8 ms·

U.S. must stop spying on WikiLeaks - Details on intimidation attempts

304 points by dsplittgerber 17y ago

oscardelben 17y ago
Does anyone know if there's an archive of documents released by wikileaks? I've not been able to find them through the website's homepage.
- metamemetics 17y ago
  http://mirror.wikileaks.info/ http://mirror.wikileaks.info/
pqs 17y ago
The problem of Wikileaks is that it is centralised and, therefore, is vulnerable. Freenet offers a much more resilient approach. It is true that Freenet is not yet easy enough, but it is just a java application which almost anyone can run. Of course, writing wikileaks.org on the browser bar is easier and faster than installing Freenet, but it puts lives in danger. By the way, there is a wikileaks mirror on Freenet. It might be better to do the other way round, wikileaks should be a mirror of the freesite. http://freenetproject.org/ http://freenetproject.org/ update: of course, the lives in danger are those of the editors of wikileaks.
- kierank 17y ago
  How do you know it's centralised?
  - pyre 17y ago
    It has a centralized structure. There is a hierarchy of responsibility, etc. There is an 'entity' to attack, whether it's the servers, or the editors/leaders/etc. Which is different from something that is truly distributed where each person is -- for all intents and purposes -- equal to anyone else in the group.
    - pqs 17y ago
      That's it. If the server is down, goodbye wikileaks. If the bank accounts are seized, goodbye wikileaks. If the leaders are imprisoned, good bye wikileaks. Freenet offers a more resilient architecture.
      - ig1 17y ago
        But that's like saying you can secure a computer by sealing it an concrete box and burying it under the ocean. Wikileaks triages the data, pushes it out to the media, maintains physical drop-boxes across multiple continents, and much more. All of which requires people doing real work, the storage of data is a tiny part of the problem. And even for the storage part freenet isn't a real solution. How many journalists do you know who use freenet ? - pushing data into the public domain is useless if only a tiny handful of people have access to it.
      - kierank 17y ago
        They don't just have one server in one location. They're not stupid.
        pqs 16y ago
        Ok, then they have 10 servers on 10 locations. That's not resilient enough.
SamAtt 17y ago
I've recently read a good book that I think is insightful here. It was written by a Bush Administration official and is called "How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama is Inviting the Next Attack." No matter how you feel about the obvious pro-Bush slant this book is worth reading for two reasons... 1. The author actually spent time talking to the CIA people who carry out Ops. He got to ask them "why do you do this?" and "why does this work?" 2. The information shared wasn't available until the Obama administration declassified it. So it gives an unprecedented look into how intelligence agencies work and how much of their work is simply psychological. After reading the book my opinion is they're screwing with Wikileaks. Again, the real expertise the CIA has built up over the years is in how to get people to think what the CIA wants them to think. In this case I believe they want this editor to think he's being spied on at every turn. Increased paranoia, especially on someone who is already prone to it, will eventually drive a person over the edge. As this post shows his instinct is to fight back in public meaning the more paranoid they can make him the more likely it is he'll start ranting in public and (they hope) discredit himself.
- lotharbot 17y ago
  One consequence of the CIA making him think he's being spied on at every turn is making him think he's on to something big. This allows the CIA -- or other intelligence agencies -- to feed him doctored or fake information, thereby destroying his credibility. I think it's highly likely the upcoming video of civilians being killed is actually a setup to discredit the wikileaks guys.
- jacobolus 17y ago
  Except that the author of said book is totally full of shit, and his book has been ripped to shreds: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/03/29/100329crbo_books_mayer http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/03/29/10032...
  - ja2ke 17y ago
    Ugh sorry, I just accidentally downvoted this while trying to upvote it. Sorry again. Thanks for the link!
dailo10 17y ago
Did anyone else draw a parallel to the current Internet censorship in China? There are differences of course, but they are both instances in which the government feels threatened by the power of information that the Internet gives the individual.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- anigbrowl 17y ago
  No. Every government and large organization has secrets; a small number are legitimate, a larger number are maintained for reasons of venality, to hide incompetence and so forth. The US has a very open society, notwithstanding its various flaws. China takes a different approach. Not only does its government obscure its own workings from its population, it seeks to cut them off from ideas which differ substantively from its philosophy of governance. I'm not sure that the intent of this is necessarily evil; to mind it's more like an extreme case of paternalism. The Chinese rulers may figure that untrammeled democracy in china would quickly degenerate into mob politics followed civil or externally directed war. On the one hand I find such an attitude most disagreeable and the tactics employed to that end almost comical; on the other hand, the country went through a painful spasm of mob politics during Mao's cultural revolution relatively recently, and it's understandable if they have no desire to repeat the experience. Whatever the reasons, Chinese society predates even western civilization, is historically somewhat more homogenous and also somewhat authoritarian. The long-term direction of such a society changes slowly.
  - lenley 17y ago
    Let's not forget that there have been numerous revolutions within American society that made representative government more representative of the actual population of United States citizens. It's hard to evaluate the progression of democracy over time when comparing such vastly different societies as you have mentioned...also we should not use the U.S. example as some sort of normalized index... Not saying you were doing that, just throwing it out there.
- 17y ago
caffeine 17y ago
I want to help them out by writing software, but I live in a CIA-infested country (the UK) and these reports make me genuinely afraid of reaching out. While I greatly admire their courage and respect their cause, I'm not really brave enough to sacrifice myself for the greater good.
- andrewcooke 17y ago
  so the intimidation worked.
  - caffeine 17y ago
    Yes.
    - fdschoeneman 17y ago
      One thing I've noticed about cowards is that they make sure to pick fights with people, and organizations, such as the CIA, the United States, (or some other western, liberal government), who they know will never really do them much harm. You want to make a stand? Send a donation to that Danish cartoonist guy who draws pictures of Allah doing stupid shit. You may be a coward, but I'm sure you're enough of a man to at least send an anonymous check.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  I've reached out as number of times to them and never had a reply... which kinda sucks
  - jonknee 17y ago
    Maybe they were too worried about the CIA volunteering. I'm sure you're not a spook, but they don't know that.
  - Vivtek 17y ago
    Yeah, same here. I'd guess they have no end of volunteers, probably about 0.05% of whom actually end up panning out.
tbrownaw 17y ago
"We freely admit to doing illegal stuff, and the government needs to stop trying to figure out what we're up to." Yeah, that makes sense...
- madair 17y ago
  Legal != Moral
  - jackfoxy 17y ago
    Moral != (Legal != Moral)
    - rntz 17y ago
      Moral != 1?
      - pohl 17y ago
        I think that's a boolean value on the right: Moral != true. Does this mean Legal == false?
        techiferous 17y ago
        In Ruby, strings evaluate to true, so that would be Moral != "Moral"
- cmelbye 17y ago
  Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves. -- Henry David Thoreau
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    That's easy for Thoreau to say when he lives alone in the woods. And that peaceful place in the woods was only his to live in because earlier English-speaking settlers in North America had gained that land from the aboriginal inhabitants.
nihilocrat 17y ago
If they supposedly have the video, why don't they just release it?
- breck 17y ago
  It's a fundraising campaign. They're not releasing it because they're trying to raise money and are building the hype. Read the article. Pretty disingenuous if you ask me.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  From the article: Some of the new interest is related to a film exposing a U.S. massacre we will release at the U.S. National Press Club on April 5 Personally I'm willing, for the moment, to take on faith everything posted so far (and that they have a video of some kind) - we'll see what happens April 5th.
  - nihilocrat 17y ago
    I'm okay with waiting, but I'm just wondering why a site that's about leaking things is holding a carrot in front of us. I have a strange feeling that the video is not as juicy as we're lead to believe, and it's just a publicity stunt, which is why I'm posing the question to HN.
    - lallysingh 17y ago
      The submitter can request Wikileaks to hold onto a document until a specific date.
      - DougBTX 17y ago
        Clearly we need a WikileaksWikileaks
        p0ppe 17y ago
        Such as http://www.wikileak.org/ http://www.wikileak.org/ ?
DanielBMarkham 17y ago
I've got some very mixed feelings about this. On one hand, the more open the society is the better it is for everybody. Wikileaks performs an impressive and valuable service by allowing a place for information to get published. On the other hand, even in a perfect world, hell if everything should be out in the open for everyone. There are lots of examples, going back as far in history as you'd like, of state secrets serving a necessary and important role. Even averting war. So my question to the wikileaks folks is this: where's the line? Would you publish anything, and the more secret the better? Or is there some kind of rule you use? Would you publish nuclear launch codes? The identities of spies in countries that would execute them for it? There is way, way, way too much secrecy in the world, especially among U.S. Agencies. They classify anything they want, and the biggest reason is political CYA. Having said that, I can't give carte blanche to Wikileaks either. Before I support them, I need to know what standards they have. Even more serious, this isn't bean bag, guys. A country pays a few billion to keep something secret and you blow the whistle? You might want to make sure your life insurance is up to date. So is wikileaks there for the leaks? Or there for the public? I don't think the two goals are the same thing.
- kljhgfvgbn 17y ago
  Simple solution, the penalty for an official classifying something as secret because it was illegal, or they were doing a deal for a supplier or they were covering their butts could be the same as that for revealing a real secret.
- ytinas 17y ago
  >Would you publish nuclear launch codes? Afaik, wikileaks has never been about publishing launch codes. It's about revealing cover ups and there should be no government cover ups. If they are trying to hide something they've done then it's probably because it's illegal.
  - Estragon 17y ago
    IOW, if you're not doing anything wrong, you can't have anything to hide? :-)
krschultz 17y ago
Alright, has anyone actually read some of these documents. Check out the US'govt report about WikiLeaks posted on WikiLeaks. http://file.wikileaks.org/file/us-intel-wikileaks.pdf http://file.wikileaks.org/file/us-intel-wikileaks.pdf Am I the only one that after reading it agrees with the government? Specifically WikiLeaks posted classified documents showing troop equipment allocation and anti-IED jamming equipment specs. What possible purpose does this serve? There is nothing embarrassing/illegal about what our troops are carrying and how they are fighting IEDs, but there is a lot of extremely valuable intel for the enemy in those documents. Honestly the guys at WikiLeaks are lucky as hell they live in a country where they are not strung up for treason already. You would not be seeing Tweets from these guys in many parts of the world. Frankly I don't WANT to help WikiLeaks. If you are endangering my friends actually deployed, what is the purpose of leaking this stuff? To show how good your sources are? So the guys running WikiLeaks value their journalism cred and their own ego over the lives of people actually relying on IED jammers to work?

304 points by dsplittgerber 17y ago

Does anyone know if there's an archive of documents released by wikileaks? I've not been able to find them through the website's homepage.

metamemetics 17y ago
http://mirror.wikileaks.info/ http://mirror.wikileaks.info/

pqs 17y ago

The problem of Wikileaks is that it is centralised and, therefore, is vulnerable. Freenet offers a much more resilient approach. It is true that Freenet is not yet easy enough, but it is just a java application which almost anyone can run. Of course, writing wikileaks.org on the browser bar is easier and faster than installing Freenet, but it puts lives in danger. By the way, there is a wikileaks mirror on Freenet. It might be better to do the other way round, wikileaks should be a mirror of the freesite. http://freenetproject.org/ http://freenetproject.org/ update: of course, the lives in danger are those of the editors of wikileaks.

kierank 17y ago
How do you know it's centralised?
- pyre 17y ago
  It has a centralized structure. There is a hierarchy of responsibility, etc. There is an 'entity' to attack, whether it's the servers, or the editors/leaders/etc. Which is different from something that is truly distributed where each person is -- for all intents and purposes -- equal to anyone else in the group.
  - pqs 17y ago
    That's it. If the server is down, goodbye wikileaks. If the bank accounts are seized, goodbye wikileaks. If the leaders are imprisoned, good bye wikileaks. Freenet offers a more resilient architecture.
    - ig1 17y ago
      But that's like saying you can secure a computer by sealing it an concrete box and burying it under the ocean. Wikileaks triages the data, pushes it out to the media, maintains physical drop-boxes across multiple continents, and much more. All of which requires people doing real work, the storage of data is a tiny part of the problem. And even for the storage part freenet isn't a real solution. How many journalists do you know who use freenet ? - pushing data into the public domain is useless if only a tiny handful of people have access to it.
    - kierank 17y ago
      They don't just have one server in one location. They're not stupid.
      - pqs 16y ago
        Ok, then they have 10 servers on 10 locations. That's not resilient enough.

SamAtt 17y ago

I've recently read a good book that I think is insightful here. It was written by a Bush Administration official and is called "How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama is Inviting the Next Attack." No matter how you feel about the obvious pro-Bush slant this book is worth reading for two reasons... 1. The author actually spent time talking to the CIA people who carry out Ops. He got to ask them "why do you do this?" and "why does this work?" 2. The information shared wasn't available until the Obama administration declassified it. So it gives an unprecedented look into how intelligence agencies work and how much of their work is simply psychological. After reading the book my opinion is they're screwing with Wikileaks. Again, the real expertise the CIA has built up over the years is in how to get people to think what the CIA wants them to think. In this case I believe they want this editor to think he's being spied on at every turn. Increased paranoia, especially on someone who is already prone to it, will eventually drive a person over the edge. As this post shows his instinct is to fight back in public meaning the more paranoid they can make him the more likely it is he'll start ranting in public and (they hope) discredit himself.

lotharbot 17y ago
One consequence of the CIA making him think he's being spied on at every turn is making him think he's on to something big. This allows the CIA -- or other intelligence agencies -- to feed him doctored or fake information, thereby destroying his credibility. I think it's highly likely the upcoming video of civilians being killed is actually a setup to discredit the wikileaks guys.
jacobolus 17y ago
Except that the author of said book is totally full of shit, and his book has been ripped to shreds: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/03/29/100329crbo_books_mayer http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/03/29/10032...
- ja2ke 17y ago
  Ugh sorry, I just accidentally downvoted this while trying to upvote it. Sorry again. Thanks for the link!

dailo10 17y ago

Did anyone else draw a parallel to the current Internet censorship in China? There are differences of course, but they are both instances in which the government feels threatened by the power of information that the Internet gives the individual.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
anigbrowl 17y ago
No. Every government and large organization has secrets; a small number are legitimate, a larger number are maintained for reasons of venality, to hide incompetence and so forth. The US has a very open society, notwithstanding its various flaws. China takes a different approach. Not only does its government obscure its own workings from its population, it seeks to cut them off from ideas which differ substantively from its philosophy of governance. I'm not sure that the intent of this is necessarily evil; to mind it's more like an extreme case of paternalism. The Chinese rulers may figure that untrammeled democracy in china would quickly degenerate into mob politics followed civil or externally directed war. On the one hand I find such an attitude most disagreeable and the tactics employed to that end almost comical; on the other hand, the country went through a painful spasm of mob politics during Mao's cultural revolution relatively recently, and it's understandable if they have no desire to repeat the experience. Whatever the reasons, Chinese society predates even western civilization, is historically somewhat more homogenous and also somewhat authoritarian. The long-term direction of such a society changes slowly.
- lenley 17y ago
  Let's not forget that there have been numerous revolutions within American society that made representative government more representative of the actual population of United States citizens. It's hard to evaluate the progression of democracy over time when comparing such vastly different societies as you have mentioned...also we should not use the U.S. example as some sort of normalized index... Not saying you were doing that, just throwing it out there.
17y ago

caffeine 17y ago

I want to help them out by writing software, but I live in a CIA-infested country (the UK) and these reports make me genuinely afraid of reaching out. While I greatly admire their courage and respect their cause, I'm not really brave enough to sacrifice myself for the greater good.

andrewcooke 17y ago
so the intimidation worked.
- caffeine 17y ago
  Yes.
  - fdschoeneman 17y ago
    One thing I've noticed about cowards is that they make sure to pick fights with people, and organizations, such as the CIA, the United States, (or some other western, liberal government), who they know will never really do them much harm. You want to make a stand? Send a donation to that Danish cartoonist guy who draws pictures of Allah doing stupid shit. You may be a coward, but I'm sure you're enough of a man to at least send an anonymous check.
ErrantX 17y ago
I've reached out as number of times to them and never had a reply... which kinda sucks
- jonknee 17y ago
  Maybe they were too worried about the CIA volunteering. I'm sure you're not a spook, but they don't know that.
- Vivtek 17y ago
  Yeah, same here. I'd guess they have no end of volunteers, probably about 0.05% of whom actually end up panning out.

tbrownaw 17y ago

"We freely admit to doing illegal stuff, and the government needs to stop trying to figure out what we're up to." Yeah, that makes sense...

madair 17y ago
Legal != Moral
- jackfoxy 17y ago
  Moral != (Legal != Moral)
  - rntz 17y ago
    Moral != 1?
    - pohl 17y ago
      I think that's a boolean value on the right: Moral != true. Does this mean Legal == false?
      - techiferous 17y ago
        In Ruby, strings evaluate to true, so that would be Moral != "Moral"
cmelbye 17y ago
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves. -- Henry David Thoreau
- tokenadult 17y ago
  That's easy for Thoreau to say when he lives alone in the woods. And that peaceful place in the woods was only his to live in because earlier English-speaking settlers in North America had gained that land from the aboriginal inhabitants.

nihilocrat 17y ago

If they supposedly have the video, why don't they just release it?

breck 17y ago
It's a fundraising campaign. They're not releasing it because they're trying to raise money and are building the hype. Read the article. Pretty disingenuous if you ask me.
ErrantX 17y ago
From the article: Some of the new interest is related to a film exposing a U.S. massacre we will release at the U.S. National Press Club on April 5 Personally I'm willing, for the moment, to take on faith everything posted so far (and that they have a video of some kind) - we'll see what happens April 5th.
- nihilocrat 17y ago
  I'm okay with waiting, but I'm just wondering why a site that's about leaking things is holding a carrot in front of us. I have a strange feeling that the video is not as juicy as we're lead to believe, and it's just a publicity stunt, which is why I'm posing the question to HN.
  - lallysingh 17y ago
    The submitter can request Wikileaks to hold onto a document until a specific date.
    - DougBTX 17y ago
      Clearly we need a WikileaksWikileaks
      - p0ppe 17y ago
        Such as http://www.wikileak.org/ http://www.wikileak.org/ ?

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

I've got some very mixed feelings about this. On one hand, the more open the society is the better it is for everybody. Wikileaks performs an impressive and valuable service by allowing a place for information to get published. On the other hand, even in a perfect world, hell if everything should be out in the open for everyone. There are lots of examples, going back as far in history as you'd like, of state secrets serving a necessary and important role. Even averting war. So my question to the wikileaks folks is this: where's the line? Would you publish anything, and the more secret the better? Or is there some kind of rule you use? Would you publish nuclear launch codes? The identities of spies in countries that would execute them for it? There is way, way, way too much secrecy in the world, especially among U.S. Agencies. They classify anything they want, and the biggest reason is political CYA. Having said that, I can't give carte blanche to Wikileaks either. Before I support them, I need to know what standards they have. Even more serious, this isn't bean bag, guys. A country pays a few billion to keep something secret and you blow the whistle? You might want to make sure your life insurance is up to date. So is wikileaks there for the leaks? Or there for the public? I don't think the two goals are the same thing.

kljhgfvgbn 17y ago
Simple solution, the penalty for an official classifying something as secret because it was illegal, or they were doing a deal for a supplier or they were covering their butts could be the same as that for revealing a real secret.
ytinas 17y ago
>Would you publish nuclear launch codes? Afaik, wikileaks has never been about publishing launch codes. It's about revealing cover ups and there should be no government cover ups. If they are trying to hide something they've done then it's probably because it's illegal.
- Estragon 17y ago
  IOW, if you're not doing anything wrong, you can't have anything to hide? :-)

krschultz 17y ago

Alright, has anyone actually read some of these documents. Check out the US'govt report about WikiLeaks posted on WikiLeaks. http://file.wikileaks.org/file/us-intel-wikileaks.pdf http://file.wikileaks.org/file/us-intel-wikileaks.pdf Am I the only one that after reading it agrees with the government? Specifically WikiLeaks posted classified documents showing troop equipment allocation and anti-IED jamming equipment specs. What possible purpose does this serve? There is nothing embarrassing/illegal about what our troops are carrying and how they are fighting IEDs, but there is a lot of extremely valuable intel for the enemy in those documents. Honestly the guys at WikiLeaks are lucky as hell they live in a country where they are not strung up for treason already. You would not be seeing Tweets from these guys in many parts of the world. Frankly I don't WANT to help WikiLeaks. If you are endangering my friends actually deployed, what is the purpose of leaking this stuff? To show how good your sources are? So the guys running WikiLeaks value their journalism cred and their own ego over the lives of people actually relying on IED jammers to work?