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WikiLeaks is struggling to stay online as millions of documents disappear
- Synaesthesia 4y agoThis website was dying already, ie. not being updated since Julian was imprisoned, but still a massive treasure trove for journalists and investigators. It is a very worrying sign of the times that it is vanishing, as the state powers seem to be fighting back against democracy and independent journalism.
- seydor 4y agoDemocracy is the State. Democracy however does not equal freedom EDIT: i mean individual freedom.
- mdp2021 4y agoWith "democracy" in «against democracy» the original poster clearly meant "that transparency that enables the decision and judgement of the People" (those conditions that allow the functioning of the empowerment of the People).
- lynx23 4y agoEven the most naive people learned that after COVID mandates.
- mdp2021 4y agoAnd the constructive point? First of all, of course Democracy has nothing to do with any supposed "absolute defense of freedom", because it is a system of attribution of power, involving coercion - because a fine line separates balance of interests ("politics") and actual coercion. So, of course, if one empowered inadequate individuals the rules will be absurd and damaging - and this has been actually happening, and it is not surprising at all to an etiologic analysis. But second, soon after Hammurabi started his reign in minus 1792 of the typical timescale, already since the framework established those many millennia ago power is limited - constitutionalism is very old. So, not only it is already well established that some will be empowered, it is also well established that they will not be fully empowered. There is no lesson that, in general, "power limits freedom": there is full evidence that the current systems need much more R&D. To note that, you already had e.g. gerrymandering, which is very graphic, or the failures in quality citizenship development - kind of the opposite of the hopeful depiction in "12 Angry Men" - which is very pervading.
- lynx23 4y ago> But perhaps the most frightening way in which the COVID-19 crisis could > undermine democracy is by reducing popular confidence in the democratic > model. https://harvardpolitics.com/a-last-stand-for-freedom-global-democracy-and-covid-19/ https://harvardpolitics.com/a-last-stand-for-freedom-global-...
- mdp2021 4y agoPreliminarily: the article in the Harvard Political Review seems to equate Democracy and Freedom, but that it is just a perspectual effect: it is substantially equating autocracies and _arbitrary_ limitation of freedom. (Which, in the context you propose, should be compared to "_clumsy_ limitation of freedom", plotting data in the two dimensions of malice and stupidity.) When the article mentions that risk of «reducing popular confidence in the democratic model», it clearly indicates it as an hysterical response, suggesting literally the possibility of «apparent [only] success» increase on the side of autocracies. The whole sub-context reinforces the evidence that Democracy requires, as a foundation, curbing the roots and risks of phenomena like hysterical responses - there is a systemic matter about the care for the roots enabling Democracy, a matter which the article notes in terms like those stating an «already declining state of global democracy». If there is a risk that some may think "ah but an iron fist would solve it" (oversimplifications, "silver bullets" - populism), then you have a problem, gravely impacting Democracy, that you have to solve through Education. The contextual opposite of the caused damage, of arbitrary measures, is not a "freedom to", but a "freedom from" - freedom from the absurd. This requires proper maintenance of the system. That requires proper information subsystems, with special regard to investigative journalism. That is to be free to live in a well working and fair system - a specific form of Freedom.
- t0bia_s 4y agoIt depends on definition of freedom. Are people in Africa free? Are they happy? Is you dependency on state and money a freedom? What about morale? Is it freedom to be narcissistic? Is it freedom to has millions different laws? Is it freedom to have imaginary choice of voting for someone who has money and someone who has even more money? Is it freedom to be forced to use platform that collects data about you? Is it freedom to live in society where fear drive politics?
- seydor 4y agoWe have pretty good definitions of freedom from the time of enlightenment on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_Man_and_of_the_Citizen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_M... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human... But we have failed to implement them. I think we need to admit that democracy worked well towards that goal in the 20th century but it has been set back with the help of technology in recent decades. The amount of surveillance and manipulation of the current world is astounding by historic standards and it is used against the individual. We should also not compare our democracies to failed mafia states or undeveloped ones, but to ourselves.
- pifm_guy 4y agoI'm kinda surprised efforts like this aren't more heavily sponsored by other countries. Like if you were Russia or Iran right now, paying a bit of money to keep wikileaks' servers running would seem like money well invested.
- Synaesthesia 4y agoWikileaks was going after any and all state actors, including Russia and Iran, nobody wants their dirty laundry aired.
- EdwardDiego 4y agoWhat did Wikileaks have on Russia? I've never heard of anything particularly juicy, and well, I'd go look it up, but... /looks at article
- thepangolino 4y agoSame as for any other country. Dirty laundry of all sorts: tales of corruption, collusion, etc. What makes it different is that Russia is expected to be like that. Not the US.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoNothing much. Being based in Western Europe and being run primarily by English speakers meant very few Russian leaks would get sent to Wikileaks.
- jddil 4y agoHow did this become the narrative? Wikileaks was started by the Russian secret service, so of course they wouldn't leak their own stuff. Assange was a useful idiot to them.
- boomboomsubban 4y ago... Source? My version is the easily verifiable truth, which is why it is the narrative.
- llanowarelves 4y agodemocracy is a threat to Our Democracy
- lamp987 4y ago#NotMyDemocracy
- ki_ 4y agowell. what if the public consists of 10% independent thinkers and 90% that follows whatever propaganda gets shoved through their eyes and ears. And if you can use your current power and money to create the most propaganda. Are people really voting? Or is the money/power that does the voting? And this is not some invented theory, if you question people why they believe what they believe, you'll discover quit fast that they dont know why they believe what they believe, except for, they were told so, by friends, tv, media, etc etc. It's easier to copy opinions (and be angry) than to establish your own.
- cdogl 4y agoThe definition of "democracy" is not subject to your broad, sweeping, unfalsifiable judgments about human nature and other peoples' apparent ignorance. (Presumably the author and reader are excluded from this, through some luck?)
- dalbasal 4y agoWhat is it subject to? .. or defined by? Democracy is a word with almost no consistent meaning or definition, yet everyone treats it as if it's clean and defined. Other than "communism is whatever the communist party does," what is democracy anyway?
- ben_w 4y ago"Democratic People's Republic of Korea" (that's North not South) comes to mind — even less genuine than clicking "I have read and agreed to the terms and conditions" on the average pre-GDPR EULA, but nevertheless perfectly illustrates the vagueness of the word. My own personal bugbear is when people say they want to "democratise" nouns and verbs, e.g. "democratise maths" or "democratise running" (both real examples) and yet there is no idea at all what that might mean. Votes? And if so, who and how and when?
- mrtksn 4y agoI think they lost quite a bit of public support when they selectively leaked documents during election time.
- kome 4y agoI guess they leaked what they had; leaks are not bipartisan
- input_sh 4y agoThat's just inaccurate. For example, they didn't even respond to Panama Papers leaker who approached them before he approached Süddeutsche Zeitung.
- kome 4y agono i remember it was more complex: https://www.dw.com/en/wikileaks-slams-panama-papers-trickle-down-strategy/a-19170435 https://www.dw.com/en/wikileaks-slams-panama-papers-trickle-... they wanted to give the public full access. and that's how wikileaks always worked. > "That is what I'd want to see with these 'Panama Papers.' They should be available to the general public in such a manner so everybody, not just the group of journalists working directly on the data, can search it," Hrafnsson added.
- input_sh 4y agoI'm not gonna say it's a lie because I don't know, but that's not the leaker's version of the story. > The impact is real: in addition to Süddeutsche Zeitung and ICIJ, and despite explicit claims to the contrary, several major media outlets did have editors review documents from the Panama Papers. They chose not to cover them. The sad truth is that among the most prominent and capable media organizations in the world there was not a single one interested in reporting on the story. Even Wikileaks didn’t answer its tip line repeatedly. https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/20160506-john-doe-statement/ https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/20160506-j... They had the opportunity to publish it in full, they didn't, leaker went to someone that had a different strategy in mind.
- anothernewdude 4y agoIt's not really. While they managed to make the news, and were the most prominent, they are hardly the most effective at providing leaks or whistle blowing (assuming you believed that was their purpose)
- coffeeblack 4y agoThe state powers as well as certain radicalized groups. Terrifying how easy it turned out to wash people’s brains.
- r721 4y ago"DDoSecrets Is the New WikiLeaks" (from https://newrepublic.com/article/163106/ddossecrets-new-wikileaks-julian-assange https://newrepublic.com/article/163106/ddossecrets-new-wikil... (2021)) UPD Another news story from 2022: https://therecord.media/how-ddosecrets-built-the-go-to-home-for-russian-leaks/ https://therecord.media/how-ddosecrets-built-the-go-to-home-...
- NKosmatos 4y agohttps://ddosecrets.com/wiki/Distributed_Denial_of_Secrets https://ddosecrets.com/wiki/Distributed_Denial_of_Secrets
- sdze 4y agohow stupid it is to use a common and known term to the public and inflate it with a completely different subject matter.
- foul 4y agoLike Wikileaks' name. There was not really much "wiki" in wikileaks.
- knowhy 4y ago> WikiLeaks originally used a "wiki" communal publication method, which ended by May 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Staff,_name_and_founding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Staff,_name_and_foun...
- foul 4y agoYeah, they installed mediawiki or something similar IIRC in the first years, but did they ever enabled public contributions through it? I recall the Assange committee have always tried to get the leaks through other means, the anonymous/encrypted version du jour of "send a letter to the newsroom".
- 4y ago
- coding123 4y agoso they released 10m docs and no one actually helped out by downloading them an republishing them
- Synaesthesia 4y agoThere certainly was a wave of publications when it first came out, and still many investigative reports can be found using wikileaks as a resource, particularly the diplomatic cable leaks.
- shp0ngle 4y agoSome things are really toxic to touch, like the democratic emails leaked (probably) by Russian state agents.
- kome 4y agowell, it was interesting stuff, proving how the primaries were heavy biased against Sanders https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/11/02/ex-dnc-chair-goes-at-the-clintons-alleging-hillarys-campaign-hijacked-dnc-during-primary-with-bernie-sanders/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/11/02/ex... I think, that overall, it was an interesting and meaningful leak. Not just "toxic".
- MallocVoidstar 4y agoIt was "toxic to touch" in that it was hacked material of an American political party, which you might not want to be redistributing publicly (such as hosting on a server) if you can't afford lawyers.
- hedora 4y agoIn the US, once a secret is leaked, it becomes public knowledge. The DNC could try to assert copyrights over the emails, but that would be admitting they are genuine, and unlikely to actually work.
- 4y ago
- ForHackernews 4y agoWhere are the torrents for this stuff?
- EGreg 4y agoWhy don't they just use IPFS? I have seen Wikipedia put on IPFS and become uncensorable: https://blog.ipfs.tech/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/ https://blog.ipfs.tech/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/ I have never understood why it's called "wiki" leaks... what is wiki about it?
- varjag 4y agoNothing. It was to get assangeleaks that whiff of collaborative spirit and openness (which was never the case).
- kreetx 4y agoAre you saying one couldn't leak documents on WikiLeaks if you wanted to?
- varjag 4y agoYes I am saying that. Assange wouldn't touch any leaks not aligning with his political preferences. https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-leaks-on-russian-government-during-u-s-presidential-campaign/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-l...
- hedora 4y agoAccording to that link, Wikileaks said they thought those documents were (1) published elsewhere, (2) not noteworthy and (3) unverifiable. When they were published elsewhere, no one cared, even though they related to Russia during a time when the US media was running all sorts of stories related to Russian corruption. I don’t see the problem with Wikileak’s behavior on that one.
- varjag 4y agoThere was not much noteworthy in cablegate, alas.
- 4y ago
- shp0ngle 4y agoThis is kind of end of an era. And because of geopolitics, there aren’t that many friends of Assange left in the west. Sad, I guess?
- 1337shadow 4y agoHackers use to fight against governmental corruption back in the days. Whereas nowadays, they cover up for them. What a great testimony about the decline of western democracy.
- krmboya 4y agoIt subjectively seems to me that upto the mid 2010s hacktivists were mostly against government power abuse, but nowadays they seem to be mostly against right-wing leaning targets
- hedora 4y agoIt’s probably a lesser of two evil things. Do you want to stick it to the man, or prevent religious fascists from being elected? There’s a reason Godwin repealed his law.
- 1337shadow 4y agoFor when ad hominem is all you have left?
- EdwardDiego 4y agoI'm not sure how you can have millions of docs disappear, but not all of them. It just sounds like their web-app is being severely throttled on CPU or memory or similar, so can't hit the indexes it needs to?
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoI'm no expert, but maybe it's disks that are failing; not catastrophically, but causing enough read errors to make most files unavailable.
- whatever1 4y agoLiterally the one thing that should have been in the blockchain and it is not.
- MallocVoidstar 4y agoWhat blockchain lets you store terabytes of data permanently?
- TekMol 4y agoArweave
- nibbleshifter 4y agolol, lmao. I mean sure. It also has a built in censorship mechanism (documented in the fucking paper).
- rippercushions 4y agoThe symptoms sound like the website is in dire need of basic maintenance. Who's paying the bandwidth bills if there are no admins left? And surely there are mirrors of the site out there?
- vegai_ 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- aa-jv 4y agoWhat a nonsense narrative. You don't get to choose which corruption is more morally substantive than the other. America is the worlds #1 funder of terrorism. How about we start addressing that, as elite members of the 1%?
- vegai_ 4y agoCompletely irrelevant. The relevant thing is that the West need not tolerate pro-Russia entities, especially in these times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance Funding them would be completely ludicrous, as smart as sawing the branch you're sitting on.
- dijit 4y agoIt has become very popular among certain political groups to reference Karl Popper's "Paradox of Tolerance" in order to justify silencing of people they disagree with. However, "we must not tolerate the intolerant" seriously misrepresents the actual argument. It was not intended as an enthusiastic endorsement of silencing tactics. It is an uneasy acknowledgement that liberal ideals, if embraced completely, leave the door open to the destruction of liberalism. It presents a question with no comfortable solution. It is absolutely not a demand that we trample the rights of people whose ideas we don't like. Here's the actual argument: > Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal. First of all, it is not talking simply about tolerance but about "unlimited tolerance." It's not saying you should extend no tolerance to the intolerant, simply that you should not extend unlimited tolerance to them. Nobody is suggesting unlimited tolerance, the parent is merely positing introspection on matters of our position in the world. Our enemies become our leaders, if/when our leaders move against our interests as a country surreptitiously and the subsequently keep knowledge of wrongdoing from us. in this case: the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but only since our enemy seeks to enlighten us. Our leaders should be scared of this, and act in our interests accordingly and with transparency. This is the only way to build trust, and would completely eliminate any power our foreign adversaries would have in destroying trust in political power. I would much prefer that knowledge come from proper journalistic methods, but given the fact that only a handful of people own all the news media, and the US has been so extremely heavy on any whistleblower journalism: I fear that we have to take what we can get; and I do not say that with happiness or pride... I say that as a person who feels utterly defeated by the crushing weight of the state and the fact that all my heroes are in prison or exile.
- ccbccccbbcccbb 4y agoWikileaks is a spent material at this point, its taskforce has been retasked with other, more topical objectives of the agenda.
- sschueller 4y agoBy that you mean the US has managed to indefinitely imprison an innocent journalist to silence the truth they didn't like.
- ccbccccbbcccbb 4y agoBy that I mean that all you see in the media is but a spectacle. Did Wikileaks achieve anything else but raising the degree of angst and learned helplessness in mere mortals of this world? Maybe there occurred a revolution somewhere against the entities whose corpus delicti was leaked? Any supreme moron convicted? Anything positively changed in the global state of affairs? Nope, all it did is communicate the message about how both utterly corrupted and invulnerable those entities are, and everyone trying to expose their crimes is doomed, like the character of Assange. In simple words: Wikileaks == controlled opposition.
- vkou 4y ago
- mandmandam 4y agoAs someone who claims to believe this - what do you make of the revelation that Clinton herself, with the DNC, deliberately elevated Trump's campaign? ... And we know this to be true because of Wikileaks, lol. https://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign-intentionally-created-donald-trump-with-its-pied-piper-strategy/ https://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaig... Hillary and the DNC also worked to undermine Sanders, though he had far, far better polling vs Trump than Hillary did. At that time, Hillary was the second most disliked politician in the country. Only Trump was lower. Bernie was the most liked. By a lot. So again - the second-most hated politician in America worked with the DNC to attack the most popular politician, while making sure that Trump got as much attention as possible... ...And you blame Wikileaks for Trump winning. You really see no problem with this?
- renewiltord 4y agoPity. There were some good ones there. I'm actually a bit upset about this one document that described data centers and network topology. I have it somewhere on one of my computers, though. And soon only I and a few others shall have it. Haha!
- Aeolun 4y agoI guess that means we now need to visit the internet archive to find those documents?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- germandiago 4y agoWho is behind this move? That is the important thing. States, of course, or people that work for them.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 4y agoYes, a decade after Wikileaks was, briefly, relevant, it’s time for „states“ to move against them. For some reason.
- potatototoo99 4y agoThey haven't forgiven Assange either.
- dane-pgp 4y agoI suppose the conspiracy theory answer is that the Democrats only became motivated (or petty) enough to illegally(?) attack the WikiLeaks website after Assange caused Hillary to lose. For most of the period between her losing the election and now, Trump has been in power, and Biden has had more important things to focus on than getting revenge against Assange/WL/Russia. (Also, it would be hard to maintain plausible deniability if the website started failing right after Biden took office).
- 0atman 4y agoThis seems like classic DDOS symptoms, right? It's not that the documents are gone, they're inaccessible.
- oriettaxx 4y agoomg SRE here with many pro-bono hours, if anyone is able to let their IT team
- forgotusername6 4y agoWhat is the goto place now for sharing data that governments don't want you to share?
- px43 4y agohttps://ddosecrets.com/wiki/Distributed_Denial_of_Secrets https://ddosecrets.com/wiki/Distributed_Denial_of_Secrets
- hellfish 4y ago> In February 2022, after many anonymous donors supported the 2022 Freedom Convoy, DDoSecrets began providing journalists and researchers with a hacked list of donors' personal information from GiveSendGo Oh sure. Go give a government organization government leaks. What a great idea!
- px43 4y agoThese idiots gave money to a group of white supremacists who were blocking off trade routes in support of spreading a deadly virus in the midst of a global pandemic. Karma happens. https://thecjn.ca/perspectives/swastikas-and-other-symbols-of-hate-displayed-at-ottawa-protest-arent-just-offensive-but-dangerous-says-andrea-freedman-ceo-of-ottawas-jewish-federation/ https://thecjn.ca/perspectives/swastikas-and-other-symbols-o...
- hellfish 4y agoFunny to see a self proclaimed "activist organization" leaking private citizen information for people donating to a peaceful protest Anyone who claims these people are "successors to WikiLeaks" is full of it
- px43 4y agoIt's really not any more complicated than "see a nazi, punch a nazi". These people were swastika waving full blown white nationalists. People have every right to support these dirtbags, but don't be surprised if you get outed because of it.
- dalbasal 4y agoApropos of WikiLeaks itself, does anyone remember "information wants to be free." As years go by, the www is decreasingly capable of disseminating information without monopoly, government or some other official backing. Basic web technologies are designed to make documents available. This should all should be trivially achievable using early 90s computers. Maintenance/sysadmin shouldn't be a major hurdle. Yet... Here we are.
- sbergot 4y agoThe full quote is "Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. That tension will not go away."
- saurik 4y agoMore originally, and with more context (as the ways and reasons in which information "wants" each of these things matters). > On the one hand you have — the point you’re making Woz — is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable — the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other.
- slim 4y agoyep, datalove
- noduerme 4y agoOn a purely technical level, suppose you currently wanted to start a site like wikileaks that hosted all this insider pirated leak shit. Where would you host it? Think of your top 10 onshore options and then all your offshore options. Could anyone even launch that site now in 2022? Is there still a nuke shelter in Denmark and a basement in Norway willing to physically protect you? Realistically, how would you do it and maintain any reasonable uptime when one government or another was dedicated to shutting you down? Ten years ago you could do it and possibly even change the world. Today it's not possible. Even hint at it, you're toast... it's that you couldn't even get an access point to try (without being murdered before if you uploaded something).
- Gasp0de 4y agoJust host the data on the darknet somewhere with hundreds of cheap VPS as internet facing fronts. Some countries still have strong protection laws for journalists (e.g. scandinavian countries, iceland) where these VPS would probably stay up for a while.
- noduerme 4y agoafaik wikileaks archive is still available as torrents and on Tor onion. Both protocols are extremely compromised..
- wizhi 4y agoHow is Tor compromised?
- DoItToMe81 4y agoIt isn't.
- noduerme 4y agoIf someone controls your entrance and exit nodes they read your traffic. A substantial enough minority of network nodes have always been controlled by the government that Tor is not and has never been anything other than a massive sting operation.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agoVisit CRYPTOME, the limited hangout version of wikileaks.
- jonathanstrange 4y agoThat's a US intelligence outlet. Still interesting, of course, but not a substitute for WL.
- arminiusreturns 4y agoFor all those who keep spouting this Russia leaked it nonsense, former NSA technical director William Binney along with some others did the technical anaylsis which showed the leaker used a usb drive to copy the emails. I also specifically remember doing a deep dive on the limited Crowdtrike report... which based their entire argument around a list of IPs in the Netherlands they somehow labelled as "known Russian IPs", but never provided any evidence for or methodology for. The servers were never provided to the FBI, and Crowdtrike is extremely questionable as an organization for other reasons. Furthermore, the accusation that Wikileaks was selectively publishing doesn't stand up to scrutiny, with it being fairly obvious in context they were trying to get leaked docs about Trump too. Even then, who was controlling the Wikileaks twitter then? I doubt it was Assange himself. I started reading Assange when he was a cryptophreaker in the 90s, and it's been a wild ride to watch inteligence agency character assassinations become so effective at forcing a narrative that supposedly educated people around HN have gobbled up. I'm proud to see the pushback that does exist though. All that said, Assange's childhood in what is likely to have been an intelligence front cult, has always made me just a bit wary of him, but to me it always felt more like a person who barely escaped and was transformed by it into what he became. (again, a lot of this context people don't know because they never read his stuff pre-wikileaks)
- nova22033 4y agohttps://www.techdirt.com/2017/08/16/stories-claiming-dnc-hack-was-inside-job-rely-heavily-stupid-conversion-error-no-forensic-expert-would-make/ https://www.techdirt.com/2017/08/16/stories-claiming-dnc-hac... William Binney's "analysis" is a little suspect. The servers were never provided to the FBI, and Crowdtrike is extremely questionable as an organization for other reasons. So, to do proper forensic analysis, I need to physically take the servers? I can't log in and take all the data? ALso, please enlighten us...Why is crowdstrike "suspect?
- arminiusreturns 4y agoNo, his analysis is not. He talked about how they even directly tested from servers in a few of the potential countries for real world data transfer speeds and they couldnt reproduce the rate. He also explains how it fits a FAT32 filesystem very well. VIPS has a long history of being corrwct and way ahead of the curve, hence the frequent character assassinations. As someone who has had formal forensic training, your statement about physical servers made me laugh! Have you never heard of chain of custody? Even if someone provided image files the break in chain of custody by a third party would make the evidence useless. As for Crowdstrike, even before 2016 they had a reputation in the industry. When it came to the Russiagate stuff, I think the following article is a good start. https://consortiumnews.com/2019/06/17/fbi-never-saw-crowdstrike-unredacted-or-final-report-on-alleged-russian-hacking-because-none-was-produced/ https://consortiumnews.com/2019/06/17/fbi-never-saw-crowdstr...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoWhat function did WikiLeaks serve when there is already independent journalism? Was their anon file drop system ahead of it's time?
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoPretty much, yeah; it was thanks to Wikileaks and the technologies they pushed that made media implement ways to anonymously report things to them. If I recall correctly, that's what Assange had to teach the journalists at the time.
- vintermann 4y agoRead a book about the history of Wikileaks, and you'll find out. Independent investigative journalism was, and is, in a sorry state. Even most of the best investigative journalists operating today defend a two tier system, where you have to trust them. You don't get access to their source documents. For instance the notorious Hunter Biden laptop, was never published. Not even by the media hawking it. Only supposed excerpts from it have been published. The same is true for ICIJ releases like the Panama Papers. Some people have access. You don't. Assange was determined to fight that, to provide to the public the source material journalists use, so that you don't have to trust him (or anyone) that they're being selective, or slipping in their own details. Wikileaks was also the first anonymous submission platform, by many years. James Dolan and Aaron Swartz, who worked at the second one, are both dead by suicide. The latter after harsh persecution by the US government. It's likely that one or both of them earlier secretly worked with Wikileaks' submission system. So yes, it was important.
- omegacharlie 4y agoThis is all very interesting. Makes one wonder about the reliability of contingency plans by WL in case of indefinite absence of Assange.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoThere WAS supposedly a dead man's switch; numerous encrypted multi-gigabyte files have been shared over the years, and the theory was that their keys would be released if Assange or one of his associates didn't hit a button every X amount of time. But that doesn't seem to have materialized.
- hosteur 4y agoI don’t think any deadman’s switch has been confirmed by Wikileaks. They did however publish insurance files which are supposed to contain full unredacted archives of various leaks. One such insurance file was exposed when an either incompetent or malicious journalist at the guardian revealed the encryption key in a publication. A deadman’s switch would be a specific mechanism to reveal such key. But the existence of it has to my knowledge never been confirmed by WL.
- nova22033 4y agohttps://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks-election-clinton-trump/ https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks... “We believe it would be much better for GOP to win,” he typed into a private Twitter direct message group to an assortment of WikiLeaks’ most loyal supporters on Twitter. “Dems+Media+liberals woudl then form a block to reign in their worst qualities,” he wrote. “With Hillary in charge, GOP will be pushing for her worst qualities., dems+media+neoliberals will be mute.” He paused for two minutes before adding, “She’s a bright, well connected, sadistic sociopath.”
- argentier 4y agoGiven the disaster of the Arab Spring, which the Clinton state department supported, he's not far wrong. The destruction of Libya alone, and the sociopathic gloating on daytime television, should disqualify Clinton from holding high political office again. She also brought the neocons into the State Department with predictably appalling results.
- petee 4y agoGood maybe my phone number and social security number will finally be deleted and not continually used for scams. My info was "shared" as part of a hack/accounting dump. Wikileaks has little useful value that can't be found through other means
- warinukraine 4y agoWeird, this data is what Wikileaks claimed they took out.
- petee 4y agoI was unaware they were doing that. I haven't checked lately but I could still find it last time I looked
- grzaks 4y agoStill cryptome.org up and running since 1996
- senda 4y agoSad to see support for Assange disappear from HN, a lot of your talking points are vague empty slogans. There has never been proof Assange was a Russian asset even if he was God forbid someone gave you information to make informed decisions. The sad truth is you want to believe the lie, and you're upset at being woken up.
- mint2 4y agoThat is correct, people are a tad miffed at WL + JA for earning their trust that WL stands for transparency … only to betray and squander it on being the gru intelligence launderer in order to get the kremlin approved potus. All just because of a mutual grudge the leader had. Had WL been transparent that JA was motivated out of his grudge against Clinton and antipathy of the US and put that disclaimer out clearly, then I suspect people would feel less betrayed by his lack of transparency as he burned their trust. Also, while it was apparent at the time to those who avoided a fox instilled Pavlovian response to Clinton that a trump presidency would be a bad thing for America and rampant with cronyism and corruption, now with hindsight everyone is faced with that factual reality and how russia benefited in spades. For those who’d trusted JA it really stings when stark reality shows them he was actually trying to get themselves to shoot themselves in the foot all along. Realizing one had been hoodwinked doesn’t breed fuzzy goodwill.
- DrScientist 4y agoI don't understand the level of JA/Wikileaks hate - reading the comments it seems to be mostly American ( DNC leaks related ). I do wonder, when the party in power changed, but the damaging leaks didn't - it started to become far too apparent that the problem wasn't Bush or the republicans, the problem was America - irrespective of who was in charge. Maybe that's too hard for many American's to accept, hence the shooting of messenger instead, rather than facing up to the uncomfortable truth - that America's vision of itself, doesn't reflect reality.
- alexfromapex 4y agoIt's not America that causes these types of problems, its our banking military industrial complex.
- DrScientist 4y agoLet me be clear - I'm not blaming American's per se ( though they do share some of the blame - the idea that America can do no wrong because it's America, is surprisingly pervasive even among highly educated people ). I think it's quite clear that democracy is failing in the US - why else would you have father and son or husband and wife as presidents or almost presidents. Clearly the statistical chance of them being the best on merit is quite slim. So yes there is institutional capture. It's not all bad though - the US is very dynamic country, there is a chance of change.
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- toomim 4y agoBut the same thing happens in sports. In basketball, Dell Curry led to Seth Curry and Steph Curry, and the latter just broke the 3-point record. That's merit.
- mandmandam 4y agoAmericans compare politics to sports all the time, and it's bizarre. I get it - we have only two teams that are really allowed to participate. Decisions all boil down to 'our team wins' or 'their team wins' 99% of the time. Like basketball, or football, or baseball, or tennis, etc. But the notion that W and Hillary earned their positions on merit, like Steph Curry did, is astounding. That's hilarious that anyone can say that with a straight face. Hillary was the second most detested politician in America, second only to Trump - who she deliberately elevated for that exact reason.