Janesdiggo's List: Leaks

• Mr. Crosbie has warned Ottawa that a U.S. document to be published on the website WikiLeaks will include criticisms he made about Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his powerful family at a meeting with other diplomats, and that this could require him to be replaced. And he noted fears that the WikiLeaks saga could push the Afghan President to break with Western allies.
• In four cables released on Wednesday, U.S. diplomats in Ottawa said Canada has an “inferiority complex,” and feels it has declined from middle-power status to an observer on the world stage, and criticized the CBC for anti-American stereotypes on shows like The Border and Little Mosque on the Prairie.
• “The message is a report of a lengthy meeting on Feb. 20, 2010, in which I speak in very critical terms about the misuse of power by Karzai and his family (AWK is named) and urge the international community to oppose Karzai’s attempts to take control of the electoral law in advance of the [parliamentary] elections,” Mr. Crosbie wrote.

  • If the family is as corrupt as indicated damn right Crosbie should speak out against them

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• The CBC program The Border, the embassy contends, regularly pits Canadians against nefarious U.S. authorities as they fight a “new war” at the border.
• “This likely reflects an almost inherent inferiority complex of Canadians vis-a-vis their sole neighbor

• The international police agency Interpol this week issued a “red notice” to assist in the arrest of Mr. Assange, who is wanted in Sweden on suspicion of sexual crimes, but Britain’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) so far has refused to authorize this, the paper said.
• Sweden’s highest court said on Thursday it had refused Mr. Assange permission to appeal against the arrest order issued over alleged sexual crimes.

• U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley interviewed by BBC Radio 4, said Mr. Assange had failed to co-operate with a U.S. investigation into the leak.

  “We’ve made clear in an exchange this weekend with Mr. Assange the fact that he is in possession of classified material of the United States government, it’s stolen property and we have asked him to return it. He has declined to do that and we would investigate the implications of this.”

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• Sweden's highest court has refused permission to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to appeal against an arrest order issued over alleged sexual crimes, the court said Thursday.

• “Several high-level Intel officers, including CEO Craig Barrett, and other officials, such as American Chamber of Commerce President Andrew Somers, highlighted to the GOR interlocutors, including President Medvedev, the role Intel plays in employing over 1,000 Russian engineers,” a cable said.

   “This high-level lobbying secured Intel a meeting with key FSB officials to explain its needs,” it continued. “Intel was able to demonstrate the reasonableness of its request and, as a result, by-passed the current extensive licensing requirement.”
• Russian attendees at meetings, the cable said, “are closely monitored by their Military Intelligence (GRU) handlers,” and are reluctant “to engage in any dialogues outside of tightly controlled statements recited from prepared texts.”
• Outright distrustful relations between the Kremlin and the Soviet Union’s former vassals were also evident in the records.

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• Mr. Putin also warned that Russia would develop and deploy new nuclear weapons if the United States did not accept its proposals on integrating Russian and European missile defense forces — amplifying a comment made by Mr. Medvedev in his annual state of the nation address on Tuesday.
• “This is no threat on our part,” he said. “We are simply saying this is what we expect to happen if we don’t agree on a joint effort there.”
• NATO’s proposals for cooperation are less ambitious, and some members remain deeply mistrustful of Russian involvement,
• “When we are talking with our American friends and tell them there are systemic problems” with the electoral college system, “we hear from them: ‘Don’t interfere with our affairs. This is our tradition, and it’s going to continue like that.’ We are not interfering.
• “But to our colleagues, I would also like to advise you not to interfere with the sovereign choice of the Russian people,” he said.
• “Some experts believe that somebody is deceiving WikiLeaks, that their reputation is being undermined to use them for their own political purposes later on,” he said. “That is one of the possibilities there. That is the opinion of the experts.”

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• “The degree of comfort with which Canadian broadcast entities, including those financed by Canadian tax dollars, twist current events to feed longstanding negative images of the U.S. — and the extent to which the Canadian public seems willing to indulge in the feast — is noteworthy as an indication of the kind of insidious negative popular stereotyping we are increasingly up against in Canada,” the cable said.
• disclose a perception by American diplomats that Canadians “always carry a chip on their shoulder” in part because of a feeling that their country “is condemned to always play ‘Robin’ to the U.S. ‘Batman.’ ”
• Canadian officials privately tried to make it clear to their American counterparts that they did not share their society’s persistent undercurrent of anti-Americanism.

  • Of course, they are American wannabe's
• during a national election in Canada, the embassy had marveled that “despite the overwhelming importance of the U.S. to Canada for its economy and security,” parliamentary candidates were rarely mentioning anything about relations with their southern neighbor.

  • Why should we consider the US during our elections??
• “Ultimately, the U.S. is like the proverbial 900-pound gorilla in the midst of the Canadian federal election: overwhelming but too potentially menacing to acknowledge,” the cable said.

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• one reason top Chinese leaders had become so obsessed with the Internet search company: they were Googling themselves.
• Extensive hacking operations suspected of originating in China, including one leveled at Google, are a central theme in the cables. The operations began earlier and were aimed at a wider array of American government and military data than generally known, including on the computers of United States diplomats involved in climate change talks with China.
• One cable, dated early this year, quoted a Chinese person with family connections to the elite as saying that Mr. Li himself directed an attack on Google’s servers in the United States, though that claim has been called into question.
• In an interview with The New York Times, the person cited in the cable said that Mr. Li personally oversaw a campaign against Google’s operations in China but the person did not know who directed the hacking attack.
• successful hacking attack on its home servers, which yielded Chinese dissidents’ e-mail accounts as well as Google’s proprietary source code.
• through the Google incident and other increased controls and surveillance, like real-name registration, they reached a conclusion: the Web is fundamentally controllable,
• That confidence may also reflect what the cables show are repeated and often successful hacking attacks from China on the United States government, private enterprises and Western allies that began by 2002, several years before such intrusions were widely reported in the United States.
• previously unreported attack in 2008, code-named Byzantine Candor by American investigators, yielded more than 50 megabytes of e-mails and a complete list of user names and passwords from an American government agency, a Nov. 3, 2008, cable revealed for the first time.
• But the person cited in the cable gave a divergent account. He detailed a campaign to press Google coordinated by the Propaganda Department’s director, Liu Yunshan. Mr. Li and Mr. Zhou issued approvals in several instances, he said, but he had no direct knowledge linking them to the hacking attack aimed at securing commercial secrets or dissidents’ e-mail accounts — considered the purview of security officials.
• the cables provide a patchwork of detail about cyberattacks that American officials believe originated in China with either the assistance or knowledge of the Chinese military.
• the American government has been fighting a pitched battle with intruders who have been clearly identified as using Chinese-language keyboards and physically located in China.
• cables also reveal that a surveillance system dubbed Ghostnet that stole information from the computers used by the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and South Asian governments and was uncovered in 2009 was linked to a second broad series of break-ins into American government computers code-named Byzantine Hades. Government investigators were able to make a “tenuous connection” between those break-ins and the People’s Liberation Army.

  • That's the hack the Munk institute discoverd
• in 2008 German intelligence briefed American officials on similar attacks beginning in 2006 against the German government, including military, economic, science and technology, commercial, diplomatic, and research and development targets. The Germans described the attacks as preceding events like the German government’s meetings with the Chinese government.
• The propaganda chief ordered three big state-owned Chinese telecommunications companies to stop doing business with Google. Mr. Li also demanded that Google executives remove any link between its sanitized Chinese Web site and its main international one, which he deemed “an illegal site,” the cable said.
• Google ultimately stopped complying with repeated censorship requests. It stopped offering a censored version of its search engine in China earlier this year, citing both the hacking attacks and its unwillingness to continue obeying censorship orders.

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• Answering questions from the Afghan, Pakistani and international media at the news conference on Saturday, Mr. Karzai and the Pakistani prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, appeared to be at once trying to diminish the significance of the cables by throwing doubt on their authenticity while at the same time taking them seriously enough to deny some of their contents.
• When Mr. Gilani was asked about a cable that said his government lacked the ability to control its own military and intelligence services, he said, “I would request you not to trust WikiLeaks.”
• “These are just the views of junior officers,” he said. “They are not authentic. We should not even take them seriously.”
• Mr. Zakhilwal, the finance minister, was reported to have called Mr. Karzai “an extremely weak man,” comments he denied in his own news conference later on Saturday.
• Mr. Karzai also said that people might say things casually in private that might not reflect their more considered and accurate positions. “People say things to other people not necessarily to be a part that they want to take home, and I understand some of the ministers may have been talking about me and some of them have done, I know, and other ministers in future may do the same,” he said, speaking in English. He added pointedly, “But we will not have a WikiLeaks to reveal that.”
• “We don’t know what to do with this whole thing: do we believe it or not believe it? I would go towards not believing it, that is better for Afghanistan.”
• “It has certainly hurt relations not only between me and him, but between some ministers and the ambassador, and it will certainly not be business as usual,” Mr. Zakhilwal said.
• Relations between Mr. Karzai and the American ambassador have been uneasy since the leaking of a secret diplomatic cable in November 2009 in which the ambassador said Mr. Karzai was “not a reliable partner” for the United States.

  • Real reason for Obama's sudden trip to visit the troops in Afghanistan?
• Mr. Zakhilwal said he had offered his resignation to President Karzai, if there was any suspicion that the cables reflected his real views, but that the president had said he did not believe the cables and had asked him to stay on.
• Mr. Zakhilwal is considered one of the ablest members of the Afghan cabinet and has proved a crucial representative for the country in negotiations with international donors and the Obama administration.

  • Using this to support the idea of 'the harm' being caused?

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• Will angry foreign governments kick out ambassadors? Will spooked locals stop talking to their embassy contacts?
• Behind all the public hand-wringing, however, there is another, more muted reaction: pride.
• “What you see are diplomats doing the work of diplomacy: reporting and analyzing and providing information, solving problems, worrying about big, complex challenges,” Mrs. Clinton said to reporters at the end of a four-country trip to Central Asia and the Persian Gulf that wound up being a contrition tour.
• “In a way,” she said, “it should be reassuring, despite the occasional tidbit that is pulled out and unfortunately blown up.”
• Not all the tidbits reflect well on the diplomats, of course. Memos from the United States Embassy in Georgia, for example, showed that it relied so heavily on the Georgian government for intelligence that it badly misjudged the country’s actions in its war with Russia in 2008.
• But the overall quality of the cables — their detail, analysis, and in some cases, laugh-out-loud humor — has won fans in unlikely places. “It’s very entertaining reading,” said Aigul Solovyeva, a member of Parliament in Kazakhstan who met Mrs. Clinton there this week.
• Richard E. Hoagland, the ambassador to Kazakhstan,
• “The trick is to catch readers’ attention,” he advises. “The first three to five words are all they will see in their electronic queue.”

  • Reason the pre-9/11 warnings were missed, no catchy lead-ins ....
• work on storytelling: “Despite what some in Washington will tell you, there is nothing at all wrong with colorful writing, as long as it communicates something.” But he adds a caveat: “Cute writing is never acceptable — cute is for toddlers, not for professional diplomats.”
• For Mrs. Clinton, the pride in the diplomats’ work is a small compensation for a difficult week in which she has discussed the WikiLeaks case with more than two dozen foreign leaders, working to soothe bruised egos and explain how the security breach happened.
• The job of damage control has fallen mainly to her. President Obama has not called any foreign leaders about the disclosures. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, meanwhile, has been reserved even though the cables were believed to be purloined from a Department of Defense computer system by an army private, Bradley Manning, who is now in a military jail.

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• from the granular picture of engagement-in-action that emerges from that trove of 250,000 WikiLeaks cables, many from the first 13 months of the Obama presidency. Mr. Obama’s style seems to be: Engage, yes, but wield a club as well — and try to counter the global doubts that he is willing to use it.
• This policy is tailored to the needs of a new president trying to demonstrate that he is neither too inexperienced nor too soft to face the menaces of the world. In a handful of cases, the approach shows some early signs of success. But in dealing with some of the world’s most intractable governments — from the Middle Kingdom to the Middle East — Mr. Obama inevitably hits some real-world limitations.
• The cable traffic hints at horse trading: The Obama administration killed a missile defense site in Poland, seemingly to win Moscow’s support for sanctions on Iran.
• Yemen,
• Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, tells Gen. David Petraeus that he is free to bomb Al Qaeda — as long as Mr. Saleh can say that it was his own forces, not the Americans, striking the militant strongholds. General Petraeus takes that deal; now, critics of the leaks argue that the disclosure may unravel it.

  • Another possible 'harm' from the leaks
• Chinese officials welcomed Mr. Obama’s outreach in 2009. But increasingly, they are determined to show they will not be pushed around by a country they view as a fading superpower. They have declared much of the South China Sea as a zone of “vital interest,” and ignored American arguments for letting China’s currency float to resolve a huge trade imbalance. And cables show repeated, often successful hacking attacks on the United States government.
• The most sensitive are classified “Secret,” far short of “Codeword” and “Nodis,” for “No Distribution,” the kind of true secrets that might reveal whether the United States is thinking about
• Yet the cables confirm that the administration has largely fulfilled its promise to give engagement some time to work, even while preparing for it to fail. “

  • Positive spins
• one of Mr. Obama’s most senior national security advisers said in a June 2009 interview. “And realistic enough to know that the main benefit of engagement may turn out to be that it showed the world we gave it an honest try and they need to join now for much tougher steps.”
• While WikiLeaks made the trove available with the intention of exposing United States duplicity, what struck many readers was that American diplomacy looked rather impressive. The day-by-day record showed diplomats trying their hardest behind closed doors to defuse some of the world’s thorniest conflicts, but also assembling a Plan B.
• the cables show that Mr. Obama’s aides were drawing Arab states into an informal regional alliance that gradually closed off Tehran’s access to banks and ports. Missile defense sites sprang up around the Persian Gulf,
• continuing a process that started under President Bush.
• Dennis Ross, the Middle East envoy, asked the Saudis to supply China with oil — in hopes that China will be willing to enforce sanctions on Iran if it can get oil elsewhere.
• The reality is that while Mr. Obama tries anew to persuade Pakistan to attack the toughest Al Qaeda havens, Plan B is well underway: There have been more than 100 Predator strikes in Pakistan this year, nearly double last year’s number, and far more than President Bush ever launched.
• no country is testing the limits of engagement strategy more skillfully than China.
• One Chinese scholar, close to the government, said last week that he was taking the WikiLeaks cables home to try to decipher how China should handle the Americans.

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• PayPal, one of the most widely used online payment services, severed ties to WikiLeaks, following similar moves by the e-commerce Web site Amazon and the domain name company EveryDNS.net. In a statement dated Friday, PayPal said that it had “permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks.”
• It added that the action had been taken “due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity,” and said that “the account holder” had been notified.
• officials have said that the Pentagon and the Justice Department have been studying possible criminal actions, as well as policies to prevent future leaks of secret documents, but no punitive measures have been announced.
• Two separate Swedish requests for Mr. Assange’s arrest, one through the 188 member countries of Interpol and the other through countries that belong to the Eurowarrant network, were distributed nearly three weeks ago, but only made public by Sweden last week.
• Mr. Assange, who has not been seen in public since an appearance in Geneva on Nov. 5, is believed to be staying with friends somewhere in southeastern England, outside London.
• Whether Scotland Yard planned to take action against him in the light of the reissued European warrant remained unclear on Saturday.

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• What’s between the lines in those cables, though, is another matter. It is a rather sobering message. America is leaking power.
• we learn from the cables that private Saudi donors today still constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide — not to mention the fundamentalist mosques, charities and schools that spawn the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
• It seems from these cables that the U.S. often has to pay leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan to be two-faced — otherwise they would just be one-faced and against the U.S. in both public and private.
• the sobering message in so many of these cables: America lacks leverage.
• America lacks leverage in the Middle East because we are addicted to oil. We are the addicts and they are the pushers, and addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.
• We also lack leverage with the Chinese on North Korea, or with regard to the value of China’s currency, because we’re addicted to their credit.
• We cannot make ourselves safer abroad unless we change our behavior at home. But our politics never connects the two.
• We have been steadily losing that leverage because of our twin addictions to Middle East oil and Chinese credit — and the WikiLeaks show just what crow we have to eat because of that.

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• Most striking were the leaks regarding Arab concerns about Iran’s aspirations for regional hegemony and its nuclear programs.
• While some hard-line analysts and pundits are relieved to find the Arabs “on our side” and feel that this disclosure will help us form a stronger alliance against Tehran, it’s more likely that the leaks will simply raise Iran’s prestige by adding to the persistent overestimation of its influence and abilities.
• Arab leaders in particular will now think twice before either speaking honestly or telling American visitors or diplomats what Washington wants to hear.
• What comes through loud and clear in these cables is a familiar Gulf Arab refrain: “We have a problem we don’t know how to deal with. You Americans must solve it for us. Do what you think best. We’ll look the other way if necessary.”
• “No one will now be able to allege that Israel is acting irresponsibly,” wrote Aluf Benn, a columnist for the Israeli daily Haaretz.
• But there is little to back up such claims. Israel has long wanted the United States to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. It has also strongly implied that if Washington refuses to do so, it will go ahead on its own — in a manner calculated to leave the United States no choice but to join it in war with Iran.
• The leaks show that Gulf Arab rulers are concerned above all that a nuclear-armed Iran would have greater prestige in the region and ever-greater influence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza. The nuclear weapons themselves, they feel, are primarily a threat to Israel and American forces in the region.
• But the leaked documents also show that one of the main worries Israel has about Iran’s nuclear ambitions is that it could lose its regional monopoly on nuclear weapons, limiting their leverage on a whole range of issues. One doubts the Gulf Arabs share that concern.
• Mr. Assange’s grand accomplishment will be nothing more than to make it far harder for American diplomats to get candid answers from their Gulf Arab and Israeli counterparts.

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• The image of Mr. Assange as ringmaster is deeply disturbing, especially since he seems to so relish his worldwide notoriety. The image of great news organizations as performers in the ring, though, is even more alarming to me.

  • No alarm when they act as performers for the gov't
• What if, instead of publishing what it knew, The Times had chosen to pass on WikiLeaks’s 250,000-plus secret documents?
• The Times, like other serious news organizations in democracies, exists to ferret out and publish information — most especially information that government, business and other power centers prefer to conceal. Arming readers with knowledge is what it’s about, and journalists are motivated to pursue that end.

  • Myth, it was once true
• As The Washington Post reported earlier this year in its illuminating series “Top Secret America,” the government has expanded secrecy so much that 854,000 people now hold top-secret security clearances.
• The authority of American diplomats’ analyses, often quoted verbatim from the cables, strengthened my understanding of the challenges the United States faces abroad.

  • More positive spin
• Are Times readers and Americans at large better informed on these issues because of the stories?
• The answer is unquestionably yes. To cite just a few specifics:

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• Leaked diplomatic cables describe a flow of money to terrorists, Iraq’s anger with interference by its neighbors and European distrust of bank monitoring.

  • This was sent out as a news Alert, why?? 12/5/2010

• Simon Jenkins of the British Guardian
• summed matters up this way: “The money-wasting is staggering. [U.S.] Aid payments are never followed, never audited, never evaluated. The impression is of the world's superpower roaming helpless in a world in which nobody behaves as bidden. Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, the United Nations, are all perpetually off script. Washington reacts like a wounded bear, its instincts imperial but its power projection unproductive.”
• empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 years for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, 22 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003.
• instead of the bloodshed that marked the end of so many past empires, with cities burning and civilians slaughtered, this twenty-first century imperial collapse could come relatively quietly through the invisible tendrils of economic collapse or cyberwarfare.
• By 2020, according to current plans, the Pentagon will throw a military Hail Mary pass for a dying empire. 
• By that year, however, China's global network of communications satellites, backed by the world's most powerful supercomputers, will also be fully operational, providing Beijing with an independent platform for the weaponization of space and a powerful communications system for missile- or cyber-strikes into every quadrant of the globe.
• The future scenarios include: economic decline, oil shock, military misadventure, and World War III.
• By 2008, the United States had already fallen to number three in global merchandise exports, with just 11% of them compared to 12% for China and 16% for the European Union.  There is no reason to believe that this trend will reverse itself.
• In 2008, the U.S. was still number two behind Japan in worldwide patent applications with 232,000, but China was closing fast at 195,000, thanks to a blistering 400% increase since 2000.
• in 2009 the U.S. hit rock bottom in ranking among the 40 nations surveyed by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation when it came to “change” in “global innovation-based competitiveness” during the previous decade.
• in October China's Defense Ministry unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, so powerful, said one U.S. expert, that it “blows away the existing No. 1 machine” in America.
• The World Economic Forum ranked the United States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010.
• Nearly half of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are now foreigners, most of whom will be heading home,
• In mid-2009, with the world's central banks holding an astronomical $4 trillion in U.S. Treasury notes, Russian president Dimitri Medvedev insisted that it was time to end “the artificially maintained unipolar system” based on “one formerly strong reserve currency.”
• Simultaneously, China's central bank governor suggested that the future might lie with a global reserve currency “disconnected from individual nations” (that is, the U.S. dollar).
• • No way Iran is a 'power' on the same scale as China and Russia. Who is being catered to here?
• China became the world's number one energy consumer this summer
• By 2025, Iran and Russia will control almost half of the world's natural gas supply

  • How true is that? Alberta and the north have huge reserves; Also, it assumes fossil fuel will continue to be of central importance, which may not be true
• The United States has taken a different path, doing far too little to develop alternative sources while, in the last three decades, doubling its dependence on foreign oil imports.  Between 1973 and 2007, oil imports have risen from 36% of energy consumed in the U.S. to 66%.
• China is now using the profits from its export trade with the U.S. to fund what is likely to become a military challenge to American dominion over the waterways of Asia and the Pacific.
• Beijing is claiming a vast maritime arc from Korea to Indonesia long dominated by the U.S. Navy.
• Beijing's official Global Times responded angrily, saying, “The U.S.-China wrestling match over the South China Sea issue has raised the stakes in deciding who the real future ruler of the planet will be.”
• the Pentagon reported that Beijing now holds “the capability to attack… [U.S.] aircraft carriers in the western Pacific Ocean” and target “nuclear forces throughout… the continental United States.”
• With ongoing development of the powerful Long March V booster rocket, as well as the launch of two satellites in January 2010 and another in July, for a total of five, Beijing signaled that the country was making rapid strides toward an “independent” network of 35 satellites for global positioning, communications, and reconnaissance capabilities by 2020.
• To check China and extend its military position globally, Washington is intent on building a new digital network of air and space robotics, advanced cyberwarfare capabilities, and electronic surveillance.
• By 2020, if all goes according to plan, the Pentagon will launch a three-tiered shield of space drones -- reaching from stratosphere to exosphere, armed with agile missiles, linked by a resilient modular satellite system, and operated through total telescopic surveillance.
• The X-37B is the first in a new generation of unmanned vehicles that will mark the full weaponization of space, creating an arena for future warfare unlike anything that has gone before.
• Even if future events prove duller than these four scenarios suggest, every significant trend points toward a far more striking decline in American global power by 2025 than anything Washington now seems to be envisioning.
• the cost of maintaining 800 or more overseas military bases will simply become unsustainable, finally forcing a staged withdrawal on a still-unwilling Washington
• At the moment then, no single superpower seems to be on the horizon likely to succeed the U.S.
• In a dark, dystopian version of our global future, a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral forces like NATO, and an international financial elite could conceivably forge a single, possibly unstable, supra-national nexus that would make it no longer meaningful to speak of national empires at all. 
• denationalized corporations and multinational elites would assumedly rule such a world from secure urban enclaves, the multitudes would be relegated to urban and rural wastelands.
• a new global oligopoly might emerge between 2020 and 2040, with rising powers China, Russia, India, and Brazil collaborating with receding powers like Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States to enforce an ad hoc global dominion, akin to the loose alliance of European empires that ruled half of humanity circa 1900.
• Another possibility: the rise of regional hegemons in a return to something reminiscent of the international system that operated before modern empires took shape.

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• Mr. Assange’s lawyer Mark Stephens warned that if Mr. Assange were to be brought to trial on rape accusations he faces in Sweden, or for treason charges that have been suggested by U.S. politicians, he would release the encryption key. The tens of thousands of people who have downloaded the file would instantly have access to the names, addresses and details contained in the file.
• prominent U.S. and Saudi officials calling for Mr. Assange’s arrest or death
• The documents were reportedly stolen from a U.S. military installation by Bradley Manning, a former private in the U.S. Army
• Mr. Manning is already being held in solitary confinement, and will likely face treason and espionage charge

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• Since several major Internet companies cut off services to WikiLeaks in recent days, activists have created hundreds of mirror sites, Web sites that host exact copies of another site’s content, making censorship difficult.
• A Swiss-Icelandic company, Datacell, will process donations instead of PayPal, and the WikiLeaks site shows that Mr. Assange is accepting direct donations into a Swiss bank account held with the financial arm of the Swiss postal service.
• But that solace may be short lived: a spokesman for the financial arm of Swiss Post, Marc Andrey, also told NZZ am Sonntag on Sunday that it was “reviewing” its relationship with Mr. Assange subject to proof that he has Swiss residency, owns property or does business in the country.
• By late Sunday, there were at least 208 WikiLeaks mirror sites up and running.

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• Mr. Assange was ordered to remain in custody until a further court session on Dec. 14, the latest twist in the drama swirling around WikiLeaks following its publication of leaked documents.
• The charges involve sexual encounters that two women say began as consensual but became nonconsensual after Mr. Assange was no longer using a condom. Mr. Assange has denied any wrongdoing and suggested that the charges were trumped up in retaliation for his WikiLeaks work, though there is no public evidence to suggest a connection.
• “Over 100,000 people” were given the entire archive of 251,287 cables in encrypted form, Mr. Assange said on Friday in a question-and-answer session on the Web site of the British newspaper The Guardian.

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