[ExI] Wikileaks

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, Dec 07, 2010 at 09:49:46AM -0400, Darren Greer wrote:

> The person is very important, because how he and others involved are dealt
> with will determine the level of risk others are willing to take to

That's just the point: a successor platform to Wikileaks has
no monetary streams to trace or block, and it does not expose
operators, and actively hides contributors.

> accomplish similar ventures in future. I'd say the press is more focussed on
> Assange than the content of the leaks precisely because they understand
> this.

The press is of some relevance on the short run, but on the long
run the press as we know is has gone to party with the buggy whip
makers.
 
> >the press waking up to the possibility of using the Internet as an
> anonymous, uncensorable informant platform is.<
> 
> If you're a decent journalist, you probably already know this. What you

Somebody fetch me a decent journalist. These have been lately in
short supply. In fact, even bad journalists are getting hard to
pay lately. Lack of revenue will do that to you.

> don't know is if a government is unable to censor the information, how
> effective will it be in censoring the person or persons responsible for
> leaking it? Because as you know, *nothing* is anonymous on the Internet.

There are anonymizing overlays of existing Internet which are quite
hard to trace (even for a TLA), especially if you remove the realtime 
communication requirement part. Distributed cryptographic filesystems 
like Tahoe can be made very, very difficult to attack -- both at the 
reader, content blocking, or publisher layer. 

The problem with journalists is that they wouldn't know how to 
use such platforms. For them Wikileaks will be a gentle introduction.

> That's the great irony of our age. An unfathomable sea of information, with
> your signature on every molecule of data you contribute, if someone is
> determined and technically equipped and proficient enough to look for it.

If you know what the signature is, it's pretty easy to remove.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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