[ExI] Wikileaks

Tue Dec 7 16:11:33 UTC 2010

>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.<

Agreed. Canada has a few decent journalists left. John Ibbitson is one I
would invite to dinner. There are others.  One of the problems with
mainstream press here in Canada is that they try so hard to be unbiased that
they are easily manipulated.

>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.<

So what do you do? You can't punish contributors, so you punish those who
make it possible to contribute and are trying to protect those involved.
It's not just Assange and Wikileaks here. Amazon has paid a price for
hosting the site. An independent cooperation forced by political pressure to
remove it? Someone somewhere can always be forced to be take responsibility,
even if it's way down the line. You're right that the battle is not really
about these people or Assange. It's a public relations battle in the long
run. But forcing these people into the public eye is key to it.

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

Perhaps. I don't know enough about internet technology to say for certain.
But Spike mentioned in this thread that someone in this group was once
worried about some things he had posted. Since it turned out to be
impossible to remove the comments from the database, the group just started
imitating each other's style and posting along similar lines so that it
would be difficult to tell who was posting what and the guy with the
original concern would get lost in the shuffle. The question I asked myself
when I read that is how did that person originally communicate his concern
over what he posted? Via the group? How was the plan of
action communicated to everyone involved? Also via the group? Private
e-mails? Snail mail. Code?

Given world enough and time, to quote Andrew Marvel, you could probably get
to the bottom of it. There's a trail somewhere. Not just via the web, but
through traditional tracking systems -- real world intelligence services,
courts, subpoenas, etc. In most cases, the effort is just not worth it. In
this case, however, some governments have decided it is. They will fail
miserably, and for all I know there may be a million ways to keep
your activities on the web a secret from all, including determined
government agencies and hackers from China and internet service providers
and the like.  But when the people doing the looking are as good if not
better than those doing the hiding, nothing is for certain.

Anyway. It seems to me there is nothing new taking place here. Just
another information power struggle similar to the one five hundred years ago
when William Tyndale translated the bible into English and was killed for
it. Mean-time it was too late: it had already had been copied and
distributed and Tyndale became a martyr for the faith. I'm not saying
Assange will have the same fate, but if they keep it up, he'll be a digital
saint before sundown.

Darren

On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 10:38 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> 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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-- 
"In the end that's all we have: our memories - electrochemical impulses
stored in eight pounds of tissue the consistency of cold porridge." -
Remembrance of the Daleks
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