MAY 2019 • LONGISLANDPRESS.COM 9
ASSANGE ARREST
LI’S WIKILEAKS LINK
BY TIMOTHY BOLGER
An ex-Brookhaven National Lab employee
who tried to help WikiLeaks
a decade ago has been tied to the case
against the whistleblower website’s
founder, Julian Assange, whom U.S.
authorities want extradited.
Jason Katz, a former systems
administrator at the lab, unsuccessfully
tried to help Wikileaks
hack into a password-protected file
that is believed to contain video
footage of an American airstrike
in Afghanistan that killed about
100 civilians. He was questioned
by the FBI and later fired from
BNL following an investigation.
Federal prosecutors have recently
contacted him and other Wikileaks
players in the hopes of having
them testify against Assange, Reuters
reported.
“I don't regret my actions, because
they led me on a really interesting
journey,” Katz, who has since moved
to Iceland and founded the Pirate
Party, told Motherboard in his only
known interview. “I would do the
same again.”
U.S. authorities have sought Assange’s
arrest since Wikileaks
published in 2010 — about a month
after Katz tried to crack the video
password — embarrassing American
diplomatic cables, secret
documents, and the infamous “Collatoral
Murder” leaked classified
cockpit gunsight footage of 2007
U.S. airstrikes in Iraq that killed
two Reuters journalists and at least
10 others.
Assange sought and received asylum
from the Ecuadorian embassy
in London for nearly seven years
until last month, when former Ecuadoran
President Rafael Correa ordered
the removal of Assange, who
was then arrested and sentenced by
a British judge to a year in jail for
bail jumping. The series of events
intensified U.S. authorities’ efforts
to extradite Assange, who is widely
reported to be facing sealed federal
charges in Virginia. U.S. extradition
efforts could take years.
During the case against former U.S.
Army intelligence officer Chelsea
Manning, who was convicted of
providing Wikileaks with the cache
of files in the website’s massive 2010
document dump, military prosecutors
questioned an investigator who
testified to having found a leaked
Wikileaks video on Katz’s computer
at BNL.
“I was asked to examine a Linux
work computer to determine
whether the file b.zip was present,”
Army Special Agent David Shaver
of the Computr Crime Investigative
Unit told the court, according to
transcripts. “Video taken from an
aircraft over the battlefield.”
Shaver testified that the video file
was the same one in Wikileaks’
possession, but is separate from the
Collatoral Murder video.
“User of the computer was attempting
to decrypt file b.zip,” Shaver was
quoted as saying in the transcripts.
“Cracking program downloaded
and installed. From bash history
it was running to try to crack the
password.”
Shaver said he could not determine
whether Katz was able to get the
password or not. To date, Wikileaks
has not published the second video,
suggesting that it still has not been
able to open the file.
Katz, who has not been charged with
a crime, told Motherboard that the
FBI seized his laptop and raided his
Brooklyn apartment as well as the
Long Island home of his girlfriend’s
family.
Katz could not be reached for comment.
Neither BNL nor federal prosecutors
responded to a request for
comment for this story. Wikileaks
also did not comment.
"When I got raided, they rounded
up my entire support network — all
of my friends, all of my close family,
and just wrecked all of that," he told
Motherboard. "It made me very wary
of involving anyone around me with
what all of this was about."
IN THE NEWS
“I don't regret my actions,” says Jason Katz.
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