WikiLeaks Unveils 160 Firms' Surveillance Gear Sales Docs, Still No Submissions System

WikiLeaks is still in the secret-spilling business. But not, apparently, in the business of accepting those secrets through the anonymous dropbox that was once its trademark.

The site on Thursday unveiled a new trove of 287 documents it’s calling the Spy Files, a collection of 287 digital surveillance firms’ marketing materials, price lists and catalogs,  a joint effort with Bugged Planet, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and Privacy International, and with a new cadre of media partners including the Washington Post, the Hindu, the Italian paper L’Espresso and the French news outlet OWNI. The documents, sorted by company name and dozens of types of surveillance such as spyware, Wifi interception, and cellphone forensics are broken down on the new page of WikiLeaks’ site.

“Mass interception of entire populations is not only a reality, it is a secret new industry spanning 25 countries,” a statement on the site reads. “International surveillance companies are based in the more technologically sophisticated countries, and they sell their technology on to every country of the world. This industry is, in practice, unregulated. Intelligence agencies, military forces and police authorities are able to silently, and on mass, and secretly intercept calls and take over computers without the help or knowledge of the telecommunication providers. Users’ physical location can be tracked if they are carrying a mobile phone, even if it is only on stand by.”

Included among the leaked documents are those from major companies like Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia-Siemens, HP, and dozens of smaller firms. But just how much previously unknown surveillance is revealed in the documents isn’t clear, given that the last month already saw several major exposés of gear from Western tech firms sold to repressive regimes for censorship and spying. The Wall Street Journal last month dumped a similar cache of surveillance firm materials, releases from the hacker group Telecomix and the Canadian research group Citizen Lab have revealed Blue Coat’s  technology in Syria and Burma, while Bloomberg reports showed that NetApp, HP, Qosmos and Ultimaco all sold gear that was found in Syria’s surveillance complex.

WikiLeaks has hinted that more documents will be released over time, and other revelations may surface as the public combs through the Spy Files. The French media outlet OWNI, for instance, has revealed a page of a manual from the French surveillance firm Amesys that includes a screenshot showing more than 40 pseudonyms of tracked figures. Many of those pseudonyms, OWNI has found, corresponded with political dissidents and activists that Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi had sought to jail or kill.

Meanwhile, one other long-awaited release from WikiLeaks has yet to come: Its new submission system. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had said in a press conference in October that the site would launch its new anonymous dropbox on November 28th, a year after its announcement of its Cablegate leak of 251,000 State Department documents. In a statement to press over the weekend titled “Online security and the reopening of the submission system,” WikiLeaks had delayed that launch until Thursday, but still hinted at a “new phase” for the group.

In the announcement Thursday, no mention was made of that new dropbox. Kristinn Hrafnsson, WikiLeaks’ Icelandic spokesperson, confirmed to me by phone that the new submissions platform is still not online.

Assange has blamed the delay of his new leak platform in part on vulnerabilities in the SSL encryption commonly used on websites, after a year that saw several of the companies ensuring the authenticity of encrypted sites compromised and used to issue fraudulent certificates. “Online security has become severely and irreversibly compromised over the past months,” reads WikiLeaks’ latest statement on the submissions platform from last week. “Over a year or longer, SSL certificates have been penetrated by various organized crime groups and intelligence agencies. The entire SSL system, which is the mechanism that guarantees security and anonymity online, has been compromised. SSL is beyond repair.”

With its leak channel down for more than a year, just where the Spy Files came from isn’t clear. One of WikiLeaks’ partners, such as the surveillance-tech-focused Bugged Planet project run by Chaos Computer Club president and WikiLeaks associate Andy Muller-Maguhn, may have obtained the documents. Assange has also hinted that sources have still been able to send him anonymous documents through other channels.

“For the last 12 months, you haven’t been able to go through the front door,” to submit  information to WikiLeaks, he said at October’s press conference. “You’ve had to establish contacts with the organization and transmit us the material through other mechanisms.”

WikiLeaks’ official submission system has been offline since former WikiLeaker Daniel Domscheit-Berg and at least one other engineer left the group in the fall of 2010, taking with them much of the control of its infrastructure and thousands of leaked documents, which they later deleted out of security concerns. Assange has since argued that the rise of online surveillance and the insecurity of Web infrastructure like SSL has made anonymity online harder than ever in WikiLeaks’ history.

With this latest portrait of pervasive spying on the Internet, don’t expect WikiLeaks’ new strain of pessimism to brighten any time soon.

o