6 ms·

Wikileaks website to be abandoned

98 points by zitterbewegung 16y ago

swombat 16y ago
I don't know what exactly is going on there, whether it's a bankruptcy or something else, but whatever it is is not being particularly well handled. Shambles, really.
- radu_floricica 16y ago
  Shambles? At this point the site is up, and it seems like they're working on building a solid base in Iceland, starting with pretty good political and legal support. All things considered, as long as one year from now they're still in business I'd say it's an impressive achievement.
fleitz 16y ago
With the turf wikileaks is treading on, does some authentication code really confirm that this is not a counter intelligence op? I'm not saying that any of these things are untrue, it's just that there would be some very valid reasons for wanting to keep the details of the operation opaque. (eg. paying in cash, etc) When you piss of the US National Security apparatus to that degree there is going to be some blow back. Yes, ideally they'd want to put him behind bars in a supermax, like other political prisoners, but he's fairly high profile and has a large amount of public support. You'd definitely want to kill the crusader for freedom aspect of his media image and promote an in it for himself persona. A hit piece in mainstream media is going to give him a better platform and have absolutely no effect on anyone with a clue. The spooks know this so they aren't going to do something like that. This is super effective, cryptome is legit as far as hackers and others that would contribute to his cause. This isn't a money issue it's a technical expertise issue. No one is going to join wikileaks for the money. Yes, money will help buy servers, but it's more about the technical expertise required for the people you're pissing off not to be able to build a solid case. Wikileaks itself has nothing to fear from the axis of evil, but a lot to fear from the G8 (except Russia). They will never honour a chinese extradition request because Assange found a video of Chinese soldiers killing civilians. They will however put his ass right next to the shoe bomber for posting vids of army dudes doing what army dudes are trained to do. Yes, Assange may be running wikileaks to embezzle himself $50 grand a year, OR it could be that he's gone dark and doesn't have time to update the site because he's brushing up on his waterboarding technique with Maher Arar.
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  > Yes, Assange may be running wikileaks to embezzle himself $50 grand a year, OR it could be that he's gone dark and doesn't have time to update the site because he's brushing up on his waterboarding technique with Maher Arar. You can't blame people for being suspicious. Humanity has proven time and time again that when there is a reason to suspect somebody absconded with large sums of money, they probably did. I have no opinion on the matter, but what could make a more effective cover story for vanishing than a believable 'Big Brother wanted to find me'?
  - ultra-nihilist 16y ago
    You make a good point. Sure Assange is self-aggrandizing. Some may even call him flamboyant, but is that such a bad thing for wikileaks? I recall similar criticism of Jimmy Wales. Wales acts like a rock star and he, like Assange, is a master fundraiser and aficionado of private jets. Despite mass defections of editors, and the enduring pompousness of Mr. Wales, Wikipedia is better than ever. Sometimes a greasy-haired, eccentric diva is the best person to represent your cause.
    - ErrantX 16y ago
      > but is that such a bad thing for wikileaks? Honestly, yes. Because in a perfect world Wikileaks has minimal editorial, no political bias and no agenda. But Assange does very much have those things. The reason Wikipedia is good is because the community decision process is very strong (mostly through being slow and laborious); they, obviously, have a lot of respect for Wales but he can't influence things dramatically without being called on it (look at the fuss over the commons porn images). Wikileaks doesn't have that sort of critical buffer of individuals (from what I have gathered about his personality Assange doesn't strike me as someone who would take any criticism at all). Sure there are volunteers but from my understanding it all works through Assange.
      - Rod 16y ago
        "Because in a perfect world Wikileaks has minimal editorial, no political bias and no agenda." Why? Where's the argumentation? Your opinion is not fact, mister.
avar 16y ago
This is getting ridiculous. Why doesn't Wikileaks just host all their content in a Git repository and use GPG to sign their releases? Then it would be impossible to take down the site, and anyone could easily spin up a mirror. Instead there's one monolithic distribution site which isn't decoupled from their submission network. The site is frequently down during a fundraiser, and due to how they run it other people can't easily directly contribute resources to run mirrors of the site. I'm beginning to think that Wikileaks is not as interested in actually getting leaks out as it is furthering Julian Assange's personal indispensability.
- adulau 16y ago
  I really share this feeling especially during the past 7 months while the fund-raising was ongoing. Now, to be more practical and maybe start an implementation of a distributed Wikileaks. There are two processes : the submission process and the distribution process. I think the distribution process is easy with Git or any distributed VCS. The submission process is more tricky as this is involving a human/social process to merge content into the distribution "branch". The submission process could be "à la" HN where there is a way to up/down vote a submission. When the submission is reaching a defined level, the submission is released for distribution. In this is case, the submission network is still centralized but the distribution part is really decentralized. For submission process decentralization, distributed ticketing (e.g. http://ditz.rubyforge.org/ http://ditz.rubyforge.org/ ) could be used to show status of a submission within a same git repository but showing/merging only submission reaching a level in its ticket. Just an idea... Update : my humble comment is just on some technical aspect. The social/legal/human aspect of Wikileaks is something much more complex...
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - furyg3 16y ago
    Submission for leaks (usually) also involves some sort of authentication, however. And that authentication needs to be kept confidential. The result is that there's no way around a 'trusted' provider who signs releases, and that will inherently be a personality like Assange. Simply relying on a reddit-style submission method would lead to a worse form of reddit. Currently you can evaluate whether or not you 'trust' content submitted to reddit by looking at the site hosting it (is the content from the NYT or a random blog?). For a wikileaks-reddit, all submissions would have to be anonymous, and you'd have no idea what is a real leak or not.
stefanp 16y ago
Guys, wikileaks is basically fighting for survival against the US government, among others. Can we really suggest they "just" use this or that, or complain that they're not handling thing so well ? They are basically trying to exist in a space that's almost impossible for most countries to exist in. We're not talking about your average (or even uniquely scalable) startup here. Seriously, do you have any doubt that anyone involved in this could end up secretly detained for years ? Assange is taking huge personal risks here, so yeah, it is about him, to a very large extent.
- Ardit20 16y ago
  I upvoted you, but shouldn't this be a reply comment rather than a comment on its own.
  - Ardit20 16y ago
    I meant a reply to one of the comments above. It felt so when I read it much earlier, but never mind.
- Kadin 16y ago
  That may be true, but it's not as though Wikileaks has been particularly well-managed, or done much to decrease their (by which I mean 'his') exposure. There has been a lot of what appears to be, to put it bluntly, showboating, intentional or otherwise. I can't say whether it stems from a desire for celebrity on Assange's part, which would be totally incompatible with the mission of a site like WL, or if it's unintentional and simply the result of accidental mismanagement. But either way I don't think it bodes well for the future of the site. That said, I don't think that Assange or Wikileaks in general are critical. If nothing else, he proved that there is material out there waiting to be released. The concept, at least in broad strokes, is still sound; it was the execution that was flawed. I think there is an open opportunity right now for someone to step in and do right -- less politically, less bombastically, more securely and more decentralized -- what WL aimed to do.
- Volscio 16y ago
  Just as a counter-point, the posts to Cryptome from Wikileaks "insiders" all are negative towards Assange. It sounds, if those posts are true, that not even the Wikileaks folks approve of him.
msy 16y ago
And this comes about 2 months after it's declared a national security threat by the Pentagon. How strange.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
jasonkester 16y ago
Anybody care to share some context for this article? It doesn't give any background into what wikileaks is and why it is being abandoned. It reads like somebody's personal email. I'm sure there's an interesting story behind this, but the article doesn't attempt to provide it.
- michael_dorfman 16y ago
  What Wikileaks is? How have you managed to avoid hearing about it, and its struggles so long? Here's a place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks
  - jasonkester 16y ago
    Funny, I'm actually amazed that so many people keep up on this sort of thing. I wouldn't know where to begin. I've been on the road the last several years, so unless it concerns rock climbing or surfing, or is something that you'd talk about with fellow travelers, it usually doesn't make it onto my radar. Evidently there was some sort of economic downturn recently. Missed that too :). HN is the only exception, since it keeps me up on the tech side of things.
    - michael_dorfman 16y ago
      If that's the case, you may want to try Googling the references you don't catch, before asking the folks here to explain further.
      - jasonkester 16y ago
        Why would it make a difference why I hadn't heard of this company? Googling the site didn't help, nor did visiting the site itself, so I asked here. Seems like a reasonable thing to do. In general, I think that a story on the front page of HN should stand on its own, without the need to go off and do any research to figure out what it's about. This story doesn't even attempt to give any background about its subject matter, so it fails that test.
oscilloscope 16y ago
This article's been discredited by Wikileaks on twitter: http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/17646287388 http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/17646287388 Found on reddit by the way =P
- igravious 16y ago
  Hard to know who or what to believe. I thought that crytome was was reliable. Certainly the some security state apparatus is turning the screw. It'd be nice to know the whole story.
- rsingel 16y ago
  Actually, check the time stamps. Wikileaks disputed the first 8, but not this one. No word from Wikileaks on this so far.
  - mischa_u 16y ago
    There it is: "WikiLeaks will NOT be abandoned. Don't listen to disinfo being spread! We'll issue clarifications soon. Should've done earlier." http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/18289990888 http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/18289990888
blots 16y ago
Cryptome seems to dislike Wikileaks for some reason, at least that's the impression I got. Never tried to dig into it though.
- philwelch 16y ago
  I think the word is "rivalry".
rdl 16y ago
I would love to participate in an open, transparent, and fair equivalent to wikileaks. Currently, cryptome actually does a 99% job of this. Tools, vs. Services, and definitely in preference to individual personalities as gatekeepers!
ErrantX 16y ago
IIRC Cryptome has "history" with Wikileaks (I believe they were pretty fed up of WL's profile of The Whistleblower site despite being the new kid on the block compared to Cryptome). Bear this in mind when reading. With that said; I much prefer Cryptome to WL - they do consistently publish stuff! Usually without to much editorializing. And even if this is all just made up (a possibility) it does highlight some of the concerns over WL. Assange is becoming a concerning character, where is the money going, the website does seem to be stagnating etc.
wyclif 16y ago
WikiLeaks will not be abandoned: http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/18289990888 http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/18289990888
dmn001 16y ago
Wow, crazy stuff. I hope there will be a new, and possibly better website to replace it.

I don't know what exactly is going on there, whether it's a bankruptcy or something else, but whatever it is is not being particularly well handled. Shambles, really.

radu_floricica 16y ago
Shambles? At this point the site is up, and it seems like they're working on building a solid base in Iceland, starting with pretty good political and legal support. All things considered, as long as one year from now they're still in business I'd say it's an impressive achievement.

fleitz 16y ago

With the turf wikileaks is treading on, does some authentication code really confirm that this is not a counter intelligence op? I'm not saying that any of these things are untrue, it's just that there would be some very valid reasons for wanting to keep the details of the operation opaque. (eg. paying in cash, etc) When you piss of the US National Security apparatus to that degree there is going to be some blow back. Yes, ideally they'd want to put him behind bars in a supermax, like other political prisoners, but he's fairly high profile and has a large amount of public support. You'd definitely want to kill the crusader for freedom aspect of his media image and promote an in it for himself persona. A hit piece in mainstream media is going to give him a better platform and have absolutely no effect on anyone with a clue. The spooks know this so they aren't going to do something like that. This is super effective, cryptome is legit as far as hackers and others that would contribute to his cause. This isn't a money issue it's a technical expertise issue. No one is going to join wikileaks for the money. Yes, money will help buy servers, but it's more about the technical expertise required for the people you're pissing off not to be able to build a solid case. Wikileaks itself has nothing to fear from the axis of evil, but a lot to fear from the G8 (except Russia). They will never honour a chinese extradition request because Assange found a video of Chinese soldiers killing civilians. They will however put his ass right next to the shoe bomber for posting vids of army dudes doing what army dudes are trained to do. Yes, Assange may be running wikileaks to embezzle himself $50 grand a year, OR it could be that he's gone dark and doesn't have time to update the site because he's brushing up on his waterboarding technique with Maher Arar.

sliverstorm 16y ago
> Yes, Assange may be running wikileaks to embezzle himself $50 grand a year, OR it could be that he's gone dark and doesn't have time to update the site because he's brushing up on his waterboarding technique with Maher Arar. You can't blame people for being suspicious. Humanity has proven time and time again that when there is a reason to suspect somebody absconded with large sums of money, they probably did. I have no opinion on the matter, but what could make a more effective cover story for vanishing than a believable 'Big Brother wanted to find me'?
- ultra-nihilist 16y ago
  You make a good point. Sure Assange is self-aggrandizing. Some may even call him flamboyant, but is that such a bad thing for wikileaks? I recall similar criticism of Jimmy Wales. Wales acts like a rock star and he, like Assange, is a master fundraiser and aficionado of private jets. Despite mass defections of editors, and the enduring pompousness of Mr. Wales, Wikipedia is better than ever. Sometimes a greasy-haired, eccentric diva is the best person to represent your cause.
  - ErrantX 16y ago
    > but is that such a bad thing for wikileaks? Honestly, yes. Because in a perfect world Wikileaks has minimal editorial, no political bias and no agenda. But Assange does very much have those things. The reason Wikipedia is good is because the community decision process is very strong (mostly through being slow and laborious); they, obviously, have a lot of respect for Wales but he can't influence things dramatically without being called on it (look at the fuss over the commons porn images). Wikileaks doesn't have that sort of critical buffer of individuals (from what I have gathered about his personality Assange doesn't strike me as someone who would take any criticism at all). Sure there are volunteers but from my understanding it all works through Assange.
    - Rod 16y ago
      "Because in a perfect world Wikileaks has minimal editorial, no political bias and no agenda." Why? Where's the argumentation? Your opinion is not fact, mister.

avar 16y ago

This is getting ridiculous. Why doesn't Wikileaks just host all their content in a Git repository and use GPG to sign their releases? Then it would be impossible to take down the site, and anyone could easily spin up a mirror. Instead there's one monolithic distribution site which isn't decoupled from their submission network. The site is frequently down during a fundraiser, and due to how they run it other people can't easily directly contribute resources to run mirrors of the site. I'm beginning to think that Wikileaks is not as interested in actually getting leaks out as it is furthering Julian Assange's personal indispensability.

adulau 16y ago
I really share this feeling especially during the past 7 months while the fund-raising was ongoing. Now, to be more practical and maybe start an implementation of a distributed Wikileaks. There are two processes : the submission process and the distribution process. I think the distribution process is easy with Git or any distributed VCS. The submission process is more tricky as this is involving a human/social process to merge content into the distribution "branch". The submission process could be "à la" HN where there is a way to up/down vote a submission. When the submission is reaching a defined level, the submission is released for distribution. In this is case, the submission network is still centralized but the distribution part is really decentralized. For submission process decentralization, distributed ticketing (e.g. http://ditz.rubyforge.org/ http://ditz.rubyforge.org/ ) could be used to show status of a submission within a same git repository but showing/merging only submission reaching a level in its ticket. Just an idea... Update : my humble comment is just on some technical aspect. The social/legal/human aspect of Wikileaks is something much more complex...
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- furyg3 16y ago
  Submission for leaks (usually) also involves some sort of authentication, however. And that authentication needs to be kept confidential. The result is that there's no way around a 'trusted' provider who signs releases, and that will inherently be a personality like Assange. Simply relying on a reddit-style submission method would lead to a worse form of reddit. Currently you can evaluate whether or not you 'trust' content submitted to reddit by looking at the site hosting it (is the content from the NYT or a random blog?). For a wikileaks-reddit, all submissions would have to be anonymous, and you'd have no idea what is a real leak or not.

stefanp 16y ago

Guys, wikileaks is basically fighting for survival against the US government, among others. Can we really suggest they "just" use this or that, or complain that they're not handling thing so well ? They are basically trying to exist in a space that's almost impossible for most countries to exist in. We're not talking about your average (or even uniquely scalable) startup here. Seriously, do you have any doubt that anyone involved in this could end up secretly detained for years ? Assange is taking huge personal risks here, so yeah, it is about him, to a very large extent.

Ardit20 16y ago
I upvoted you, but shouldn't this be a reply comment rather than a comment on its own.
- Ardit20 16y ago
  I meant a reply to one of the comments above. It felt so when I read it much earlier, but never mind.
Kadin 16y ago
That may be true, but it's not as though Wikileaks has been particularly well-managed, or done much to decrease their (by which I mean 'his') exposure. There has been a lot of what appears to be, to put it bluntly, showboating, intentional or otherwise. I can't say whether it stems from a desire for celebrity on Assange's part, which would be totally incompatible with the mission of a site like WL, or if it's unintentional and simply the result of accidental mismanagement. But either way I don't think it bodes well for the future of the site. That said, I don't think that Assange or Wikileaks in general are critical. If nothing else, he proved that there is material out there waiting to be released. The concept, at least in broad strokes, is still sound; it was the execution that was flawed. I think there is an open opportunity right now for someone to step in and do right -- less politically, less bombastically, more securely and more decentralized -- what WL aimed to do.
Volscio 16y ago
Just as a counter-point, the posts to Cryptome from Wikileaks "insiders" all are negative towards Assange. It sounds, if those posts are true, that not even the Wikileaks folks approve of him.

msy 16y ago

And this comes about 2 months after it's declared a national security threat by the Pentagon. How strange.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

jasonkester 16y ago

Anybody care to share some context for this article? It doesn't give any background into what wikileaks is and why it is being abandoned. It reads like somebody's personal email. I'm sure there's an interesting story behind this, but the article doesn't attempt to provide it.

michael_dorfman 16y ago
What Wikileaks is? How have you managed to avoid hearing about it, and its struggles so long? Here's a place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks
- jasonkester 16y ago
  Funny, I'm actually amazed that so many people keep up on this sort of thing. I wouldn't know where to begin. I've been on the road the last several years, so unless it concerns rock climbing or surfing, or is something that you'd talk about with fellow travelers, it usually doesn't make it onto my radar. Evidently there was some sort of economic downturn recently. Missed that too :). HN is the only exception, since it keeps me up on the tech side of things.
  - michael_dorfman 16y ago
    If that's the case, you may want to try Googling the references you don't catch, before asking the folks here to explain further.
    - jasonkester 16y ago
      Why would it make a difference why I hadn't heard of this company? Googling the site didn't help, nor did visiting the site itself, so I asked here. Seems like a reasonable thing to do. In general, I think that a story on the front page of HN should stand on its own, without the need to go off and do any research to figure out what it's about. This story doesn't even attempt to give any background about its subject matter, so it fails that test.

oscilloscope 16y ago

This article's been discredited by Wikileaks on twitter: http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/17646287388 http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/17646287388 Found on reddit by the way =P

igravious 16y ago
Hard to know who or what to believe. I thought that crytome was was reliable. Certainly the some security state apparatus is turning the screw. It'd be nice to know the whole story.
rsingel 16y ago
Actually, check the time stamps. Wikileaks disputed the first 8, but not this one. No word from Wikileaks on this so far.
- mischa_u 16y ago
  There it is: "WikiLeaks will NOT be abandoned. Don't listen to disinfo being spread! We'll issue clarifications soon. Should've done earlier." http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/18289990888 http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/18289990888

blots 16y ago

Cryptome seems to dislike Wikileaks for some reason, at least that's the impression I got. Never tried to dig into it though.

philwelch 16y ago
I think the word is "rivalry".

rdl 16y ago

I would love to participate in an open, transparent, and fair equivalent to wikileaks. Currently, cryptome actually does a 99% job of this. Tools, vs. Services, and definitely in preference to individual personalities as gatekeepers!

ErrantX 16y ago

IIRC Cryptome has "history" with Wikileaks (I believe they were pretty fed up of WL's profile of The Whistleblower site despite being the new kid on the block compared to Cryptome). Bear this in mind when reading. With that said; I much prefer Cryptome to WL - they do consistently publish stuff! Usually without to much editorializing. And even if this is all just made up (a possibility) it does highlight some of the concerns over WL. Assange is becoming a concerning character, where is the money going, the website does seem to be stagnating etc.

wyclif 16y ago

WikiLeaks will not be abandoned: http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/18289990888 http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/18289990888

dmn001 16y ago

Wow, crazy stuff. I hope there will be a new, and possibly better website to replace it.