It feels like I'm watching someone try to act out the part of a character in a spy novel. Big encrypted files called Insurance, twittering about being followed by government agents, sensationalizing the things they post...
I think they have good reasons for what they're doing (or at least good intentions), and I do like the concept behind WikiLeaks.
I just think they're getting a bit caught up in the whole drama/mystique, and their credibility and ethical standing is suffering as a result, which could be dangerous for the "open leak repository" movement.
A couple of years ago Julian and his colleagues released information that swung the national election in Kenya. This must have gotten the attention of every government with something to hide (all of them). Since then, he claims to have released more confidential information than the rest of the worldwide media. Combined. The stakes are enormous. And the reality is that that puts a target on your back.
I think if there ever is a downfall to the Wikileak initiative, it will be due to the gloating and the drama they perpetuate.
Julian and his gang need to stop with the commentary and just release the documents. leave the opinions to be formed by the people. The twitter account is going to come back and bite them in the ass if they keep pushing commentary out.
I fully support the need for an organisation like this and having seen multiple interviews of Julian, I have to say he's the right character to lead this mission.
>It feels like I'm watching someone try to act out the part of a character in a spy novel.
In that case we should be able to figure out his key and decrypt the file. The key in the spy novels is always something you feel like you should have seen coming, something predictable.
It feels like I'm watching someone try to act out the part
of a character in a spy novel.
It feels more like I'm watching someone forced to act out that part. Those novels me be dramatized, but many are still based on the way things actually happen. Ian Flemming couldn't have kept that out if he wanted to, because he simply knew.
Is anyone else getting just a little bit sick of WikiLeaks? The basic concept of providing transparency is good, but I think they are taking things way too far.
I hadn't even thought of the issue of the Taliban being able to read the records themselves to find out who the informants are.
Just because something is a secret doesn't mean it has to be exposed, and I think that is the fundamental problem with Wikileaks. Some things do more harm out in the open than they would locked away.
What Julian appears to me to be trying to do is to reduce the ability of large bureaucratic militarized organizations to dominate innocent individuals.
Secrets exist for many purposes, but their primary impact on history is to permit groups of people to organize in order to persecute other less organized groups of people. Ultimately, it was the combination of industrialization and secrets that made it possible for nation states to directly the cause the death of 160 million people in the 20th century. In these situations, the ability of individuals to influence the course of events is essentially nil. That's why you and I have not stopped the millions of murders in Darfur, the same as our parents did not stop them in Rwanda 17 years ago, and so on.
In this context, it really is not reasonable to argue that we would all be much safer if nobody was revealing the secrets of those who have too many secrets.
Wikileaks is about trying to implement the right to know, the right to inform and source protection via technology. This is laws[1] that in Sweden[2] is part of the "constitution" via the freedom of press act and the fundamental law on freedom of expression (free speech). If more countries had similar laws, Wikileaks would be unnecessary. If you don't agree with or understand why these laws exist, then of course your view on the necessity of Wikileaks might differ.
Wikileaks, just like laws on rights and freedoms, will sometimes facilitate the distribution of, for governments, "problematic" material. Does this mean we should remove these laws and/or outlaw Wikileaks? Not in my opinion. Of course there will always be some limitations.
Nothing stops government and organizations from protecting their information in the first place. Wikileaks doesn't pick what information they get access to. If someone in your organization is leaking your most inner secrets, you probably have more serious problem than than the existence of Wikileaks. Also the public nature of Wikileaks distribution model means that intelligence agencies are free to do all the operation security analysis they want when something is published.
"Now we contacted the White House as a group before we released this material and asked them to help assist in going through it to make sure that no innocent names came out, and the White House did not accept that request."
If there had been major revelations in the leaked data I would be more sympathetic to their cause. 5 days later it's out of the mainstream news cycle because it's not really news worthy. The leak itself is news worthy but the content mostly is not. It looks like all they managed to do was out some informants and damage the possibility of reconciliation. (not that the odds were great to start with)
But who decides what "has to" be exposed, and what doesn't? The problem is that there is no third party at all trustworthy enough to bear the responsibility of "filtering" through all the world's dirty laundry to just find the "morally reprehensible" parts. So, there must be some (transparent) strategy set in advance: they either release nothing (most news agencies), everything (Wikileaks), or use some other pre-defined filter that can be proven to function (i.e. they cover everything, but then push their stories to a proxy server, with a transparent and inspectable program designed to only publish the stories that match some algorithm.)
frankly I'm a little surprised at the number of people that just plain don't hold government accountable.
Collateral damage video? No outrage over killing the civilians, Full outrage that they dared to add labels to a video.
This thing? No outrage over the fact that innocent people are getting killed...full outrage that WL dares to release information.
Seems like a lot of people are just plain authoritative and have full faith that anything they aren't being told is for their own good...when in reality it's just people covering their ass.
Without full transparency, they leave it up to sites like wikileaks to make decisions about things that might have military value, since they don't know 100% whether the thing they are reading is being censored because it's actually important or because the gov't just doesn't want bad PR.
The whole "these guys are assholes for releasing information about our bad deeds" just sounds like bs to me. Don't want bad PR? Don't commit atrocities.
Democracy can't function if the populace isn't fully aware of all the details.
Just because something is a secret doesn't mean it has to
be exposed
Why does everyone suppose WikiLeaks is being naive about this? I'm sure there are plenty of files that they won't leak, because they think it will endanger more people than it will save.
In this case, the safety of a few Afghan informants could be considered collateral damage: you can't expect WikiLeaks to keep their hands completely clean, when they are trying to out pools of blood on the hands of others. There isn't an optimal solution; they will have to make case-by-case judgments. If you don't like that and want them to censor the documents: by all means, start volunteering for them to read all the stuff. In the mean time, putting this out in the open may save countless Afghan civilians in the years to come.
By my understanding there are around 12401769434657526912139264 possibilities, therefore to calculate the time taken in days to brute force a password would be the application of the following formula:
t = n / m / 86400 / P
n: search space (no of possible passwords)
m: amount of random passwords that can be tested a second
86400: 60*60*24 (converts units to days)
P: parallelism (number of crackers)
Let
n = 12401769434657526912139264
m = 100
P = 1,000,000
It would only take 143 days to be successful. Is this correct? Second question, how do we carve up the search space and distribute this to the internet?
Edit: n is generated by limiting the key to be a composition of alphanumeric and related characters. Could be wrong.
According to Schneier[1] n should be closer to ~2600000000000000000000000000000000000000. For each single available core, m would be smaller, say 20 wouldn't it? On the other side, consider 8 or more cores a box for the NSA by 500,000 boxes (wildly conservative guess??) for about P = 4,000,000??
NSA probably has much more compute power than this, though: "With supercomputers measured by the acre and estimated $70 million annual electricity bills for its headquarters, the agency has begun browning out, which is the reason for locating its new data centers in Utah and Texas."[2]
[+] [-] dlytle|15 years ago|reply
I think they have good reasons for what they're doing (or at least good intentions), and I do like the concept behind WikiLeaks.
I just think they're getting a bit caught up in the whole drama/mystique, and their credibility and ethical standing is suffering as a result, which could be dangerous for the "open leak repository" movement.
[+] [-] riffer|15 years ago|reply
Go Julian, go.
[+] [-] faramarz|15 years ago|reply
I think if there ever is a downfall to the Wikileak initiative, it will be due to the gloating and the drama they perpetuate.
Julian and his gang need to stop with the commentary and just release the documents. leave the opinions to be formed by the people. The twitter account is going to come back and bite them in the ass if they keep pushing commentary out.
I fully support the need for an organisation like this and having seen multiple interviews of Julian, I have to say he's the right character to lead this mission.
[+] [-] ahn|15 years ago|reply
In that case we should be able to figure out his key and decrypt the file. The key in the spy novels is always something you feel like you should have seen coming, something predictable.
[+] [-] Confusion|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] NathanKP|15 years ago|reply
I hadn't even thought of the issue of the Taliban being able to read the records themselves to find out who the informants are.
Just because something is a secret doesn't mean it has to be exposed, and I think that is the fundamental problem with Wikileaks. Some things do more harm out in the open than they would locked away.
[+] [-] riffer|15 years ago|reply
Secrets exist for many purposes, but their primary impact on history is to permit groups of people to organize in order to persecute other less organized groups of people. Ultimately, it was the combination of industrialization and secrets that made it possible for nation states to directly the cause the death of 160 million people in the 20th century. In these situations, the ability of individuals to influence the course of events is essentially nil. That's why you and I have not stopped the millions of murders in Darfur, the same as our parents did not stop them in Rwanda 17 years ago, and so on.
In this context, it really is not reasonable to argue that we would all be much safer if nobody was revealing the secrets of those who have too many secrets.
[+] [-] hbd|15 years ago|reply
Wikileaks, just like laws on rights and freedoms, will sometimes facilitate the distribution of, for governments, "problematic" material. Does this mean we should remove these laws and/or outlaw Wikileaks? Not in my opinion. Of course there will always be some limitations.
Nothing stops government and organizations from protecting their information in the first place. Wikileaks doesn't pick what information they get access to. If someone in your organization is leaking your most inner secrets, you probably have more serious problem than than the existence of Wikileaks. Also the public nature of Wikileaks distribution model means that intelligence agencies are free to do all the operation security analysis they want when something is published.
[1] http://www.meddelarfrihet.nu/freedom.php?lang=en
[2] This is why Wikileaks is hosted in Sweden.
[+] [-] _politicalist|15 years ago|reply
"Now we contacted the White House as a group before we released this material and asked them to help assist in going through it to make sure that no innocent names came out, and the White House did not accept that request."
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s2968342.htm
[+] [-] jsz0|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derefr|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vaksel|15 years ago|reply
Collateral damage video? No outrage over killing the civilians, Full outrage that they dared to add labels to a video.
This thing? No outrage over the fact that innocent people are getting killed...full outrage that WL dares to release information.
Seems like a lot of people are just plain authoritative and have full faith that anything they aren't being told is for their own good...when in reality it's just people covering their ass.
Without full transparency, they leave it up to sites like wikileaks to make decisions about things that might have military value, since they don't know 100% whether the thing they are reading is being censored because it's actually important or because the gov't just doesn't want bad PR.
The whole "these guys are assholes for releasing information about our bad deeds" just sounds like bs to me. Don't want bad PR? Don't commit atrocities.
Democracy can't function if the populace isn't fully aware of all the details.
[+] [-] Confusion|15 years ago|reply
In this case, the safety of a few Afghan informants could be considered collateral damage: you can't expect WikiLeaks to keep their hands completely clean, when they are trying to out pools of blood on the hands of others. There isn't an optimal solution; they will have to make case-by-case judgments. If you don't like that and want them to censor the documents: by all means, start volunteering for them to read all the stuff. In the mean time, putting this out in the open may save countless Afghan civilians in the years to come.
[+] [-] Qz|15 years ago|reply
Oh, and the government doesn't have that blood on their hands already? Brings to mind something about a pot and a kettle.
[+] [-] maika|15 years ago|reply
Edit: n is generated by limiting the key to be a composition of alphanumeric and related characters. Could be wrong.
[+] [-] mishmash|15 years ago|reply
NSA probably has much more compute power than this, though: "With supercomputers measured by the acre and estimated $70 million annual electricity bills for its headquarters, the agency has begun browning out, which is the reason for locating its new data centers in Utah and Texas."[2]
1 - http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/new_attack_on_... 2 - http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/10/james_bamford_...
[+] [-] mishmash|15 years ago|reply
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1562651
[+] [-] Groxx|15 years ago|reply
Talk about a coincidence (or is it??!?).
[+] [-] vaksel|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] novon|15 years ago|reply