taking steps to stop further leaks. Wired magazine reports that troops are being stopped from using CDs, DVDs, thumb drives, and every other form of removable media - or risk a court martial.
• A 16-year-old Dutch boy was arrested on suspicion of being involved in the cyber attack against Visa and Mastercard (see 6.57pm).
• Brazil's former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has spoken out in support of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange (5.21pm).
• Serbia suspects Russian help for fugitive Ratko Mladić
• Cable expose US-UK rift over Croatian accession to EU
• Kosovo sliding towards partition, Washington told
• Cables suggest Burma is building secret nuclear sites
• Hosni Mubarak cast as Egypt's ruler for life
• WikiLeaks cables had a huge impact in Spain, says El Pais editor-in-chief
• Cable expose US-UK rift over Croatian accession to EU
• Kosovo sliding towards partition, Washington told
• Cables suggest Burma is building secret nuclear sites
• Hosni Mubarak cast as Egypt's ruler for life
• WikiLeaks cables had a huge impact in Spain, says El Pais editor-in-chief
You can follow all the previous disclosures and reaction on our other live blogs about the cables. And for full coverage go to our US embassy cables page or follow our US embassy cable Twitter feed @GdnCables.
And please keep sending us your You Ask:We Search suggestions.
Simply tweet @GdnCables with the information you're interested in. We're working with a search engine, remember, so it would help greatly if you could give us:
• Search terms
• Rough dates (the main archive runs from 2005 to Feb 2010)
• The likely embassy involved ( eg 'Moscow', or 'Kampala')
So you might say @gdncables Oil Spills June 2003 Angola. Our resources aren't infinite - but we'll do our best, so please be a little patient!• Search terms
• Rough dates (the main archive runs from 2005 to Feb 2010)
• The likely embassy involved ( eg 'Moscow', or 'Kampala')
8.53am: The UN's top human rights official has spoken out against the "pressure exerted" on private firms to cut ties and funding to WikiLeaks.
Speaking at a press conference in Geneva Navi Pillay this was "potentially violating WikiLeaks' right to freedom of expression". 9.05am: First Russia, and now China suggests nominating Julian Assange for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The China Media Project reports: Here's part of its translation of what the paper said:It was an editorial in Beijing Daily, the official Party mouthpiece of the Beijing city leadership, criticizing the Nobel Peace Prize as a "tool of Western values and ideology," and snidely suggesting that this year's prize be given instead to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
If we want to talk about someone who is now a figure in the global spotlight, then who, if not Julian Assange? The founder of the Wikileaks website has been the subject of a worldwide manhunt by Western nations led by the United States, and all because he wanted to release a number of secrets that could not be spoken. Based on what we know, Assange, who was arrested in London on December 7, will have to face a two-year jail term . . .
Assange's misfortunes tell us that the freedom of speech that America advocates is not an absolute freedom, that it is a matter of kind and degree, and that it has its limits. Ordinarily, if you say vicious things about the American government, talk about its problems, or even openly critical the American government, this is nothing very remarkable. But this time Assange has dared expose the truth, airing out before the world a number of things and remarks that the American government wouldn't dare make public, make transparent or share with others — and this has stepped over the line of America's freedom of expression. And the worldwide manhunt [for Assange] is no surprise.
The writer Clay Shirky warned this would happen. In a prophetic article on Monday he predicted the kind of argument repressive regimes would use following the US's approach to WikiLeaks.
Democracies have a process for creating such restrictions, and as a citizen it sickens me to see the US trying to take shortcuts. The leaders of Myanmar and Belarus, or Thailand and Russia, can now rightly say to us "You went after Wikileaks' domain name, their hosting provider, and even denied your citizens the ability to register protest through donations, all without a warrant and all targeting overseas entities, simply because you decided you don't like the site. If that's the way governments get to behave, we can live with that."
9.32am: Anonymous seems to be changing tactics. Operation: Payback could be morphing into Operation:Leakspin. The idea is to highlight the best and and least exposed cables.
Here's the poster:
And this is what a Guardian editorial said about Operation: Payback.
The hacktivists of Anonymous may be accused of many things – such as immaturity or being run by a herd instinct. But theirs is the cyber equivalent of non-violent action or civil disobedience. It disrupts rather than damages. In challenging the credit card companies and the web hosts in this way, they are reminding these businesses that their brand reputation relies not only on how the state department sees them, but also on how they maintain their independence in the eyes of their users
9.41am: Hang on... apply a big pinch of salt to that Anonymous poster, warns Josh Halliday.
The fact is, hundreds of such posters are distributed each day, but rarely do they convey the support of the masses. Anonymous doesn't speak as one, remember?
PayPal's API (application programming interface) continues to be the one sustained target for the Anonymous big guns today. Targeting an API causes a lot of collateral damage – third-party websites, such as eBay, that process customer payments via PayPal will no doubt be affected if the service is sufficiently disrupted. As with yesterday, though, the API only appears to be down in a handful of countries.
Also – and you'll have to bear with me here – one of the DNS hosting companies caught in last week's WikiLeaks firestorm has pledged resources to the whistleblowers' site.
EasyDNS – the company which was wrongly attacked after media reports misidentified it as EveryDNS, the hosting provider that actually did drop WikiLeaks from its services – now provides DNS services to WikiLeaks' two fully-operational sites at WikiLeaks.ch and WikiLeaks.nl.
The sites, both hosted by the international Pirate Party, have been coming under DDoS attack in the past week. The attacks are thought to originate from a disenfranchised pact in the Anonymous movement.
10.05am: Anonymous has conducted a revenge attack on the Dutch authorities following the arrest yesterday of a 16-year-old boy suspected of hacking MasterCard and Visa.
A translation of the Dutch paper NRC Handlesbland suggests that the group hacked the Dutch police site. It was slow to load to load at the time of writing, but did work eventually.
10.20am: How does WikiLeaks challenge journalism? Media commentator and LSE academic Charlie Beckett explains, in this SlideShare presentation (I've never tried embedding a presentation before, so I hope it works).
10.48am: Anonymous and 22-year-old Coldblood have registered on the radar of Glenn Beck from Fox News. He links its call for chaos with the attack last night on Charles and Camilla. You can watch his chillingly weird rant here.
11.34am: Rallies in support of WikiLeaks have been taking place in Australia. Attendance was sparse in Brisbane, but thousand took to the streets of Sydney, as Ten News reports:
Radio producer Joel Werner recorded the speeches of the Australian MP David Shoebridge and the senator Lee Rhiannon.
11.45am: A former WikiLeaks worker has been giving more details about a rival whistleblowing site.
Daniel Domscheit-Berg reckons OpenLeaks will achieve the same level of disclosure without the flak. Forbes magazine has this:
Like WikiLeaks, the new site will allow leakers to anonymously submit information to a secure online dropbox. But unlike its parent site, it won't publish that information itself. Instead, it will allow the source to designate any media or non-governmental organizations he or she chooses and have that information passed on for fact-checking, redaction and publication. That difference, argues Domscheit-Berg, will allow OpenLeaks to accomplish much of the transparency achieved by WikiLeaks, without drawing the same political fury and legal pressure.
12.08pm: To all those who have sent me links and messages about the two women accusing Julian Assange of sexual assault, please read Libby Brooks on the "Wikiblokesphere".
Assange's status as embattled warrior for free speech is taken as giving permission – by those on the left as well as right – to indulge in the basest slut-shaming and misogyny. It's terrifying to witness how swiftly rape orthodoxies reassert themselves: that impugning a man's sexual propriety is a political act, that sexual assault complainants are prone to a level of mendacity others are not (and, in this case, deserving of the same crowd-sourced scrutiny afforded leaked diplomatic cables), that not all forms of non-consensual sex count as "rape-rape"...The fact that the defence of Assange has spawned such naked and vitriolic misogyny should be of concern to all women and men who find it as distasteful and counter to the pursuit of truth as the attacks on WikiLeaks itself.
12.23pm: Interpol have issued an international arrest warrant for the former Croatian prime minister Ivo Sanader, who fled Croatia as WikiLeak cables exposed corruption allegations against him.
As Ian Traynor reported, according to cables from the US Zagreb embassy Sanader, the centre-right politician who stood down suddenly as prime minister in summer last year, features in several of the corruption cases currently terrorising the Croatian political class.
A friend of Sanader Jerko Rosinsaid, said on state-run today that the former leader was on a foreign business trip and would cut it short to return home.But Croatian police issued warrant for Sanader and sent it overnight to Interpol. Police also searched his home, AP reports.
12.42pm: Assange is in solitary without a computer while his lawyers prepare for US spying charges and extradition, according to ABC news.
The story is based on an interview with one of Assange's British lawyers, Jennifer Robinson. "Our position of course is that we don't believe it applies to Mr Assange and that in any event he's entitled to First Amendment protection as publisher of Wikileaks and any prosecution under the espionage act would in my view be unconstitutional and puts at risk all media organizations in the US".
Robinson said a US indictment of Assange was imminent.
Assange is already in custody in London on sexual assault charges including rape originating out of Sweden. He is being held in solitary confinement with restricted access to a phone and his lawyers, Robinson said.
12.58pm: The online payment site Moneybookers, was down briefly today after Anonymous urged its followers to strike.
Reuters reports: "The attack on Moneybookers appeared to have blocked the site for about two minutes at about 1235 GMT but it subsequently came back online."But Moneybookers site was was down again when I tried a few moments ago.
1.49pm: The solicitor representing Julian Assange said she feared the US was poised to press charges against the WikiLeaks founder, writes Steven Morris.
More from Steven soon.Assange is currently on remand in Wandsworth prison while Swedish prosecutors seek his extradition to face questioning over allegations of sexual assault.
Jennifer Robinson said Assange's team had heard "several different US lawyers rumours that an indictment was on its way or had happened already, but we don't know."
According to some reports, Washington is seeking to prosecute Assange under the 1917 Espionage Act which was unsuccessfully used to try to gag the New York Times when it published the Pentagon Papers.
Robinson said Assange's team did not believe the US had grounds to prosecute him under the act but understood that Washington was "looking closely at other charges, such as computer charges, so we have one eye on it."
1.58pm: High time for a summary:
• Julian Assange's lawyer are preparing for a US spying charge against their client. Jennifer Robinson told the Guardian that Assange team had heard "several different US lawyers rumours that an indictment was on its way or had happened already, but we don't know."• The UN's top human rights' official Navi Pillay has suggested the the US is "potentially violating WikiLeaks' right to freedom of expression", by pressuring private firms to cut ties with the site. Thousands of people have taken to the streets of Australian cities in support of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.
• Cyber attacks against firms that have cut ties with WikiLeaks have continued. The latest targets include the Dutch authorities following the arrest of 16-year-old hacker yesterday, and the payment service Moneybookers.
• Interpol have issued an international arrest warrant for the former Croatian prime minister Ivo Sanader, who fled Croatia as leaked cables exposed corruption allegations against him. The former leader fled Croatia yesterday.
• The Chinese government's mouthpiece, Beijing Daily, has suggested nominating Julian Assange for the Noble Peace Prize. Russia made a similarly mischievous suggestion yesterday.
• Leading Pakistani newspapers have acknowledged they were hoaxed by fake cables. They apologised after the Guardian revealed cables claiming to portray Indian generals vain, egotistical and genocidal had been made up.
2.18pm: MasterCard's site has been brought down again, after another attack by Anonymous, writes Josh Haliday.
Anonymous are doing it because they can. The group is digital strong-arming and will no doubt get a bit of short-term satisfaction from it.
"The plan is keeping them offline for a few hours, if not the entire day," my mystery source said.
Meanwhile, Moneybookers has confirmed that its site was down earlier today.
According to Reuters, Moneybookers became a target because it had informed WikiLeaks in August that it had closed its account "to comply with investigations by several governments into possible money laundering and other matters". Stay tuned on more on that.
A spokeswoman said: "We can confirm that our website was unavailable for a few minutes this morning. The service is back up and running. In light of recent events, we have been tightening security and applying additional vigilance which means that despite the attacks we continue to provide our service to users and merchants 24/7."
2.48pm: My colleague Simon Jeffery has an update on our You Ask: We Search exercise (see 7.31am).
To the tweeter who wondered if US Senator Joe Lieberman's attacks on Wikileaks was because he had something to hide, we can answer that no he didn't. Lieberman is mentioned several times in the cables, but always as part of US congressional delegations to foreign governments. In one Taro Aso, a former Japanese PM, tells him the two countries' alliance is like an "old marriage" that both sides need to work at if they are to avoid to avoid divorce.
We've also searched the Nepalese royal family, Prestwick airport, Jean-Claude Trichet, the MV Arctic Sea and - just in case it was meant seriously - Elvis Presley. The late singer, in turns out, appears in 24 cables - though 22 of them concern the visit of the former Japanese PM Junichiro Koizumi to Graceland.
The other two mention an Arab nationalist newspaper editor who is a big Elvis fan and the visit of a group of touring German Elvis impersonators to Albania, a country which had previously rarely seen them.
You can continue to make requests by tweeting @GdnCables but please try to specify names or other details we should look for. Also, the bulk of the cables concern the last decade so we may have less success with events before that.Thank you for all the suggestions so far.
3.03pm: Evgeny Morozov, the author of the forthcoming The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, has another smart post on WikiLeaks, expanding on a New York Times article.
If the Cablegate release ends up having significant global repercussions – resignations of politicians, visible changes of behavior amongst governments and corporations – this is bound to encourage more people to take risks and start leaking(That's it from me this week. Thanks for all your comments and messages. There'll probably be more WikiLeaks live blogging next week. Bye for now)
The buzz generated by the Cablegate makes it clear that WikiLeaks is as only as effective as its media partners: they screen the cables, identify narrative threads, redact the names, and embarrass the parties involved.
Thus, one of the most important questions about the future of WikiLeaks is how they will choose to structure their relationship with the media. One option that I outline in the paragraph above assumes that they would continue the role set defined by the Cablegate, i.e. WikiLeaks would leverage their brand to solicit leaks and rely on their in-house technology to protect the anonymity of the leakers, with the media doing all the heavylifting – i.e. writing news reports based on the leaks.
To watch the full slide show turn off auto-refresh at the top of the page
