In Soviet Russia ... no wait, seriously ... in Soviet Russia, when they tried to control copy machines and fax machines, people used typewriters, pen and ink, and good old sneaker net to create and distribute their samizdat.
I'm reminded of the scene in "The Lives of Others" where the Stasi typewriter guy is giving a presentation in which he details exactly what model and make of typewriter every writer and journalist in East Berlin uses.
Depends on how much you trust them, really. What you call collusion is, for them, co-operation. There were a lot of powerful internal voices in the security industry against the kind of online information-sharing that makes a leak like this possible.
The reason they were overruled was because 9/11 in particular showed how badly joined up the information services were. Now the pendulum will swing the other way again, inevitably.
I'm not yet convinced this a great outcome. Shouldn't diplomatic staff be able to send back accurate assessments of political figures in countries where the US has interests? If internal comms are sanitised for potential public exposure, who benefits?
The "taking on tyranny" rhetoric surrounding wikileaks is overheated, too. Assange is taking on the softest Western governments; the ones who will go after him with arrest warrants. Were he actually to take on tyranny he knows he'd end up in a London clinic with radiation poisoning.
"Shouldn't diplomatic staff be able to send back accurate assessments of political figures in countries where the US has interests? If internal comms are sanitised for potential public exposure, who benefits?"
Why do you think Wikileaks is only about the US? Right now the cables leaked out are from the US, but the point is to do this to every government. Everyone opposed to statism and nationalism benefits.
"Were he actually to take on tyranny he knows he'd end up in a London clinic with radiation poisoning."
Except Litvinenko wasn't interested in revealing state secrets, but in making schemes with Russian oligarchs. Which is probably why he's the only Soviet or Russian defector to have died under suspicious circumstances since 1959.
"Why do you think Wikileaks is only about the US? Right now the cables leaked out are from the US, but the point is to do this to every government. Everyone opposed to statism and nationalism benefits."
I think a dog only barks because that's all I've heard it do. I think you're choosing a "point" that chimes with your hopes, not the facts.
Your "benefits" too need made more explicit. I'm opposed to nationalism and don't see any short or long-term benefits for me, here. Doing actions contrary to the welfare of a national state doesn't automatically amount to a benefit for anti-nationalists.
On the contrary, there are serious questions to be asked about what this will do to things that actively help nations to work together, such as diplomatic backchannels. Severing those is no more laudable, and far more potentially lethal, than when TC posted Twitter's internal emails.
As for 1959, your answer's a little fine in its splitting of the hair -- the KGB went after plenty in its time, including assisting in the bizarre murder of Markov, and the "suicide" of Shevchenko's wife. There were also the many sentenced to death that had to be hidden by the CIA. Lets not start on the Stasi, either.
If your point was that tyrannies don't murder their citizens for treason, you'll have a tough sell. That's why actually taking them on is a lot harder than taking on a government that -- as the cables are showing -- is actually relatively close to plain-speaking in its dealing with other nations. A lot of the embarrassment has come from second-hand revelations about what other countries have been lying about.
"I'm opposed to nationalism and don't see any short or long-term benefits for me, here."
I see a lot of potential benefits for people currently being murdered in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"On the contrary, there are serious questions to be asked about what this will do to things that actively help nations to work together, such as diplomatic backchannels."
Nations working together towards what? The whole point is that nations work together for the benefit of those governing them. The only reason you and I aren't property of god-kings at this point in history is because in the past people have resisted tribal/nationalist/statist power.
"As for 1959, your answer's a little fine in its splitting of the hair -- the KGB went after plenty in its time, including assisting in the bizarre murder of Markov, and the "suicide" of Shevchenko's wife. There were also the many sentenced to death that had to be hidden by the CIA. Lets not start on the Stasi, either."
Do you think Africa is a country? How is it splitting hairs to be aware that "Eastern Europe" isn't a single place?
"If your point was that tyrannies don't murder their citizens for treason, you'll have a tough sell."
Every country punishes its citizens for treason. Assange isn't a citizen of the United States. Bradley Manning is.
"I see a lot of potential benefits for people currently being murdered in Iraq and Afghanistan."
1. Expose internal documents.
2. ????
3. Fewer people being murdered in Iraq.
Going to need to spell out 2 here, because nothing wikileaks has done so far has done anything to stop those deaths, and isn't likely to. Assange's, yours and Winer's stances all assume that the states involved won't change their methods in response to informational insecurity, and will instead continue business as usual. This is a strange assumption.
"Do you think Africa is a country? How is it splitting hairs to be aware that "Eastern Europe" isn't a single place?"
It was you who took my allusion to Litvinenko and turned into it something exclusively exclusively about Russia. My point was, and remains, that tyrannies murder to protect themselves, and high-minded rhetoric about bringing them down comes to naught when you just pick on the soft targets.
"Assange's, yours and Winer's stances all assume that the states involved won't change their methods in response to informational insecurity, and will instead continue business as usual. This is a strange assumption."
Please read Assange's manifesto, I posted the link for a reason. The whole point of Wikileaks is to force states to "change their methods in response to informational insecurity" and make their functioning less efficient. Armed revolution isn't popular these days, and this is a bloodless, scalable, and morally unassailable (well, for normal people's morals, anyway) way to attack the functioning of a government.
I read the manifesto; it's troubling for people who, like me, are in support of the general principle of greater transparency but don't support an ideological reading of the US as an authoritarian conspiracy.
As for "morally unassailable", that's a ridiculous assertion. HN can't even decide whether or not TechCrunch was right to publish the Twitter emails; this is at a much more morally complicated level. The potential to put people in harm's way is being used by politicians as a stick to beat WikiLeaks, but nonetheless there's something to it.
When Amnesty International says you're putting people in danger, there's more than just hype to it.
"Shouldn't diplomatic staff be able to send back accurate assessments of political figures in countries where the US has interests? If internal comms are sanitised for potential public exposure, who benefits?"
I can't help but think how nice it'd be if all the taxpayer funded diplomats could hold their heads high and say "Yes, what Wikileaks just published was my professional communication as a trained diplomat. the opinions expressed were my opinions and I stand behind them."
There are times when I may have turned to a coworker and said "this client is STUPID!", but in any written correspondence that would have come out as "there seems to be a misunderstanding on their part" or "perhaps we need to be dealing with someone at the client with a higher level of technical understanding", surely that sort of diplomatic communications is what diplomats are trained and paid to do?
History of unreliability, check. Centralized, check. Business model that has nothing to do with replacing DNS, check. Will probably give in to the US government without a fight, ?
I think there is some lack of technical knowledge with the people who are running wikileaks as they are still using the same free dns service with a new domain rather than switching to another dns that might be able to handle their traffic (DDOS) with a known domain name.
Since moving a host to another IP address practically requires temporarily setting a low TTL (which may have been what actually caused the DDoS), creating an entirely new domain with a high TTL is a reasonable (albeit desperate) attempt to reduce the load on the authoritative nameserver. I doubt it's a lack of technical knowledge as much as it is lack of resources in what amounts to a perfect storm (hot potato content, inherent DNS weakness, scalability during surge of popularity, etc.).
"Amazon cuts them off, then says the Lieberman call had nothing to do with it. We have no reason to doubt Amazon. It's consistent with their philosophy of not taking sides in political battles."
Seriously? Is there some memo addressing this self-evident truth that I missed? What Amazon did was politically expedient. That doesn't mean they didn't take sides.
"We have no reason to doubt Amazon" != "It is clearly obvious that their stated motivation is true." It's a claim that there isn't a lot of evidence for the claim that Amazon has bowed to politics in the past, which is not the same as saying that they didn't this time. I do not have enough evidence to judge the claim myself, I'm just observing what you're reading the text as is not what it says.
I would also point out that large service hosts also have a vested interest in resisting government intrusions, because it's bad for Amazon to have a reputation of trashing your service every time some government somewhere burbles something to them. Exactly how "expedient" this is overall is actually a tricky thing to judge and the evidence isn't all one-sided. Again, I don't have enough information to judge.
From the rest of the essay, I got the impression that he is giving them the benefit of the doubt, but finds it implausible, given all the other friction wikileaks is experiencing.
What I don't understand is EveryDNS's claim that the DDoS was affecting them. Why would the bots be making repeated DNS requests? It seems like an efficient bot would cache the IP in order to speed up the flood.
Is the DoS targeted against WikiLeaks or EveryDNS? Attackers have been known to target DNS servers instead of HTTP servers if that's the weakest point.
Saying that a torrent can't be DDoS'd is wrong. The tracker can be DDoS's and DHT doesn't seem (at least to me) to be as good at distribution as using a tracker.
the problem with official cablegate torrents is that there are very few trackers in them and DHT is reportedly disabled. Not sure why they did it this way.
DHT and Peer Exchange are just about good enough to download a torrent in the absence of a tracker, albeit with a much longer "spin up" time than usual. If tens of thousands of people were all on one torrent, and most of them had DHT / PE enabled, it should work pretty well.
And of course as cryptoz pointed out, there's no shortage of trackers to use. If more are needed, it would be cheap and easy to make a few yourself, opentracker should use almost no resources.
There are daily, updated releases of the cables available to date. There is not, as far as I know, a torrent of the entire dataset (it is being released piecewise). These torrents are trivial to find on google, etc. https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=wikileaks+cable+torren...
There is also a torrent of the "insurance" file, but no-one (publicly) knows what that contains.
The "insurance" torrent contains all of the (unredacted) cables and other damaging information in encrypted form. If Wikileaks can't keep their site up, they just might release the password.
