WASHINGTON — All 251,287 diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks last year are now accessible in multiple locations on the Internet, a development that touched off a dispute Thursday between the group and the British newspaper The Guardian about who was responsible for their release.
The full publication of the cables will dramatically enlarge a window on U.S. diplomacy that first opened in November when WikiLeaks and several news organizations, including The New York Times, started publishing selected cables. The process proceeded slowly, with fewer than 20,000 cables on the Web until last week, when WikiLeaks suddenly accelerated publication and placed nearly 134,000 additional cables on its site.
But the release of the unedited texts of all the cables will make meaningless past efforts by WikiLeaks and journalists to remove the names of vulnerable people in repressive countries, including activists, academics and journalists, who might face reprisals for speaking candidly to U.S. diplomats. While no consequence more serious than dismissal from a job has been reported so far, both State Department officials and human rights advocates are concerned about the possibility that people named in the cables could face prison or worse.
The cable texts were contained in an encrypted file that was apparently released inadvertently by WikiLeaks and subsequently copied and posted in multiple locations on the Internet. The Times confirmed Thursday that the file can be opened using a password that was included in a book about WikiLeaks published earlier this year by David Leigh and Luke Harding of The Guardian.
WikiLeaks, in a statement and Twitter messages, blamed the cables’ release on Leigh, the investigations editor of The Guardian, who included the 58-character password as an epigraph of a chapter in his book, “WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy.”
Leigh, in an email and an article on The Guardian’s website, said Assange had assured him the password would work for only a matter of hours, so he assumed it was obsolete by the time his book was published. In fact, the file had been inadvertently copied by a WikiLeaks worker and eventually spread around the Web.
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