Wikileaks Moneybomb

[tangent4ronpaul]

Wikileaks used to have a ton of content online and now has little due to short funding. Their yearly budget is $600,000 of which they have $370,000. Lets do a mini-moneybomb and try to help them get the $230,000 they need.

http://wikileaks.org/

WikiLeaks has probably produced more scoops in its short life than the Washington Post has in the past 30 years ”
— The National, November 19, 2009

-t

[Kotin]

bump

[tangent4ronpaul]

donated $25

-t

[Vessol]

I'll have to donate a little next paycheck. Wikileaks has constantly been awesome and I believe it play a vital part in offering a safe way for whistleblowers to come forth.

[tangent4ronpaul]

FYI: BlackNet was undoubtedly WikiLeaks ancestor.

http://osaka.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/tcmay.htm

9. The BlackNet Experiment

A few years ago I devised a working information market, using PGP for secure communication and digital signatures, chained anonymous remailers for untraceability, and message pools (e.g., alt.anonymous.messages on Usenet) for making contact and sending later messages. My intention was to directly demonstrate the feasibility of such markets, and to explore some of the nuances of such markets. (At no point was BlackNet actually used for espionage, though I did get a few strange offers, including an offer to sell me information on how the CIA was targetting the diplomats of certain African nations in Washington.)

BlackNet allowed fully-anonymous, two-way exchanges of information of all sorts. The basic idea was to use a "message pool," a publicly readable place for messages. By using chains of remailers, messages could be untraceably and anonymously deposited in such pools, and then read anonymously by others (because the message pool was broadcast widely, a la Usenet). By including public keys for later communications, two-way communication could be established, all within the message pool. What was missing at the time of this experiment was some form of untraceable payment, i.e., digital cash.

As Paul Leyland so succinctly described the experiment:

"Tim May showed how mutually anonymous secure information trading could be implemented with a public forum such as usenet and with public key cryptography. Each information purchaser wishing to take part posts a sales pitch and a public key to Usenet. Information to be traded would then have a public key appended so that a reply can be posted and the whole encrypted in the public key of the other party. For anonymity, the keys should contain no information that links it to an identifiable person. May posted a 1024-bit PGP key supposedly belonging to "Blacknet". As May's purpose was only educational, he soon admitted authorship."

(I should add that copies of the BlackNet message circulated widely and even appeared at some national laboratories doing sensitive work. Oak Ridge issued an advisory warning employees to report any contacts with BlackNet!)

10. Espionage as an Information Market

The implications for espionage are profound, and largely unstoppable. Anyone with a home computer and access to the Net can use these methods to communicate securely, anonymously or pseudonymously, and with no fear of detection. "Anyone a spy." Troop movements can be reported, for a fee in digital cash, by anyone with a view of a harbor or train tracks. Military or corporate secrets are saleable by anyone with access to them. Corporate business and technical secrets can be sold safely and untraceably. "Digital dead drops" can be used to post information obtained, far more securely than the old physical dead drops...no more messages left in Coke cans at the bases of trees on remote roads. Aldrich Ames was a piker, maybe the last of his breed.

(There are well-known methods to detect who is selling secrets. "Canary traps" involve seeding disinformation to localize the source. The KGB called this "barium," as it made the source visible. Expect more sophisticated countermeasures to this new ease in selling information.)

Untraceable digital cash will likely play a central role, especially in non-ideological, or "casual," espionage. With real digital cash on the verge of becoming available, such espionage markets will become feasible. Not all of them will be widely advertised, of course. The advantages for spies are incredible. No longer will Aldrich the Spy face risks of contact (dead drops, payments) when contacting Boris the Spymaster. Rather, he can make contact from the safety and anonymity of his home PC, using chained remailers to make his offer in a place read by Boris, then using encrypted messages for later contact. Even the payment can be made safely. "Digital dead drops" will revolutionize espionage, military and corporate. As with "anyone a mint," this makes for an "anyone a spy" situation.

This is a concrete example of an application on the "margins." Arguments that people will not be "interested" in using digital cash must be considered in the light of examples like this. There are, of course, less controversial applications.

-t

[TheState]

"Help wikileaks investigate video of Afghan massacre"


There is more. Sources have also given WikiLeaks an encrypted military video from a May 2009 attack in western Afghanistan which killed over 100 civilians, including many women and children, though bombs. The U.S. Military has said it would release the video, but it has not.

http://spot.us/pitches/396

[Vessol]

As sick as that video may be, if it is released it will be DAMNING against Obama's continued illegal war in Afghanistan. Shut those lefties who defend him up.

[tangent4ronpaul]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/apr/06/pass-notes-wikileaks


Pass notes No 2,758: Wikileaks

Telling the public what those in power don't want revealed

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2010/4/6/1270561125970/Britain-National-Archives-001.jpg

Age: Three.

Appearance: Feared by the bad, loved by the good.

It's the modern equivalent of Robin Hood? Sort of, yes. Today's most valuable currency is information and Wikileaks' raison d'etre is to take the stuff our politicians, financiers, religious leaders and other powerful yet shadowy types don't want us to know and share it out as widely as possible. It is run by The Sunshine Press and was founded by journalists, mathematicians, techies and Chinese dissidents.

And what has it done for me lately?

It has posted a secret video showing footage of a US aircrew falsely claiming they had encountered a group of armed insurgents and opening fire on them, killing 12 people.

I imagine the US government wasn't too happy about that? Indeed not. It has labelled the whistleblowing site a threat to national security.

I meant, not happy about the trigger-happy inhumanity of its soldiers. They don't seem too bothered about that.

How do we know about such a report anyway? Surely that's the kind of thing they like to keep secret too? It is. But it's also exactly the kind of thing Wikileaks likes to get hold of, and so . . .

It's posted up on the site along with everything else? Last month, yes.

Where do they get all this information from? The public.

But who in the public? Nobody, obviously, really knows. The Pentagon – in keeping with its unofficial motto "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you" – thinks the CIA may be responsible.

And we know they think this because . . . ? Yes. Wikileaked it.

And where do they get the money to perform this international service of speaking truth to and about power? From the public. Ish. It relies on donations and had to close down earlier this year in order to build up funds.

It was worth the wait. Not if you work for the US government, it wasn't.

Do say: "I've got this tape in the attic – it's of this grassy knoll in Dallas, Texas, in 1963. Crazy thing, but this guy comes up and . . ."

Don't say: "It's all run by lizards really."

-t

[Reason]

Wikileaks is awesome!

[tangent4ronpaul]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/world/07wikileaks.html

Iraq Video Brings Notice to a Web Site
By NOAM COHEN and BRIAN STELTER
Published: April 6, 2010

Three months ago, WikiLeaks, a whistle-blower Web site that posts classified and sensitive documents, put out an urgent call for help on Twitter.

“Have encrypted videos of U.S. bomb strikes on civilians. We need super computer time,” stated the Web site, which calls itself “an intelligence agency of the people.”

Somehow — it will not say how — WikiLeaks found the necessary computer time to decrypt a graphic video, released Monday, of a United States Army assault in Baghdad in 2007 that left 12 people dead, including two employees of the news agency Reuters. The video has been viewed nearly three million times on YouTube, and has been replayed hundreds of times in television news reports.

The release of the Iraq video is drawing attention to the once-fringe Web site, which aims to bring to light hidden information about governments and multinational corporations — putting secrets in plain sight and protecting the identity of those who help do so. Accordingly, the site has become a thorn in the side of authorities in the United States and abroad. With the Iraq attack video, the clearinghouse for sensitive documents is edging closer toward a form of investigative journalism and to advocacy.

“That’s arguably what spy agencies do — high-tech investigative journalism,” Julian Assange, one of the site’s founders, said in an interview on Tuesday. “It’s time that the media upgraded its capabilities along those lines.”

Mr. Assange, an Australian activist and journalist, founded the site three years ago along with a group of like-minded activists and computer experts. Since then, WikiLeaks has published documents about toxic dumping in Africa, protocols from Guantánamo Bay, e-mail messages from Sarah Palin’s personal account and 9/11 pager messages.

Today there is a core group of five full-time volunteers, according to Daniel Schmitt, a site spokesman, and there are 800 to 1,000 people whom the group can call on for expertise in areas like encryption, programming and writing news releases.

The site is not shy about its intent to shape media coverage, and Mr. Assange said he considered himself both a journalist and an advocate; should he be forced to choose one, he would choose advocate. WikiLeaks did not merely post the 38-minute video, it used the label “Collateral Murder” and said it depicted “indiscriminate” and “unprovoked” killing. (The Pentagon defended the killings and said no disciplinary action was taken at the time of the incident.)

“From my human point of view, I couldn’t believe it would be so easy to wreak that kind of havoc on the city, when they can’t see what is really going on there," Mr. Schmitt said in an interview from Germany on Monday night.

The Web site also posted a 17-minute edited version, which proved to be much more widely viewed on YouTube than the full version. Critics contend that the video was misleading because it did not make clear that the attacks took place amid clashes in the neighborhood and that one of the men was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade.

By releasing such a graphic video, which a media organization had tried in vain to get through traditional channels, WikiLeaks has inserted itself in the national discussion about the role of journalism in the digital age. Where judges and plaintiffs could once stop or delay publication with a court order, WikiLeaks exists in a digital sphere in which information becomes instantly available.

“The most significant thing about the release of the Baghdad video is that several million more people are on the same page,” with knowledge of WikiLeaks, said Lisa Lynch, an assistant professor of journalism at Concordia University in Montreal, who recently published a paper about the site. “It is amazing that outside of the conventional channels of information something like this can happen.”

Reuters had tried for two and a half years through the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the Iraq video, to no avail. WikiLeaks, as always, refuses to say how it obtained the video, and credits only “our courageous source.”

Mr. Assange said “research institutions” offered to help decrypt the Army video, but he declined to detail how they went about it. After decrypting the attack video, WikiLeaks in concert with an Icelandic television channel sent two people to Baghdad last weekend to gather information about the killings, at a cost of $50,000, the site said.

David Schlesinger, Reuters editor in chief, said Tuesday that the video was disturbing to watch “but also important to watch.” He said he hoped to meet with the Pentagon “to press the need to learn lessons from this tragedy.”

WikiLeaks publishes its material on its own site, which is housed on a few dozen servers around the globe, including places like Sweden, Belgium and the United States that the organization considers friendly to journalists and document leakers, Mr. Schmitt said.

By being everywhere, yet in no exact place, WikiLeaks is, in effect, beyond the reach of any institution or government that hopes to silence it.

Because it relies on donations, however, WikiLeaks says it has struggled to keep its servers online. It has found moral, but not financial, support from some news organizations, like The Guardian in Britain, which said in January that “If you want to read the exposés of the future, it’s time to chip in.”

On Tuesday, WikiLeaks claimed to have another encrypted video, said to show an American airstrike in Afghanistan that killed 97 civilians last year, and used the opportunity to ask for donations.

WikiLeaks has grown increasingly controversial as it has published more material. (The United States Army called it a threat to its operations in a report last month.) Many have tried to silence the site; in Britain, WikiLeaks has been used a number of times to evade injunctions on publication by courts that ruled that the material would violate the privacy of the people involved. The courts reversed themselves when they discovered how ineffectual their rulings were.

Another early attempt to shut down the site involved a United States District Court judge in California. In 2008, Judge Jeffrey S. White ordered the American version of the site shut down after it published confidential documents concerning a subsidiary of a Swiss bank. Two weeks later he reversed himself, in part recognizing that the order had little effect because the same material could be accessed on a number of other “mirror sites.”

Judge White said at the time, “We live in an age when people can do some good things and people can do some terrible things without accountability necessarily in a court of law.”

-t

[tangent4ronpaul]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/bronstein/detail?entry_id=60734

Soldiers snickering while shooting journalists and kids looks bad, no question. My favorite quote of the week was from the refreshingly blunt General Stanley McChrystal about civilian deaths in Afghanistan:

"We have shot an amazing number of people, but...none has ever proven to be a threat."

[...]

I am sure of one thing: tragedy aside, this is all good for us in the bigger sense, starting with the video release. Transparency is the victor here. More information and even more yelling back and forth gives everyone more data and opportunity to make up their own minds. And it keeps life-and-death topics like war fully in the bull's-eye heat of aggressive social interaction.

[tangent4ronpaul]

blimp for morning crowd

-t

[tangent4ronpaul]

afternoon bump

[FrostyLeaf]

As sick as that video may be, if it is released it will be DAMNING against Obama's continued illegal war in Afghanistan. Shut those lefties who defend him up.

I threw em 20$(wikileaks). That is true, it is treason. Impeach Obama based on the war in Afghanistan. He claimed he would end these wars. Now he is protecting the logistical bases for the poppy/heroin that is financing the the bullets flying at our troops, that Obama has increased. We entered the Helhem Province in January. That province produces more refined heroin than anywhere else on the face of the earth. Yet we've done nothing against the crop, or the refineries. Whenever we DO actually do something, it involves shooting a farmer that can farm in a desert. Which is stupid in its own right. You cannot attack the farmers means to live, you have to break their nations dependence on the monetary stream of the opium crop. They can't feed their population yet they can get half the planet high. Something is wrong with that. If we aren't there to fix that, then we shouldnt be there period.

More democrats are pissed off about the afghanistan situation than you may think. Look at Pete Olson(R), hes defending Obama on the afghanistan policy.

Anyone who defends the policy in afghanistan isn't competent on the issue, especially the president who has rejected an offer from russia to specifically deal with the opium production within afghanistan. Which has pissed Russia off since millions of their people are addicted to it. The heroin's monetary streams are used to finance the attacks like the 3 as of late.

Pete Olson defending Obama
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http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?t=239246

[tangent4ronpaul]

I threw em 20$(wikileaks). That is true, it is treason. Impeach Obama based on the war in Afghanistan. He claimed he would end these wars. Now he is protecting the logistical bases for the poppy/heroin that is financing the the bullets flying at our troops, that Obama has increased. We entered the Helhem Province in January. That province produces more refined heroin than anywhere else on the face of the earth. Yet we've done nothing against the crop, or the refineries. Whenever we DO actually do something, it involves shooting a farmer that can farm in a desert. Which is stupid in its own right. You cannot attack the farmers means to live, you have to break their nations dependence on the monetary stream of the opium crop. They can't feed their population yet they can get half the planet high. Something is wrong with that. If we aren't there to fix that, then we shouldnt be there period.

More democrats are pissed off about the afghanistan situation than you may think. Look at Pete Olson(R), hes defending Obama on the afghanistan policy.

Anyone who defends the policy in afghanistan isn't competent on the issue, especially the president who has rejected an offer from russia to specifically deal with the opium production within afghanistan. Which has pissed Russia off since millions of their people are addicted to it. The heroin's monetary streams are used to finance the attacks like the 3 as of late.

Pete Olson defending Obama
\|/
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?t=239246

Thanks Frostyleaf!