Disinclined to Care: The Fabled NCIS and WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks has become a target of the United States government which seeks to discredit and destroy it. In March 2008, the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center created a secret report- ironically leaked to WikiLeaks- documenting the history of WikiLeaks, its prior disclosure of sensitive National Security information, the threat that WikiLeaks could pose to the United States Army, and laying out methods by which WikiLeaks could be destroyed. In 2010, Icelandic police were accused of raiding a house of a underage WikiLeaks volunteer. WikiLeaks ' Twitter feed contains numerous allegations of harassment and surveillance of WikiLeaks staff at the hands of the American intelligence establishments.

In contrast, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) gave little consideration or attention to WikiLeaks. In response to a FOIA request for all NCIS records pertaining to WikiLeaks, NCIS released, with some minor redactions by NCIS and the Army Criminal Investigative Division for reasons of privacy, two pages of records. Assuming a honest disclosure, and the disclosed documents provided no reason to doubt that it is, the records demonstrate a surprising passivity of one of the DOD's premier investigative arms toward WikiLeaks given the all but declared war against WikiLeaks by the Pentagon.

NCIS Wikileaks Records

The first page of the PDF is the cover page of the investigative file. It is the standard NCIS cover sheet designed to facilitate the rapid identification of the file. The investigation file is named “ WikiLeaks/Suspected Leakage of Classified Information” and was assigned case number 08FEB0824D400075EC. This investigation was a follow-up into a report of leaked classified information on WikiLeaks . The second page of the PDF, a single page report dated 2/8/2008 from that investigation, shows that a member of the NETWARCOM Security informed NCIS that WikiLeaks was hosting classified material. A report was taken by a Reporting Agent (RA) who then contacted a Special Agent involved with FCI (Foreign Counterintelligence Investigations.) The FCI agent informed him the US Army Criminal Investigation Division had been contacted and was conducting their own investigation into the matter. It was decided that “No Further Reporting [was] Anticipated.” The case was closed the same day with no additional investigations having been conducted since.