This 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.
Watch the Laura Poitras movie "Risk"[1] if you want a really good feel for why Julian has every reason in the world to disrupt the possibility of a Hillary Clinton presidency.
It's an amazing movie that came out at a really unfortunate time for Laura, in that it got lost in the noise of the dcleaks drama. Anti-Julian people hated the movie because it humanized him too much, and pro-Julian people hated the movie because it made him look weak. It was a deeply personal look into the life of a man who suddenly got caught up in the polarizing shitstorm of the 2016 elections.
The leaks definitely came from GRU hackers, but it seems like the GRU was super careful to sell it to Julian as a DNC insider leak, and in his excitement to stick it to the Clinton campaign, he probably overlooked a lot of red flags that he might have caught if didn't have a personal grudge to satisfy.
I voted for Hillary, and I'd do it again, she'd have made a fine US president. I also seeded the hell out of the Podesta emails, because people deserve to know about political corruption. I also believe that the espionage crimes that Julian is charged with are 100% horseshit, and going after journalists like that sets an incredibly bad precedent coming from a nation that purports to be a world leader in press freedoms.
I've honestly been amazed in these past few years how many people have started hating Wikileaks for leaking things that didn't agree with either their interpretation of the world, or made their favorite politician look bad. The only interpretation I can draw from it is that many people crave ignorance. And when they're confronted with something that challenges their ignorance they blame the messenger.
Overall I find the sentiment pathetic and cowardly. I want to know what my government and powerful people are up to. I have a right to know it and Wikileaks was giving me information about this.
IMO people who get angry at WL for telling them what powerful people and governments do behind their back are pathetic bootlickers.
I was such a massive and uncritical supporter of Julian Assange for his breathtakingly ballsy attempt to free information... right up until the moment he threw his chips in with the FSB, the ultimate disinformation crew who believe all information is only a set of lies waiting to be discovered and people waiting to be manipulated. Since then, fuck that dude. He didn't live up to the promise. Whether out of cowardice or greed, he betrayed his own beliefs under pressure, and it has unfortunately tainted everything he ever touched. The world of distributed whistleblowing could have been better with any avatar besides him, but then again almost anyone in that position would have been assassinated in character. My main beef with him is that he pawned himself to Putin when the 2016 election was on the line, and it's entirely unclear why he did that.
At least I understand why Snowden eats and spews Russian crap all day. Poor guy got stuck in the wrong airport. Assange is much more insidious.
> 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.
Who do you think paid for those servers in the past, lol. Seems that the GRU has defunded the project, though - they must have other higher priority projects.
Cause there leaked documents were/are on it as well. At some non-ideologic point the interests of all state actors meet. The might makes right mentality of a seasoned bureaucrat is the same everywhere. Which is why the narrative of Wikileaks being funded as a psy OP does not hold up. Such a "attack" would only host one type of document and its journalists wouldn't "attack" all governments equally.
But hey, if i betrayed the fourth pillar of democracy and suffered from cognitive dissonance therefore, this not being supported by the "evils" behind it, would be woven into some nice story too.
If millions of people die in a war in Russia, the government doesn’t feel anything, because they are not the ones going to war. If their own people turn against them, they feel it.
It's amazing the amount of crazy stuff people trick themselves into beleiving due to their hatred of Trump. Wikileaks works for Russia? This wikileaks?
well. 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.
It'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)
With "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).
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?
Apropos 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.
More 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.
I 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.
Assange's original theory was that WL would create a "secrecy tax", making life difficult for evil orgs that had to keep secrets. But as far as I can tell, WL ended up damaging regular orgs more than evil ones. Because:
- minor scandals within regular orgs created large damage because the members have high ethical standards. While the members of evil orgs didn't care how corrupt their leadership was.
- evil orgs were more effective at keeping secrets, so most leaks were from non-evil orgs that didn't think they had much to hide.
That these second-order effects would end up dominating the first-order effects Assange intended wasn't obvious in advance, so I don't blame the guy for not foreseeing it. But at this point, we have to consider the "leaks in general are good" theory thoroughly discredited.
This depends on your own subjective view of which organizations are evil, and which aren't.
WikiLeaks' biggest document dumps were about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and about American diplomacy around the world. The latter also revealed countless local scandals that were big news in different countries (for example, about corruption in Tunisia, which helped spark the Arab Spring).
I don't see any credible argument for the idea that WikiLeaks did more harm than good. What decisively turned American liberals against WikiLeaks was the publication of the DNC emails, which revealed a real scandal (the DNC trying to stack things against Bernie Sanders during the primaries) that had real consequences (the head of the DNC having to resign). American liberals turned against WikiLeaks for that largely partisan reason (the fact that Democrats were desperate for scapegoats after their election loss to Trump made the backlash against WikiLeaks even worse), while American conservatives wouldn't like an organization that leaks American state secrets anyways, so Wikileaks was left with no support in the US.
Let 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.
But I see the main difference as him having oodles of integrity and courage, in contrast to going for the quiet life in the middle of the herd.
A lot of the accusations that have been thrown at him frankly don't bear detailed examination - the whole assault thing, the idea that he put US operative lives at risk, the idea he was in cahoots with the Russians, the idea he was active in hacking rather than being a journalist receiving information from a source.
In my view, this is all mud thrown to dehumanise him, so nobody complains when he is effectively tortured and imprisoned for life for telling the uncomfortable truth.
Wikileaks had the public backing of, and was composed of, people who had proved the painful way that they weren't working for governments or other established interests.
Merely getting access to flashy hacks will never win DDoSecrets that.
Assange paid a huge price for being the organization's public face, but it wasn't for nothing. It could never have worked as well as it did unless someone was willing to play that role.
Bullshit. Unlike Wikileaks, of which the 'Russian intelligence' smear has never been substantiated, DDoSecrets works with organizations that are indirectly and directly financed by intelligence agencies and smears those outside of this information complex. Namely, Wikileaks.
They work with the OCCRP, which is made up directly of intelligence shills like Radio Free Europe, and groups funded by the NED. That's the agency the CIA used to finance armed groups in Nicuragua after the Iran-Contra affair. This is not an independent organization.
Rubbish, not when DDOS hacked GoFundMe, exposing Freedom Convoy donors in order to help Justin Turdeau's irresponsible government shut down public dissent in Canada.
That put them squarely in the far-left, antidemocratic, not to mention criminal activist category. As if we didn't know that already
On 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).
Just 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.
To be honest your best bet is probably obtaining a stolen credit card, sticking it up on one of the big cloud providers and then rest safe in the knowledge the second you release the data it's going to be copied a thousand times over by journalists and political operatives. If you really want to continue your campaign, just continually pop up with new stolen credit cards on various cloud providers, the barrier to entry is so low now.
So I'm trying to pretend you realistically have something huge to expose... and want to make it through the week or possibly the rest of the month without going to jail. Booting up a site on Amazon with a stolen CC is probably not that smart.
>> it's going to be copied a thousand times over by journalists
The big cloud providers have encountered this many times, and are experts at combatting drive-by fraud like this.
The largest and default "big cloud provider" in the US is also a retailer and might be the best organization in the world at detecting and preventing credit card fraud.
IPFS isn’t uncensorable. The only thing it changes is that there isn’t a single DNS name which can be revoked or blocked. Otherwise, a government can follow the same process: resolve an IP, get it taken down or block it nationally, repeat.
That's much harder to do though, they need to continuously monitor new nodes and make sure blocking the IP does not have too much side effects unless I misunderstand how it works.
> 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!
Readit News
It's an amazing movie that came out at a really unfortunate time for Laura, in that it got lost in the noise of the dcleaks drama. Anti-Julian people hated the movie because it humanized him too much, and pro-Julian people hated the movie because it made him look weak. It was a deeply personal look into the life of a man who suddenly got caught up in the polarizing shitstorm of the 2016 elections.
The leaks definitely came from GRU hackers, but it seems like the GRU was super careful to sell it to Julian as a DNC insider leak, and in his excitement to stick it to the Clinton campaign, he probably overlooked a lot of red flags that he might have caught if didn't have a personal grudge to satisfy.
I voted for Hillary, and I'd do it again, she'd have made a fine US president. I also seeded the hell out of the Podesta emails, because people deserve to know about political corruption. I also believe that the espionage crimes that Julian is charged with are 100% horseshit, and going after journalists like that sets an incredibly bad precedent coming from a nation that purports to be a world leader in press freedoms.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_(2016_film)
Overall I find the sentiment pathetic and cowardly. I want to know what my government and powerful people are up to. I have a right to know it and Wikileaks was giving me information about this.
IMO people who get angry at WL for telling them what powerful people and governments do behind their back are pathetic bootlickers.
Deleted Comment
At least I understand why Snowden eats and spews Russian crap all day. Poor guy got stuck in the wrong airport. Assange is much more insidious.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
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.
Who do you think paid for those servers in the past, lol. Seems that the GRU has defunded the project, though - they must have other higher priority projects.
Some details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRU#Unit_74455
But hey, if i betrayed the fourth pillar of democracy and suffered from cognitive dissonance therefore, this not being supported by the "evils" behind it, would be woven into some nice story too.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-11893886
The know-how is in Assange's mind, and he's in prison.
Meme of the year
EDIT: i mean individual 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
- minor scandals within regular orgs created large damage because the members have high ethical standards. While the members of evil orgs didn't care how corrupt their leadership was.
- evil orgs were more effective at keeping secrets, so most leaks were from non-evil orgs that didn't think they had much to hide.
That these second-order effects would end up dominating the first-order effects Assange intended wasn't obvious in advance, so I don't blame the guy for not foreseeing it. But at this point, we have to consider the "leaks in general are good" theory thoroughly discredited.
WikiLeaks' biggest document dumps were about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and about American diplomacy around the world. The latter also revealed countless local scandals that were big news in different countries (for example, about corruption in Tunisia, which helped spark the Arab Spring).
I don't see any credible argument for the idea that WikiLeaks did more harm than good. What decisively turned American liberals against WikiLeaks was the publication of the DNC emails, which revealed a real scandal (the DNC trying to stack things against Bernie Sanders during the primaries) that had real consequences (the head of the DNC having to resign). American liberals turned against WikiLeaks for that largely partisan reason (the fact that Democrats were desperate for scapegoats after their election loss to Trump made the backlash against WikiLeaks even worse), while American conservatives wouldn't like an organization that leaks American state secrets anyways, so Wikileaks was left with no support in the US.
Essentially, the evil groups weaponized the tool of transparency.
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.
Yep he is different.
But I see the main difference as him having oodles of integrity and courage, in contrast to going for the quiet life in the middle of the herd.
A lot of the accusations that have been thrown at him frankly don't bear detailed examination - the whole assault thing, the idea that he put US operative lives at risk, the idea he was in cahoots with the Russians, the idea he was active in hacking rather than being a journalist receiving information from a source.
In my view, this is all mud thrown to dehumanise him, so nobody complains when he is effectively tortured and imprisoned for life for telling the uncomfortable truth.
UPD Another news story from 2022: https://therecord.media/how-ddosecrets-built-the-go-to-home-...
Wikileaks had the public backing of, and was composed of, people who had proved the painful way that they weren't working for governments or other established interests.
Merely getting access to flashy hacks will never win DDoSecrets that.
Assange paid a huge price for being the organization's public face, but it wasn't for nothing. It could never have worked as well as it did unless someone was willing to play that role.
Dead Comment
They work with the OCCRP, which is made up directly of intelligence shills like Radio Free Europe, and groups funded by the NED. That's the agency the CIA used to finance armed groups in Nicuragua after the Iran-Contra affair. This is not an independent organization.
Such as suggesting Syria chemical attack was false flag[2].
[1]https://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/6/14179240/wikileaks-russia... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks
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?
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).
>> it's going to be copied a thousand times over by journalists
not really if it's a fucking terabyte of data
The largest and default "big cloud provider" in the US is also a retailer and might be the best organization in the world at detecting and preventing credit card fraud.
I have never understood why it's called "wiki" leaks... what is wiki about it?
Dead Comment
Oh sure. Go give a government organization government leaks. What a great idea!