Slashdot Mirror
Wikileaks Targets the Local News Frontier
eldavojohn writes "Wikileaks has been pretty successful on a global scale — from ACTA documents to East Anglian e-mails, it is the definitive place to find suppressed documents. But some are saying that now Wikileaks should begin focusing on a local level. From the article: 'The organization has applied for a $532,000 two-year grant from the Knight Foundation to expand the use of its secure, anonymous submission system by local newspapers. The foundation's News Challenge will give as much as $5 million this year to projects that use digital technology to transform community news. WikiLeaks proposes using the grant to encourage local newspapers to include a link to WikiLeaks' secure, anonymous servers so that readers can submit documents on local issues or scandals. The newspapers would have first crack at the material, and after a period of time — perhaps two weeks, [German Wikileaks spokesman Daniel] Schmitt said — the documents would be made public on the main WikiLeaks page.' Anyone reading this who works for a community news source and would like to host sensitive documents with no risk: here is your solution."
I suppose once the application becomes local tracing the submission becomes easier. There might be two ISPs in town and two newspapers. So there are two submission URLs to be searched for and finding them might not be too hard. And local laws vary. In some places it might be easy to get a law to search for a few URLs in proxy server logs.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The supply of journalists willing to play along if they get a two-week head start over their competitors is almost certainly a good deal larger than the supply of journalists willing to do so out of the goodness of their hearts.
It seems to me that redirecting more people to wikileaks holds sufficient incentive for journalists without the two week "holding period."
Sending more people to wikileaks increases the likelihood of leaked information. More leaks, more news, more sales.
The two weeks is NOT so that the local newspaper can 'spoon feed snippets' it's to give an actual journalist time to verify the accuracy and authenticity of the information. Without that, wikileaks is really nothing but a gossip site.
WikiLeaks didn't win that challange yet and I think it would be a good idea to support them by commenting on and rating their application here: http://generalapp.newschallenge.org/SNC/ViewItem.aspx?pguid=6aee8166-fb7c-4a2e-8581-fa6f6ff036dd&itemguid=3decc665-ebd1-46f0-95f4-f5fa57311062
You are an idiot. Despite the fact that the Director of the Hawaiian Health Department verified the birth certificate, that all those who have seen it have verified it, that both of Honolulu's major newspapers, the Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin published birth announcements in August, 1961, that the Obama campaign actually released a digitally scanned copy of the birth certificate, that time and again Hawaiian officials have said that it is real, you still think that it is a forgery?
What is wrong with you? There is no conspiracy. Obama was born in the U.S. He is a natural born citizen. Get over it.
I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.