LEAKIER THAN THOU
spectre
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2010/02/03/leakier-than-thou/
PREVIOUSLY
https://tipit.to/wikileaks.org
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o2ZGk1djTU
http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/wikileaks-applies-for-a-grant-to-expand-659552
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks
"Sunshine Press (WikiLeaks) is an non-profit organization funded by
human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and
the general public. Through your support we have exposed significant
injustice around the world—successfully fighting off over 100 legal
attacks in the process. Although our work produces reforms daily and
is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the 2008
Economist Freedom of Expression Award as well as the 2009 Amnesty
International New Media Award, these accolades do not pay the bills.
Nor can we accept government or corporate funding and maintain our
absolute integrity. It is your strong support alone that preserves our
continued independence and strength."
WHISTLEBLOWER REPOSITORY GOES ON STRIKE
http://wikileak.org/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8490867.stm
WikiLeaks whistleblower site in temporary shutdown / 1 February 2010
WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website that allows people to publish
uncensored information anonymously, has suspended operations owing to
financial problems. Its running costs including staff payments are
$600,000 (£377,000), but so far this year it has raised just $130,000
(£81,000). WikiLeaks has established a reputation for publishing
information that traditional media cannot. The website claims to be
non-profit and relies on donations. A statement on its front page says
it is funded by "human rights campaigners, investigative journalists,
technologists and the general public".
Original documents
WikiLeaks does not accept money from governments or corporations. A
list of names and addresses of people said to belong to the British
National Party (BNP) was posted on the site in October 2009. WikiLeaks
also published e-mail exchanges involving US politician Sarah Palin
after her account was hacked. The site claims to have information
about corrupt banks, the UN and the Iraq war that it is unable to
publish while funds remain low.
While it has won awards for its work from the Economist and Amnesty
International, WikiLeaks has also fought more than 100 legal
challenges. "WikiLeaks has established a good name for itself and
broken some good stories," Julian Petley, chair of the Campaign for
Press and Broadcasting Freedom, told BBC News. "One of the reasons why
WikiLeaks is so useful is that it's able to put original documents up
- unfiltered by comment and editorial." Investigative journalist Paul
Lashmar said he had been "startled" by the effectiveness of WikiLeaks
in publishing suppressed information.
However he thought that the funding issue would not be easily
resolved. "(Web) users aren't interested in how the people behind
sites make their money," he said. "The problem for the self-funding
model is that sites like WikiLeaks will not find it easy to attract
funding through advertising. "At some point people who care about free
speech will realise that free speech has to be funded, otherwise it's
not free."
LABOR DISPUTE
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/jan/29/wikileaks-shut-down
Dig deep for Wikileaks
BY Emily Butselaar / 29 January 2010
Wikileaks, the whistleblowers' home, has been temporarily shut down
while its management tries to raise funds. Its tremendous success has
meant the site has often struggled under the volume of users. It has
faced down governments, investment banks and the famously litigious
Church of Scientology but paying its operating costs (circa $600,000)
has proved its undoing. As of today instead of reading government
secrets and details of corporate malfeasance all visitors to the site
will see is an appeal for cash. Anyone who cares about freedom of
expression should dig deep.
Wikileaks, with its simple "keep the bastards honest" ethos, aims to
discourage unethical behaviour by airing governments' and
corporations' dirty laundry in public, putting their secrets out there
in the public realm. The site won Index on Censorship's 2008 freedom
of expression award because it's an invaluable resource for anonymous
whistleblowers and investigative journalists.
Among Wikileaks' recent triumphs are its publication of top-secret
internet censorship lists. The blacklists from Australia, Thailand,
Denmark and Norway demonstrate exactly how censorship systems are
abused to suppress free expression. The Thai list featured sites
criticising the country's royal family and the Australian blacklist
turned out to include a school canteen consultancy. Despite its child
porn mandate, less than half of the Australian blacklist were linked
to paedophilia. Also on the list were satanic and fetish sites, anti-
abortion websites, and sites belonging to a kennel operator and a
dentist. Publication highlighted the lack of transparency in the
process and gave impetus to the "No Clean Feed" campaign which opposes
the Australian government's internet filter proposals.
But Wikileaks is not just a tool for journalists, it allows ordinary
Kenyans to read a confidential report detailing the billions their
former president allegedly siphoned from the country's coffers. Its
repository includes controversial military documents including the US
rules of engagement in Iraq and an operating manual issued to army
officers in Guantánamo Bay. It has put corporations on notice that the
costs of unethical behaviour are immeasurable in PR terms because it
amplifies the Streisand effect, the social media phenomenon that
punishes those who use the courts to suppress or censor information,
by ensuring it has a much wider reach.
Some have dismissed the site as a snooper's charter. Many were
outraged by its publication of Sarah Palin's hacked emails which
included private email addresses and Palin's family photographs. These
critics tended to overlook that the emails also provided clear
evidence that Palin was using private email accounts for state
business.
Wikipedia democratises news and information, allowing the public to
access secret information that once would have been limited to the
chateratti. Had the Trafigura case occurred five years earlier, most
journalists would have been able to access the secret report at the
heart of the case, but Wikileaks enables everyone to read it. The
superinjunction taken out by Trafigura was so comprehensive that of
293 articles about the suppressed report, only 11 dared to link to it
or told the public where they could access it. If Wikileaks didn't
exist, it is possible that Trafigura's management may have clung to
their injunction.
For fear of compromising its integrity Wikileaks doesn't accept
funding from corporations or governments. Instead, it relies on the
public. If you want to read the exposés of the future, it's time to
chip in.
LIKE WHAT?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks#Notable_leaks
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/aug/31/kenya.topstories3
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/03/wikileaks-restraining-order-a-failure-judge-says.ars
http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/11/gitmo
http://www.homepagedaily.com/Pages/article6937-wikileaks-cracks-natos-master-narrative-for-afghanistan.aspx
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/leaked_911_text.html
http://www.smartmobs.com/2009/11/26/text-messages-sent-on-911/
http://reason.com/blog/2009/11/25/climategate-forget-the-emails
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/08/wikileaks-to-auction-hugo-chavez-aides-e-mail-trove.ars
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/rudd-government-blacklist-hacker-monitors-police/story-e6frg8yx-1225718288350
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikileaks_tells_Wikinews_why_they_published_Danish_child_porn_censorship_list
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/02/cayman-island-b/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/02/post/
OVERWORKED, UNDERVALUED
http://wikileaks.org/
“ Wikileaks has probably produced more scoops in its short life than
the Washington Post has in the past 30 years ” — The National,
November 19. 2009
"To concentrate on raising the funds necessary to keep us alive into
2010, we have reluctantly suspended all other operations, but will be
back soon. We have received hundreds of thousands of pages from
corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and
many others that we do not currently have the resources to release.
You can change that and by doing so, change the world. Even $10 will
pay to put one of these reports into another ten thousand hands and
$1000, a million. We have raised just over $130,000 for this year but
can not meaningfully continue operations until costs are covered.
These amount to just under $200,000 PA. If staff are paid, our yearly
budget is $600,000.
The Sunshine Press (WikiLeaks) is an non-profit organization funded by
human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and
the general public. Through your support we have exposed significant
injustice around the world—successfully fighting off over 100 legal
attacks in the process. Although our work produces reforms daily and
is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the 2008
Economist Freedom of Expression Award as well as the 2009 Amnesty
International New Media Award, these accolades do not pay the bills.
Nor can we accept government or corporate funding and maintain our
absolute integrity. It is your strong support alone that preserves our
continued independence and strength.
If you are interested in contributing to our mission using another
payment method or with a shares, property, bonds, a grant, matched
contribution, bequest, interest free loan, or have any other
questions, please write to wl-supporters[at]sunshinepress[dot]org
SUPPORT TECHNICALLY
Wikileaks is currently overloaded by readers. This is a regular
difficulty that can only be resolved by deploying additional
resources. If you support our mission, you can help us by integrating
new hardware into our project infrastructure or developing software
for the project. Become patron of a WikiLeaks server or other parts of
our technology, adding more pillars to the stability and balance of
the WikiLeaks platform. Servers come trouble-free and legally
fortified, software is uniquely challenging. If you can provide
rackspace, power and an uplink, or a dedicated server or storage
space, for at least 12 months, or software development work for
WikiLeaks, please write to wl-supporters[at]sunshinepress[dot]org
SUPPORT LEGALLY
Individuals or organizations wishing to donate lawyer time write to wl-
legal[at]sunshinepress[dot]org. We provide unique legal challenges in
an ongoing fight for global justice and freedom of speech. If you
support our mission, join our legal team to help defend those values.
THANKS GIVEN
WikiLeaks would like to thank the following 18 steadfast supporters
(unordered):
Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press (RCFP)
The American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE)
The Associated Press - world wide news agency, based in New York
Citizen Media Law Project - Harvard university
The E.W Scripps Company - newspapers, TV, cable TV etc.
Gannett Co. Inc - largest publisher of newspapers in US, including USA
Today
The Hearst Corporation - conglomerate which publishes the San
Francisco Chronicle
The Los Angeles Times
National Newspaper Association (NNA)
Newspaper Association of America (NAA)
The Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA)
The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ)
Public Citizen - founded by Ralph Nader together with the California
First Amendment Coalition (CFAC)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
The Project on Government Oversight (POGO)
Jordan McCorkle, the University of Texas
“ ... serves as an uncensorable and untraceable depository for the
truth, able to publish documents that the courts may prevent
newspapers and broadcasters from being able to touch. ” — In praise
of... Wikileaks - The Guardian, October 20, 2009
SUNSHINE PRESS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o2ZGk1djTU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWNfIvG4z-g
GOING GALT
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/wiki/Main_Page
http://mirror.fem-net.de/CCC/26C3/mp4/26c3-3567-en-wikileaks_release_10.mp4
http://stefanmey.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/leak-o-nomy-the-economy-of-wikileaks/
The Economy of Wikileaks / January 4, 2010
Wikileaks is a global platform for Whistleblowers, in which internal
documents can be published. The idea is that arcane knowledge becomes
common knowledge and the world a better place. The project could play
in the same league as success stories like Wikipedia or Indymedia.
After a highly acclaimed lecture at the 26th Congress of the Chaos
Computer Club in Berlin, I had the opportunity to interview Julian
Assange, the most prominent Wikileaks-character on how to finance such
a website. The question seems to be pressing.
Q. At the moment [update Jan 21: and still today] Wikileaks.org has an
unusual appearance. The website is locked down in order to generate
money. How did you decide in favor of this tough step?
A. In part, this is a desire for us to to enforce self-discipline. It
is for us a way to ensure that everyone who is involved stops normal
work and actually spends time raising revenue. That’s hard for us,
because we promise our sources that we will do something about their
situation.
Q. So, you strike?
A. Yes, it’s similar to what unions do when they go on strike. They
remind people that their labour has value by withdrawing supply
entirely. We give free and important information to the world every
day. But when the supply is infinite in the sense that everyone is
able to download what we publish, the perceived value starts to reduce
down to zero. So by withdrawing supply and making our supply to zero,
people start to once again perceive the value of what we are doing.
Q. Do you urgently need money?
A. We have lots of very significant upcoming releases, significant in
terms of bandwidth, but even more significant in terms of amount of
labour they will require to process and in terms of legal attacks we
will get. So we need to be in a stronger position before we can
publish the material.
Q. In mainstream media as well as in non-commercial media there are
two important questions. What does it cost? And how is it financed?
Would you please first describe the cost side …
A. By far the biggest cost is people. That’s also a cost that scales
with operations. The more material we go through, the more the
management and labour costs are. People need to write summaries of the
material and see whether it’s true or not. In the moment everyone is
paying himself, but that can’t last forever.
Q. How big is the core team of WikiLeaks?
A. There are probably five people that do it 24 hours a day. And then
there are 800 people who do it occasionally throughout the year. And
in between there is a spectrum.
Q. How do you and the other four guys who work full time without
salaries finance living costs?
A. I have made money in the Internet. So I have enough money to do
that, but also not forever. And the other four guys, in the moment
they are also able to self-finance.
Q. Was Wikileaks your idea as many assumed?
A. I don’t call myself a founder.
Q. Nobody really knows about the founders, says Wikipedia …
A. Yes. This is simply because some of the people in the initial
founding group are refugees, refugees from China and other places. And
they still have family back in their home countries.
Q. So at the moment the labour costs are still hypothetical, but the
big costs that you really have to pay bills for are servers, office,
etc.?
A. On the bandwidth side, the backing is costly as well when we get
big spikes. Then there are registrations, bureaucracy, dealing with
bank accounts and this sort of stuff. Because we are not in one
location, it doesn’t make sense for us to have headquarters. People
have their own offices across the world.
Q. What about cost for lawsuits?
A. We don’t have to pay for our lawyer’s time. Hundred of thousands or
millions dollars’ worth of lawyer time are being donated. But we still
have to pay things like photocopying and court filing. And so far we
have never lost a case, there were no penalties or compensations to
pay.
Q. So all in all, can you give figures about how much money Wikileaks
needs in one year?
A. Propably 200 000, that’s with everyone paying themselves. But there
are people who can’t afford to continue being involved fulltime unless
they are paid. For that I would say maybe it’s 600 000 a year.
Q. Now let’s talk about revenues, your only visible revenue stream is
donations …
A. Private donations. We refuse government and corporate donations. In
the moment most of the money comes from the journalists, the lawyers
or the technologists who are personally involved. Only about ten
percent are from online donations. But that might increase.
Q. At the bottom of the site is a list of your “steadfast supporters”,
media organisations and companies like AP, Los Angeles Times or The
National Newspaper Association. What do they do for you?
A. They give their lawyers, not cash.
Q. Why do the they help you? Probably not out of selflessness.
A. Two things: They see us as an organisation that makes it easier for
them to do what they do. But they also see us as the thin end of the
wedge. We tackle the hardest publishing cases. And if we are defeated,
maybe they will be next in line. In other words: If Wikileaks.org goes
down as a result of a legal action, the same precedence can be used to
take down nytimes.com the next day or the German Spiegelonline.
Q. My explanation was that maybe they do it because they know that
what you do is actually their job, but they don’t have the money to do
it.
A. Maybe. The cost per word in investigative journalism is high. We
make it a little bit cheaper for them. If you can bring these costs
per word down you can get more words of investigative journalism and
publish even in a company that wants to maximize profit, because we do
some of the expensive sourcing. And there is another really big cost,
namely the threat of legal action. We take the most legally difficult
part, which is not the story, but usually the backing documents. As a
result there is less chance of legal action against the publisher. So
we help them to bring their costs per word in investigative journalism
down.
Q. You need to motivate two groups of people, in order to make the
site run, the whistleblowers and the journalists. What are the
motivations for whistleblowers?
A. Usually they are incenced morally by something. Very rarely
actually they want revenge or just to embarrass some organisation. So
that’s their incentive, to satisfy this feeling. Actually we would
have no problem giving sources cash. We don’t do that, but for me
there is no reason why only the lawyers and the journalists should be
compensated for their effort. Somebody is taking the risk to do
something and this will end up benefiting the public.
Q. But then the legal problem would become much bigger.
A. Yes, but we’re not concerned about that. We could do these transfer
payments to a jurisdiction like Belgium which says, that the
authorities are not to use any means to determine the connection
between the journalist and their source. And this would include the
banking system.
Q. On the other hand, you experiment with incentives for journalists.
This sounds weird at first. Why do you have to give them additional
incentives so they use material you offer them for free?
A. It’s not that easy. Information has value, generally in proportion
to the supply of this information being restricted. Once everyone has
the information, another copy of the information has no value.
Q. But nearly every journalist in the U.S. has daily access to the
material of a news agency like AP.
A. The material of AP is ready to go straight into the newspaper. Our
material requires additional investment. So when we release an
important leak, it requires an important, intelligent journalist who
is politically well connected. Those journalists have significant
opportunity costs. Okay, they want to spend their time on 200 pages.
In order for that to be profitable they need to make sure that they
will come out with an exclusive at the end. But if it is perceived to
be something of interest, it is probable that also other people will
be working on it at that moment. And when they publish is
unpredictable. That produces the counter-intuitive outcome that the
more evidence there is of some scandal and the more important the
scandal, the less likely it is that the press will write about it. If
there is no exclusivity.
Q. In Germany you made an exclusivity deal with two media companies,
with Stern and Heise. Are you satisfied with these kind of deals?
A. We have done this in other countries before. Generally we have been
satisfied. The problem is that it takes too much time to manage. To
make a contract, and to determine who should have the exclusivity.
Someone can say, oh, we will do a good story. We are going to maximize
the political impact. And then they won’t do it. How do we measure
this?
Q. You want to make sure that if you give them the exclusivity that
they really do what they promise to do …
A. Yes. One thing that can’t be faked is how much money they pay. If
you have an auction and a media organisation pays the most, then they
are predicting, that they will benefit the most from publishing the
story. That is, they will have the maximum number of readers. So this
is a very good way to measure who should have the exclusivity. We
tried to do it as an experiment in Venezuela .
Q. Why Venezuela?
A. Because of the character of the document. We had 7 000 e-mails from
Freddy Balzan, he was Hugo Chavez’s former speech writer and also the
former ambassador to Argentinia. We knew that this document would have
this problem, that it was big and political important, therefore
probably no one would write anything about it for the reason I just
said.
Q. What happened?
A. This auction proved to be a logistical nightmare. Media
organisations wanted access to the material before they went to
auction. Consequently we would get them to sign non-disclosure
agreements, chop up the material and release just every second page or
every second sentence.That proved to distracting to all the normal
work we were doing, so that we said, forget it, we can’t do that. We
just released the material as normal. And that’s precisely what
happened: no one wrote anything at all about those 7 000 Emails. Even
though 15 stories had appeared about the fact that we were holding the
auction.
Q. The experiment failed.
A. The experiment didn’t fail; the experiment taught us about what the
burdens were. We would actually need a team of five or six people
whose job was just to arrange these auctions.
Q. You plan to continue the auction idea in the future …
A. We plan to continue it, but we know it will take more resources.
But if we pursue that we will not do that for single documents. We
will instead offer a subscription. This would be much simpler. We
would only have the overhead of doing the auction stuff every three
months or six months, and not for every document.
Q. So the exclusivity of the story will run out after three months?
A. No, there will be exclusivity in terms of different time windows in
access to the material. As an example: there will be an auction for
North America. And you will be ranked in the auction. The media
organisation which bids most in the auction would get access to it
first, the one who bids second will get access to it second and so on.
Media organisations would have a subscription to Wikileaks.
Q. They would have timely privileged access to all Wikileaks documents
that are relevant for North America …
A. Yes. Let’s imagine there are only two companies in the auction. And
one pays double what the other one pays. And let’s say the source says
they want the document to be published in one month’s time. So there
is a one month window where the journalists have time to investigate
and write about the material. The organisation that pays the most for
it gets it immediately, so therefore they would be able to do a more
comprehensive story. Then the organisation that pays half as much gets
it half the time later, they get the documents two weeks later. And
then after one month they both publish.
Q. That sounds promising. Wouldn’t then the financial problem be
solved?
A. It depends on how many resources the auction itself takes. And
media themselves don’t have so much money at all. But all in all I
think we only would have to have a few bid cases per year, that would
be enough to finance it.
SECURE ANONYMIZED UPLOAD [DISCLAIMER]
https://secure.wikileaks.org/
YOU Submit a document for us to publish and, inorder to maximize its
impact, distribute amongst our network of investigative journalists,
human rights workers, lawyers and other partners.
WE will publish and keep published the document you submitted,
provided it meets the submission criteria. Your data is stored
decentralized, encrypted and as a preserved historic record,
accessible in full by the public. The information you submit will be
cleaned by us to not be technically traceable to your PDF printing
program, your word installation, scanner, printer. We also anonymize
any information on you at a very early stage of the WikiLeaks network,
and our services neither know who you are nor do they keep any
information about your visit. We will never cooperate with anyone
trying to identify you as our source. In fact we are legally bound not
to do so, and any investigation into you as our source is a crime in
various countries and will be prosecuted.
UPLOADING THE HISTORICAL RECORD
http://web.archive.org/web/20080419013425/http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Wikileaks:Submissions
http://www.itworld.com/internet/80445/wikileaks-plans-make-web-a-leakier-place
Wikileaks plans to make the Web a leakier place
BY Dan Nystedt / October 9, 2009
Wikileaks.org, the online clearinghouse for leaked documents, is
working on a plan to make the Web leakier by enabling newspapers,
human rights organizations, criminal investigators and others to embed
an "upload a disclosure to me via Wikileaks" form onto their Web
sites. The upload system will give potential whistleblowers around the
world the ability to leak sensitive documents to an organization or
journalist they trust over a secure connection, while giving the
receiver legal protection they might not otherwise enjoy. "We will
take the burden of protecting the source and the legal risks
associated with publishing the document," said Julien Assange, an
advisory board member at Wikileaks, in an interview at the Hack In The
Box security conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Once Wikileaks
confirms the uploaded material is real, it will be handed over to the
Web site that encouraged the submission for a period of time. This
embargo period gives the journalist or rights group time to write a
news story or report based on the material.
The embargo period is a key part of the plan, Assange said. When
Wikileaks releases material without writing its own story or finding
people who will, it gains little attention. "It's counterintuitive,"
he said. "You'd think the bigger and more important the document is,
the more likely it will be reported on but that's absolutely not true.
It's about supply and demand. Zero supply equals high demand, it has
value. As soon as we release the material, the supply goes to
infinity, so the perceived value goes to zero." The final act will be
for Wikileaks to publish the material on its Web site after the story
has been written and the embargo period lapsed. "We want to get as
much substantive information as possible into the historical record,
keep it accessible and provide incentives for people to turn it into
something that will achieve political reform," said Assange.
Wikileaks is also working on ways to make the material it receives
easier to search through. The problem Wikileaks often runs into is how
to present the material it's been given and how to make it easier to
sift through for vital information, said Assange. "At the moment, for
example, we are sitting on 5GB from Bank of America, one of the
executive's hard drives," he said. "Now how do we present that? It's a
difficult problem. We could just dump it all into one giant Zip file,
but we know for a fact that has limited impact. To have impact, it
needs to be easy for people to dive in and search it and get something
out of it." In three years on the Web, Wikileaks has published over
1.2 million sensitive documents.
GLASS HOUSE INTACT
http://www.infoworld.com/d/windows/wikileaks-springs-leak-599
The famous whistle-blower site just blew its own whistle, leaking the
e-mail addresses of dozens of its financial supporters.
By Robert X. Cringely / February 23, 2009
Live by the leak, die by the leak. Apparently that's the motto at
Wikileaks.org, the whistle-blowing site that provides one-stop
shopping for stuff other folks really don't want you to see. Wikileaks
made headlines last year when it published documents accusing Swiss
bank Julius Baer of money laundering and other activities not-entirely-
on-the-up-and-up. The bank sued, inspiring some laughably lame
attempts to shut the site down and generating even more bad PR. About
a month later the site published various "secret documents" for the
Church of Scientology. The site has also been instrumental in
documenting torture at Abu Ghraib, human rights protests in Tibet, and
civilian casualties in Afghanistan.
But Wikileaks is now dangling by its own petard, after someone in its
fundraising arm sent out an e-mail shilling for donations but put the
addresses of its 58 recipients on the "To:" field instead of "Bcc:".
Someone quickly submitted the e-mail to the Wikileaks foundation as a
"leaked" document, presumably to test just how devoted Wikileaks is to
its own mission. Egg meet face. To its credit (and probably to some
donors' horror) the site posted the document in full, including all 58
email addresses. Many of them feature aliases like "eekameeka" and
"phantom 7266," while other less fortunate folks included what appear
to be their real names and work email addresses. But even a
pseudonymous address can yield a lot of information about someone if
they use it to sign onto multiple sites across the Web.
Nothing wrong with giving money to a site that exists to promote
freedom of the press. But now one question becomes whether
organizations that got pwned by Wikileaks will start harassing the
site's donors, if only to shut off the money spigot. The bigger
question is, how can you trust Wikileaks to protect whistle-blowers'
identities when it can't protect its own donors? Wikileaks claims it's
better at protecting the sources of its information, even if it's not
so hot at protecting the sources of its funding. In a comment posted
on Wired's Threat Level blog, organization spokesdude Jay Lim says:
"...while definitely not good form, the mistake was a missed shortcut
made by one of our admin people and is not related to the efforts or
systems involved in source protection." If I'm someone who could lose
my job because I posted secret information to Wikileaks, I would find
this statement cold comfort. Really, Wikileaks was hosed regardless of
what it decided to do; if your whole schtick is exposing the
unvarnished unredacted truth, you can't suddenly start making
exceptions for yourself. But this dumb mistake is likely to cost it
contributions, both monetary and otherwise.
PUBLIC DATA HAVEN
http://www.pcworld.com/article/188519/will_wikileaks_drown_in_its_own_red_ink.html
Will Wikileaks Drown in Its Own Red Ink?
Robert Cringely / Feb 4, 2010
We have interrupted our nonstop coverage of Apple iPad mania to bring
you this important word about the freedom of information -- more
specifically, Wikileaks.org. I've written about Wikileaks several
times over the last few years, in part because it's a classic example
of why the Internet is such an extraordinary telecommunications tool.
Wikileaks is usually described as a "whistleblower" site, but it's
really more of a safe haven for secrets that need to be exposed --
kind of like a Swiss bank, only in reverse, so it's kind of fitting
that a Swiss bank is one of its most famous targets. But instead of
shielding people who are trying to hide their assets, it exposes them.
Thanks to the nature of the Net, confidential sources can make those
secrets public without putting their own necks on the chopping block.
(Admittedly, these sources sometimes break the law or their legal
agreements by doing so. And Wikileaks sometimes exposes information --
like personal email addresses -- of people who've done nothing wrong.
It's far from perfect.)
Through its work, Wikileaks has exposed money-laundering banks,
brainwashing cults, repressive governments, corporate scofflaws,
butter-fingered politicos, and all other manner of bad actors. Not
surprisingly, the org has been sued by its deep-pocketed targets,
harassed by the authorities, and attacked by DDoSers. Now it faces the
biggest obstacle of all: money -- or, rather, a lack thereof.
Today Wikileaks announced it has been forced to suspend its operations
due to a lack of funds. That sound you hear is champagne glasses
clinking in the boardrooms at Bank Julius Baer, at the Scientology HQ
in St. Petersburg, Fla., in the government halls of Beijing, and in
other elite locations around the globe. I can understand why the
wiki's donor pool dried up. About a year ago, Wikileaks sprung a leak
itself and accidentally emailed a list of its financial patrons, some
of whom probably would have preferred to remain anonymous. That email
was then submitted to Wikileaks, which dutifully posted it like any
other document it receives from anonymous sources. Now it's seeking
donations from the public to stay afloat, as well as technical
resources (like servers and storage space) and legal expertise. Its
supporters have started a Facebook group (numbering about 1,200
members at press time), and other journos besides yours truly are
spreading the good word.
Why support Wikileaks?
Because investigative journalism is on a respirator, and the prognosis
isn't good. For one thing, this kind of reporting is expensive. You
need publications that can afford to pay a professional reporter, or a
team of them, to dig into a story for months or even years without any
promise that they'll end up with something worth publishing. Those
stories might involve the use of a private detective, and they will
almost always require the services of a team of attorneys to vet the
copy carefully and defend the story later in court, if required. None
of that stuff comes cheap.
Still, investigative reporting was how major news dailies and dozens
of glossy mags made their bones back in the day. Now the number of
publications that can continue to fund this kind of reporting have
been whittled down to a handful, and most of those are teetering on
the brink. These days it's all about how fast you can publish a story
online -- even when it bears little resemblance to reality as defined
by most people -- and how much Google loves you as a result. There
aren't a lot of rewards for reporting and reflection there. Sure, the
blogosphere can occasionally step in and break a story, just like a
blind pig occasionally stumbles across an acorn. But only for the most
brain-dead simple stuff -- like the wrong font used in a typewritten
letter. Most investigative breakthroughs involve detailed painstaking
work, deep understanding of a topic, and the ability to earn the trust
of a wide range of confidential sources who are willing to put their
jobs and possibly their lives at risk just by talking to you.
Those things are not generally available to obsessive-compulsive
pajama-wearing typists who may or may not be using their real names.
And they certainly won't be without resources like Wikileaks, which
levels the information playing field for everyone, professional and
amateur journos alike. So it's your choice. You can spend $10 on a
couple of lattes and a kruller, or you can spend it on keeping
information flowing just a little more freely around the world. I know
which one I'd pick. If Wikileaks goes down, will something new rise to
take its place?
ENDING IN PAY SETTLEMENT : LEAKED DATA BACK UP, FOR NOW
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/02/wikileaks-meets-cash-goal
Wikileaks Meets Its Minimum Cash Goal
BY Kim Zetter / February 4, 2010
The whistleblowing site Wikileaks has apparently raised the money it
needs to continue operating for the time being, according to a message
the organization sent out Wednesday night on Twitter. “Achieved min.
funraising [sic] goal. ($200k/600k); we’re back fighting for another
year, even if we have to eat rice to do it,” read the tweet, without
specifying whether it had raised the full $600,000 or just $200,000.
The site announced last December that it was ceasing day-to-day
operations to focus on raising money. It said contributors could still
send documents and tips through its anonymous submission tool. Last
week, it was ceasing operations indefinitely because it had raised
only $130,000 of the $200,000 it needed to maintain base operations
annually. The site says it requires $600,000 to operate if it pays its
staff of technologists and curators who sift through submissions to
provide context for documents and other information valuable to its
users. The announcement page, beginning with: “We protect the world —
but will you protect us?” has not changed, except to add that
Wikileaks “will be back soon.”
“We have received hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks,
the U.S. detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others
that we do not currently have the resources to release,” the pages
reads. “You can change that and by doing so, change the world. Even
$10 will pay to put one of these reports into another 10,000 hands and
$1,000, a million.”
The site takes donations through PayPal, Moneybookers and TipiT, as
well as checks and bank transfers. Its online TipiT tipjar indicates
it has raised $31,000 using that method. Donors to its tipjar leave
such messages as: “Keep scooping us — we’re very grateful for your
persistence.” “Keep up the good work, shining light in dark places.”
“You may be the most important resource on the net in the long term.”
The site was formally launched in 2007 as an online clearinghouse for
anonymous submissions of documents, images and other data. It has
received awards from Amnesty International and has been praised by
media groups and others for giving whistleblowers and political
dissidents a forum to expose corruption and suppression and foster
transparency.
It’s run by the Sunshine Press, said to be supported by anonymous
human rights activists, investigative journalists, technologists and
members of the general public around the world. The site has scooped
mainstream media outlets a number of times in obtaining documents and
information on controversial topics that have then become the source
of mainstream media stories.
In 2007, the site published a 238-page U.S. military manual detailing
operations of the Defense Department’s Guantánamo Bay detention
facility. It also posted a manual for operating the CIA’s rendition
flights, which involved undocumented detainees who were kidnapped in
various locations and flown to countries outside the United States for
interrogation and torture.
Wikileaks was among the first to publish data from Sarah Palin’s
private Yahoo e-mail account after a Tennessee judge tried to shutter
Wikileaks by ordering its U.S. host to take it offline after a Cayman
Islands bank complained that the site was publishing proprietary
documents. The judge reversed his decision a week later following
criticism of numerous groups that said the judge’s decision
constituted prior restraint, a violation of the First Amendment.
SEE ALSO
http://www.cryptome.org/