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Hosting a Highly Inflammatory Document?

Posted by Soulskill on from the information-wants-to-be-free,-particularly-the-juicy-stuff dept.

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?"

8 of 471 comments (clear)

  1. I know where . . . by arizwebfoot · · Score: 5, Informative

    Wikileaks dude

    --
    Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
    1. Re:I know where . . . by fm6 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Good point about "the professionals". For one thing, Wikileaks is smart enough not to go to Slashdot for legal advice. They'd go to a lawyer, who'd tell you that local authorities can hold a local person accountable for web content, regardless of where it's hosted.

    2. Re:I know where . . . by JWSmythe · · Score: 5, Informative

          I really don't want to tell. ... I guess I should.

          My dad was a strong candidate for a senior county level elected position.

          The incumbent was well rooted in the "good ol' boy" system. He was close friends with the local judges, sheriff, and most of the deputies. This was very apparent during campaign season. You could spot the who's who of local politics at various fundraisers and political events.

          That rolled downhill to absorb quite a few other law enforcement people to do "a favor" for them. There was at least one state police officer involved, who later went to jail on bribery and corruption charges. One deputy involved also went away on bribery and corruption charges. Both of those happened after I moved away. I don't keep up with their news much, but a friend told me, and sent the newspaper clippings.

          Local police were very friendly with the sheriff's department, as the cities generally didn't have the required manpower at all hours, so through city and county agreements, all of their jurisdictions overlapped. A city police officer from three towns over had arresting powers in any city in the county as well as the unincorporated areas.

          When I mentioned that the deputy didn't have anything to hold me on, he didn't. He was actually being a good cop, and didn't want to put his ass on the line for something stupid that he had no knowledge of. The local PD wanted me, but were busy with something else.

          By distracting my family with the harassment, I believe they hoped my dad would drop out of politics. They couldn't harass him directly, because they knew he wouldn't screw up. I was a teenager, I'm more likely to do something stupid.

          For example, late one night I was driving out of a town towards home. It was a 4 lane divided highway, with only a few cars on the road. I saw a car going the other way, and didn't pay much attention. About a minute later, he had turned around, and was tailgating me. I wasn't sure if it was someone looking for trouble, or a cop, so I drove carefully, expecting them to hit me eventually. After 3 miles of tailgating, it turned out to be a deputy. After a patdown and search of my car, I was given a "careless driving" ticket, that was thrown out when I showed up in court. What if I had floored the gas to get away? I wasn't sure if I should run or not. If I had, that could have been reckless driving, evading law enforcement, blah, blah, blah. a whole stack of misdemeanor charges to put me in jail for a while. I got lucky.

      --
      Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
  2. 1. Upload to Wikileaks with Xerobank 2. Link to It by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Informative
    Assuming you & your friend are aware or desire that once this hits the internet it is forever online for all to see, you have friends across the pond. Yes, this is foreign hosting.

    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 ... when you're dealing with serious stuff ...

    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.
  3. Isn't this slashdot article... by Daemonax · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:1. Upload to Wikileaks with Xerobank 2. Link to by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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 ;)

  5. Re:1. Upload to Wikileaks with Xerobank 2. Link to by Emnar · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    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.)

  6. Re:1. Upload to Wikileaks with Xerobank 2. Link to by Lillesvin · · Score: 4, Informative

    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."