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Hosting a Highly Inflammatory Document?
IndianaKim writes "I have been asked if I can host or assist in hosting a highly inflammatory document that reflects poorly on a Police Department. I want to help, but I also do not want the headache and possible subjection to search warrants and/or illegal searches. The document is so inflammatory that it could interest the FBI and DoJ and cause them to investigate the government officials involved. I live in the same county, but not the same city, and therefore could be subject to a search (legal or not) by some of these government agencies. I have been asked to host it on a server outside of the US. At this time, I do not have the ability to do that, but I could set it up if I needed to. My question is: would you host it if you were asked? How would you go about protecting the document and yourself?"
Wikileaks dude
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Assuming the document is small, you could install Xerobank (formerly TorPark) and create an account on Wikileaks and upload it to Wikileaks through the Tor onion router. Your anonymity would be assured in a hilariously sound manner.
Your website need do nothing more than link to Wikileaks and ponder how it got there.
That would be my plan of action. I would also be careful with all the machines/devices used to transfer that file.
Depending on how important/inflammable this document is, I might look into buying a cheap 20GB laptop hard drive, installing ubuntu, going to a star bucks, doing the above and then "disposing" of the drive and all media so that there are no questions. Sorry to sound like Harvey Keitel on Pulp Fiction but
My question is: would you host it if you were asked? How would you go about protecting the document and yourself?
It depends on who is asking me. There are maybe 5 or 6 people in my life that if they approached me with this request and said it was serious and said it had to be me hosting it, I would do it no questions ask. I would not read the document, I would stop them from explaining to me what is the document, I would do it and give them the link. I would then go directly to my lawyer and have a small chat with him. Then I would grab a glass of Chivas Regal and put on a record and take the battery out of my cell phone and relax.
My work here is dung.
net cafe hundreds of miles away using an onion routing anonymizing proxy. Problem solved.
Bad idea. Most cyber cafes i've seen have cctv.
HavenCo used to host anything but child porn. They have a few more restrictions now but I think they would have no issue host criticism of a police department. They are based out of Sealand, an independent micronation sitting on a former World War II Maunsell Sea Fort.
Isn't this slashdot article enough to cause problems for you? If corrupt police suspect you have information that could harm them, then what is to stop them from causing problems for you? They're already corrupt aren't they?
I would say put it on wikileaks as fast as you can.
I'm not a lawyer though, so perhaps there are reasons to not do this? Perhaps contact a lawyer first. Give them a copy of the documents.
That's assuming there's nothing in the document itself that only a particular author would write. That's how they ended up identifying the unibomber.
You could use an existing laptop with an os installed on a flash drive or a live cd, buy a cheap $10 usb wifi adapter and chuck both the cd + wifi in the trash for about $20. Just a fyi ;)
For this to work you would also have to change your wireless interface's Ethernet MAC (hardware) address. By default this is a vendor-specific code that is probably unique enough that it could be used to link you to the upload. This would require that (a) the coffee shop kept some kind of long-term logging on their wireless device, (b) the authorities were able to trace the upload to the coffee shop, and (c) the police had some kind of suspicion of you already. All are improbable, but none are impossible.
Most wireless cards will let you change the hardware address. I'll leave instructions for how to do that to the enterprising googler.
The alternative is to use a cheap throwaway laptop with wireless, or a disposable wireless ethernet card.
(Yes, it's paranoid, but so is the original question.)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Well, "they" didn't identify the Unabomber - his brother did, because he recognized his writing style in his published manifesto, which in turn resulted in the forensic investigation and comparison of his manifesto to some earlier stuff that he'd written. The method is called stylometry (or stylometrics) and is used widely in forensic linguistics, but it's still only an indicator of authorship - not proof.
In the Unabomber case, they had two sets of texts, the manifesto written by the Unabomber and the texts written by Ted Kaczynski, hence it was relatively easy to compare the two sets and see if there was reason to believe the author of both sets to be the same. In this case, you'll have a single text by an unknown author... What will you compare it to first when you have no suspect or suspected texts? Exactly... This document will have to mean the end of the world before they start trawling the web for random texts and comparing. Mind you, these stylometric comparisons must be verified by a human, even though a lot can be automated with principal component analysis.
I'd say that the author can feel pretty safe, as long as he/she isn't a well-known author and/or uses linguistic constructions specific for his/her dialect or regiolect. Remove all meta-data from the file (e.g. go with plain text or HTML as suggested (far) above) and publish to wikileaks through Tor from a public hotspot. At least, that's what I'd do. I don't know about Brian Boitano, Buddha, Muhammed or Jesus.
Oh, and yes, I am a linguist. :)
"Live free or don't."
The Russians can do this, no problem. Probably some Ukrainians could easily do it too. Both charge more than the Chinese, but doing it there might bring some problems with the CPC. Disclaimer: I would never intend to do anything illegal, immoral, unethical, illogical, politically incorrect, or bad by anybody's definition of the word. If this is in any way seemed or inferred to be one of the above, I disavow any knowledge of my actions and plead insanity. Good luck and I hope that you fuck them up really good. Oh, I didn't mean that.
Martin Luther (with special attention to the 95 theses)
Martin Luther King, Jr.
"If I am such a genius, how come that I am drunk and lost in the desert with a bullet in my ass?" --Otto (Malcom ITM)
If you choose to stand up to things you don't like, you still have the choice of tactics in how to make your stand. Part of that it figuring out how to either 1) continue to remain alive and free, or 2) make it expensive for the opposition to kill or imprison you.
If I were given some hot data -- say, a copy of the "torture photos" that have made Obama lose his testicles (or perhaps to display that he never really had any) -- I would keep in mind that in order to get the information out there, I don't have to arrange for permanent hosting. I just get it out to a bunch of different places long enough for the Streisand Effect to work its magic.
My suggestion:
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
All .onion addresses are like that. It is associated to the public key of the site's private key, so that it cannot be spoofed.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.