12.00pm: Some recent developments:
The commander at Bradley Manning's military jail is to be replaced. James Averhart has come under attack over the last week for, it is claimed, moving the 23-year-old to suicide watch as a form of punishment. A spokesman at the Quantico base said the change in command was ordered in October and is not in any way related to its high-profile detainee, but Manning's lawyer held out the hope that a new commander may review his client's custodial conditions.
As reported yesterday, a company asked by Visa to investigate WikiLeaks' finances found no proof the group's fundraising arm is breaking the law in its home base of Iceland. Visa Europe said it would continue blocking donations until it completes its own investigation – however, it can't say when that will be.
WikiLeaks has made several appearances at Davos. Guardian columnist and historian Timothy Garton Ash said the lessons for businesses and governments is that they were probably keeping too much information secret, when the online world made information that much more easily available. He later told a reporter (Davos events are held under the Chatham House rule, so no direct quotes from the sessions themselves):
Every organisation should think very hard about what it is you really need to protect. You're probably protecting a whole lot you don't need to. And then do everything you can to protect that smaller amount
Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, also at Davos, said he believes WikiLeaks "should improve the international climate".
Russia has been relatively sanguine about WikiLeaks, despite cables and new stories where US diplomats compare Kremlin attempts to demonstrate the rule of law was respected in the Mikhail Khodorkovsky trial to "lipstick on a pig", a Spanish prosecutor called the country a "mafia state"; and suspicions were aired that Silvio Berlusconi could be "profiting personally" from secret deals with Vladimir Putin.
Medvedev is one of the those who puts themselves in the "nothing new" camp on the cables. "I got the sense that most assessments that found their way to WikiLeaks concerning Russia were taken from the general political sites on the internet," he said. Keen readers may remember that the Russian president's office last month floated the idea that Julian Assange should be awarded the Nobel peace prize.
Assange has been giving interviews and taking part in online Q&As. He told the Associated Press he currently has 20 media partners and hopes to enlist as many as 60 as WikiLeaks seeks to speed up its release of the cables. In an online Q&A on a Brazilian blog, he said he was taking no part in the current slew of WikiLeaks film projects, but if he were to sell production rights it would be on condition that he was be played by Will Smith. (I get the impression Assange isn't taking WikiLeaks the Movie / TV mini-series that seriously.)
An Australian report on an Assange interview this weekend with the US CBS network notes another interesting development: WikiLeaks has announced it will start holding "regular direct meetings with the public and the press", taking questions by Twitter and email. The first of the online meetings is scheduled for Tuesday.
The New York Times, one of the original media partners, has published an extract from its forthcoming WikiLeaks book where executive editor Bill Keller explains how and why it got involved with the war logs and embassy cables. WikiLeaks' Twitter feed has been increasingly antagonistic to the newspaper of late (on Sunday it tweeted: "The NYTimes has got to go. It can not be repaired. It is a hopeless government shrill" – linking to a blogpost with the same title) and yesterday linked to Keller's piece calling it a "smear".
There was no Wikiblog yesterday, so here is a link to Tuesday's.
12.25pm: A Christian Science Monitor blog has a post up about Egypt in the cables.
12.45pm: Jeff Jarvis tweets to announce the work of one of his journalism students: Localeaks. The idea is to allow any one of 1400 US newspapers to receive leaks (tips and/or files) from whistleblowers through its online dropbox.
Each drop-box consists of a secure web connection and a form that encrypts both files and the text submitted (then destroys the originals) as well as removes identifying metadata from documents. The system also makes every effort to leave no traceable remnants from the transaction, such as identifiable session cookies on the client side or logging of any IP addresses on the server side.
Once a file is submitted, the newspaper will receive an email, alerting them to the tip. The newspaper then needs to reply that it's interested. Then a temporary secure file transfer is established
2.20pm: Five arrested on suspicion of involvement in pro-WikiLeaks Anonymous web attacks. The five males, aged between 15 and 26, are being held after a series of arrests in the West Midlands, Northamptonshire, Herfordshire, Surrey and London.
2.45pm: The company hosting the WikiLeaks servers has said it will make requests to the website (and others) anonymous in order to circumvent Swedish implementation of a European data retention directive that requires it to log users.
Stockholm-based Banhof, which runs its servers from a former nuclear bunker hewn out of rock, is to direct all customer traffic through an encrypted VPN (virtual private network) service. This means it will be able to neither see or log who is asking for what, and will therefore be unable to hand any of that information over.
Jon Karlung, the Banhof CEO, explained all to Sveriges Radio (Swedish) but here is a fuller summary in English.
A Wall Street Journal blogpost has more on the data retention directive, which it explains partly in terms of the Wire.
4pm: A new Aftenposten-published cable from early 2010 reveals US diplomats asking if Hamas has a cashflow problem. With the possibility that outside assistance to meet its estimated $25m monthly expenditure was not getting through (maybe because of restrictions imposed by Egypt) staff at the US's Jerusalem consulate reported what they believed to be attempts by Hamas to increase the $3.5m-$4m it could collect monthly from the territory itself.
Several contacts report that Hamas is both cutting costs and increasing collection of revenue from inside Gaza. They noted that the potential benefit to Hamas is limited due to the current economic situation.
12. (C) According to multiple contacts, municipalities in Gaza are stepping up the collection of electricity and water bills. Hamas-run ministries also charge fees for various services, like the issuance of official documents. The first-time "registration" fee for a car is USD 12,000
In a perhaps unexpected echo of those in the UK who claim traffic regulations are over-enforced as part of a revenue-generating "war on the motorist", the cable suggests that Hamas turned to traffic laws to meet its budget shortfall.
New traffic signs are being installed, and traffic laws are being aggressively enforced by the police. For an infraction, according to a Gazan contact, police typically confiscate a driver's license or car documents and require the driver to retrieve his documents at a police station, where he will likely pay a penalty fee. In one anecdotal account of more rigorous traffic controls, a man who used his van to transport children to school was confronted by Hamas authorities and instructed to register his van as a school bus, and then pay the requisite taxes.
4.30pm: Another Aftenposten-published cable: Dreams of a national railway network in Afghanistan "remain remote", it says.
One problem is that while its neighbours are sponsoring several small-scale projects, each of those is using a different gauge. Meanwhile, a single gauge for Afghanistan, it says, "is not practical" since it would fail to make connections with at least half of those neighbours.
5.15pm: Estonian newspaper Postimees has been given access to the 610 Talinn cables by Aftenposten.
5.20pm: More from WikiLeaks on next week's online public meeting (or "interactive town hall" if you are CNN):
To submit a question please tweet your question prefixed with the "#wlquest" tag
To submit a question please email twlrt@mail.be
The email questions will close at 6.00pm GMT on Saturday 29th January
The first conference will be a video recording to be broadcast at 11.30am GMT on Tuesday 1st February
6.20pm: Back tomorrow.
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