LONDON — Anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks said early today that its massive archive of unredacted U.S. State Department cables had been exposed in a security breach that it blamed on its one-time partner, Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
In a 1,600-word editorial posted to the Internet, WikiLeaks accused Guardian investigative reporter David Leigh of divulging the password needed to decrypt the files in a book he and another Guardian journalist, Luke Harding, published earlier this year.
WikiLeaks said in its statement that Leigh had “recklessly, and without gaining our approval, knowingly disclosed the decryption passwords” in a nonfiction book about the organization published by the Guardian in February.
Leigh dismissed the charge as “time-wasting nonsense.” He said that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had supplied him with a password needed to access the U.S. embassy cables from a server in July 2010 — but that Assange assured him the site would expire within a matter of hours.
“What we published much later in our book was obsolete and harmless,” Leigh said. “We did not disclose the URL (Web address) where the file was located, and in any event, Assange had told us it would no longer exist.”
Repeated attempts to reach WikiLeaks staffers for an explanation of why the file was apparently left online were unsuccessful, although on its Twitter feed the group described one of Leigh’s previous statements as false and warned of “continuous lies to come.”
In its statement, WikiLeaks said that knowledge of the leaked password had been spreading privately for months, but that the organization was forced to come out with a statement today after news of the breach began spilling into the press.
The group claimed it had tried to warn the State Department about what was happening. In Washington, the State Department did not immediately respond to a call seeking comment. U.S. officials have previously said that WikiLeaks’ disclosures could have potentially serious consequences for informants, activists and others quoted in the cables.
After posting its editorial, WikiLeaks posted a threat to publish its entire archive in an unencrypted form.
