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WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious ‘Insurance’ File
- dlytle 16y agoIt feels like I'm watching someone try to act out the part of a character in a spy novel. Big encrypted files called Insurance, twittering about being followed by government agents, sensationalizing the things they post... I think they have good reasons for what they're doing (or at least good intentions), and I do like the concept behind WikiLeaks. I just think they're getting a bit caught up in the whole drama/mystique, and their credibility and ethical standing is suffering as a result, which could be dangerous for the "open leak repository" movement.
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- riffer 16y agoA couple of years ago Julian and his colleagues released information that swung the national election in Kenya. This must have gotten the attention of every government with something to hide (all of them). Since then, he claims to have released more confidential information than the rest of the worldwide media. Combined. The stakes are enormous. And the reality is that that puts a target on your back. Go Julian, go.
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- riffer 16y agoPlease produce a statement that I made in which I pretend he's a journalist holding a neutral point of view.
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- faramarz 16y agoI have to agree with you. I think if there ever is a downfall to the Wikileak initiative, it will be due to the gloating and the drama they perpetuate. Julian and his gang need to stop with the commentary and just release the documents. leave the opinions to be formed by the people. The twitter account is going to come back and bite them in the ass if they keep pushing commentary out. I fully support the need for an organisation like this and having seen multiple interviews of Julian, I have to say he's the right character to lead this mission.
- Rod 16y ago"Leave the opinions to be formed by the people." Yes, because the average American surely has the time to read 100s of classified documents. The goal of the release is to attain reform, and if drama stokes discussion and catalyzes reform, so be it. What's the problem with drama exactly? The more notorious Assange gets, the harder it will be for the powers that be to get rid of him. Do you honestly think that drama leads to the downfall of media? Do you remember CNN, Fox, NYTimes in early 2003, when they all claimed that Iraq had WMD? Why do they still have credibility? They do because media has become part of the enterntainment industry, which makes it obvious why WL is necessary.
- philwelch 16y agoIt seems self-defeating to argue there's a shortage of people who are capable of dramatizing leaked information on the one hand, while on the other hand arguing that the entire news industry is solely interested in entertainment.
- ahn 16y ago>It feels like I'm watching someone try to act out the part of a character in a spy novel. In that case we should be able to figure out his key and decrypt the file. The key in the spy novels is always something you feel like you should have seen coming, something predictable.
- Confusion 16y agoIt feels like I'm watching someone try to act out the part of a character in a spy novel. It feels more like I'm watching someone forced to act out that part. Those novels me be dramatized, but many are still based on the way things actually happen. Ian Flemming couldn't have kept that out if he wanted to, because he simply knew. sensationalizing the things they post You can't sensationalize something on your own.
- vaksel 16y agoit's probably just a video of the wikileaks staff offering the person a job.
- mishmash 16y agoHmm posted this earlier and it got no love. :( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1562651 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1562651
- NathanKP 16y agoIs anyone else getting just a little bit sick of WikiLeaks? The basic concept of providing transparency is good, but I think they are taking things way too far. I hadn't even thought of the issue of the Taliban being able to read the records themselves to find out who the informants are. Just because something is a secret doesn't mean it has to be exposed, and I think that is the fundamental problem with Wikileaks. Some things do more harm out in the open than they would locked away.
- riffer 16y agoWhat Julian appears to me to be trying to do is to reduce the ability of large bureaucratic militarized organizations to dominate innocent individuals. Secrets exist for many purposes, but their primary impact on history is to permit groups of people to organize in order to persecute other less organized groups of people. Ultimately, it was the combination of industrialization and secrets that made it possible for nation states to directly the cause the death of 160 million people in the 20th century. In these situations, the ability of individuals to influence the course of events is essentially nil. That's why you and I have not stopped the millions of murders in Darfur, the same as our parents did not stop them in Rwanda 17 years ago, and so on. In this context, it really is not reasonable to argue that we would all be much safer if nobody was revealing the secrets of those who have too many secrets.
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- Alex3917 16y ago"War is a failure of the imagination." In an ideal world Wikileaks wouldn't be necessary, but in the world we have it helps ameliorate the damage caused by our cognitive biases. Also, someone should really make Chris Hedges' book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning into a movie.
- philwelch 16y agoSixty to seventy years ago, the following information was kept secret by Western governments: -How to build an atom bomb -How to build effective radar systems to detect incoming bombers -The fact that German and Japanese encryption codes had been compromised -The US Navy's awareness of Japan's intention to attack Midway Island -The fact that Patton was actually removed from command, and that his travels around Italy and north Africa were a ruse to misdirect German defenses away from Normandy Need I go on? If some idealist decided to leak these secrets, a lot more innocent individuals would be dominated by certain nation states. State secrets are no different from any other power of the state--they can be used for good or for ill, and it's careful to ensure they're used for good, but it's foolish and suicidal to try and keep them from being used at all.
- maika 16y agoBy my understanding there are around 12401769434657526912139264 possibilities, therefore to calculate the time taken in days to brute force a password would be the application of the following formula: t = n / m / 86400 / P n: search space (no of possible passwords) m: amount of random passwords that can be tested a second 86400: 60*60*24 (converts units to days) P: parallelism (number of crackers) Let n = 12401769434657526912139264 m = 100 P = 1,000,000 It would only take 143 days to be successful. Is this correct? Second question, how do we carve up the search space and distribute this to the internet? Edit: n is generated by limiting the key to be a composition of alphanumeric and related characters. Could be wrong.
- mishmash 16y agoAccording to Schneier[1] n should be closer to ~2600000000000000000000000000000000000000. For each single available core, m would be smaller, say 20 wouldn't it? On the other side, consider 8 or more cores a box for the NSA by 500,000 boxes (wildly conservative guess??) for about P = 4,000,000?? NSA probably has much more compute power than this, though: "With supercomputers measured by the acre and estimated $70 million annual electricity bills for its headquarters, the agency has begun browning out, which is the reason for locating its new data centers in Utah and Texas."[2] 1 - http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/new_attack_on_a.html http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/new_attack_on_... 2 - http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/10/james_bamford_o.html http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/10/james_bamford_...
- maika 16y agoYeah n would be bigger, but if you limit the key to a composition of characters (alphabet, letters, funky characters %^&*, etc), would that drastically reduce the search space?
- mishmash 16y agoOh good point. Would it then be 95 printable ASCII characters by 32 (for the effective key size in bytes)? If so, that gives a laughably large number: 1937114844585011541643853683619338993862294591963291168212890625 Another question, and I'm way over my head here (also time for bed), but considering this snippet below, is it possible the NSA or another group would have an undiscovered attack against it? "NSA was embroiled in some minor controversy concerning its involvement in the creation of the Data Encryption Standard (DES), a standard and public block cipher algorithm used by the U.S. government and banking community. During the development of DES by IBM in the 1970s, NSA recommended changes to some details of the design. There was suspicion that these changes had weakened the algorithm sufficiently to enable the agency to eavesdrop if required, including speculation that a critical component—the so-called S-boxes—had been altered to insert a "backdoor" and that the reduction in key length might have made it feasible for NSA to discover DES keys using massive computing power. It has since been observed that the S-boxes in DES are particularly resilient against differential cryptanalysis, a technique which was not publicly discovered until the late 1980s, but which was known to the IBM DES team. The United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reviewed NSA's involvement, and concluded that while the agency had provided some assistance, it had not tampered with the design.[11][12] In late 2009 NSA declassified information stating that NSA worked closely with IBM to strengthen the algorithm against all except brute force attacks and to strengthen substitution tables, called S-boxes. Conversely, NSA tried to convince IBM to reduce the length of the key from 64 to 48 bits. Ultimately they compromised on a 56-bit key.[13]" Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency
- novon 16y agoAll institutions are corrupt.
- Qz 16y agoMullen was even more direct and said that WikiLeaks "might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier" Oh, and the government doesn't have that blood on their hands already? Brings to mind something about a pot and a kettle.