Cablegate: A Timeline

BCE (Before Cablegate Era)
Sept. 17, 1787 • U.S. Constitution created, limiting powers of the government.
Sept. 25, 1789 • Bill of Rights created, ensuring freedom of the press among other civil rights.
June 13, 1971 • The New York Times begins publishing parts of The Pentagon Papers, a secret report describing U.S. involvement in Vietnam since 1945.
June 30, 1971 • The U.S. Supreme Court allows the New York Times and other newspapers censored by the Nixon government from publishing the contents of The Pentagon Papers to continue publication.
Jan. 21, 2010 • U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gives a speech on the importance of net neutrality.
April 5, 2010 • “Collateral Murder” – a video of U.S. soldiers shooting 17 civilians from a helicopter in 2007 – released at a press conference by Wikileaks.
May 26, 2010 • Bradley Manning, 22, arrested in Iraq for allegedly copying diplomatic cables from SIPRNet, the U.S. Department of Defense’s electronic information network. He is still being held in a military base in conditions some consider to be a form of torture, awaiting trial.
July 25, 2010 • Afghan War Logs, a series of U.S. military logs drafted during the current war in Afghanistan, released by Wikileaks.
July 28, 2010 • A 1.4-gigabyte file named “insur- ance.aes256” is uploaded to computers around the world via a torrent tracker on The Pirate Bay. This is supposedly an encrypted archive containing sensitive documents to be released if Wikileaks editor Julian Assange is imprisoned or killed.
Sept. 25, 2010 • Daniel “Schmidt” Domscheit-Berg, Wikileaks second-in-command, tells German newspaper Der Spiegel he left over disputes with Assange and plans to start his own service called OpenLeaks.
Oct. 22, 2010 • Iraq War Logs, detailing military records from the current war in Iraq, released by Wikileaks.
Nov. 28, 2010 • Cablegate
Wikileaks releases a large collection of U.S. diplomatic cables to the public via the U.K. newspaper The Guardian, The New York Times in the U.S., the French Le Monde, German newspaper Der Spiegel and El Pais in Spain. The resulting scandal is dubbed “Cablegate.” At the time of release, only 220 diplomatic cables are made available to the public, all of which had been read and redacted by journalists at these papers.
CE (Cablegate Era)
Nov. 30, 2010 • Assange claims to have cables regarding a major American bank (speculated to be the Bank of America) which could force a high-ranking executive in the bank to resign.
Dec. 1, 2010 • Former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin says Assange should be hunted like a terrorist.
Dec. 2, 2010 • Wikileaks website taken down from book-selling website Amazon’s web hosting service at the request of U.S. senator Joe Lieberman; EveryDNS.net stops linking the domain name wikileaks.org to its assigned server.
Dec. 3, 2010 • Wikileaks switches to a Swedish host under the domain name wikileaks.ch; Assange accused of rape under Swedish law by two women he claims formerly had consensual sex with him.
Dec. 4, 2010 • Online money-transfer service Paypal stops processing transactions to Wikileaks.
Dec. 6, 2010 • Wikileaks’ Swiss bank account (PostFinance) closed; former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee says Assange should be executed.
Dec. 7, 2010 • Visa Europe and MasterCard stop processing transactions to Wikileaks; Assange imprisoned in England.
Dec. 8, 2010 • A loose organization of young hackers called “Anonymous” launch a series of denial-of-service attacks against the websites owned by Visa, MasterCard, Paypal and Amazon in a campaign dubbed “Operation Payback.”
Dec. 9, 2010 • WikiRebels, a documentary about WikiLeaks, released on YouTube by SVT; Russia suggests Assange be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, likely as a jab at the U.S.
Dec. 16 2010 • U.S. prosecutors investigate the possibility of charging Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917, an act designed to stop domestic spies during wartime; Assange released from British prison on bail, under house arrest in a friend’s home.
Dec. 18, 2010 • Bank of America stops processing transactions to WikiLeaks.
Dec. 19, 2010 • U.S. vice-president Joe Biden calls Assange a “hi-tech terrorist.”
Dec. 21, 2010 • Assange sells memoirs to Canongate; his book is to be published in March.
Dec. 27, 2010 • Tom Flanagan, former aid to Prime Minster Stephen Harper, says on the CBC that President Barack Obama should assassinate Assange.
Jan. 8, 2011 • U.S. Justice Department subpoenas Twitter for account details of Icelandic MP and former Wikileaks volunteer Birgitta Jonsdottir.
Jan. 11, 2011 • Assange’s defence team say he is at risk of being sent to Guantánamo Bay or of facing the death penalty if extradited to Sweden because of co-operation with the U.S.
Jan. 12, 2011 • Assange claims to have 504 diplomatic cables, some of which regard Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (the global media conglomerate and owner of Fox News), in the encrypted “insurance file” being distributed by the BitTorrent community; he will release these if anything happens to him.
Jan. 15, 2011 • Around 2440 of the approximately 250,000 anonymously submitted “Cablegate” cables are available to the public.
* Some of these dates reflect the day the event was reported in the news rather than the date of the actual occurrence