Wikileaks Needs Help, and Not Just Money

st1d writes to tell us that Wikileaks has put out a call for help. However, instead of just asking for money, they have also suggested technical and legal avenues for support. In the site's short life, Wikileaks has been at the center of many breaking scandals and investigations. "Wikileaks is currently overloaded by readers. This is a regular difficulty that can only be resolved by deploying additional resources. If you support our mission, you can help us by integrating new hardware into our project infrastructure or developing software for the project. Become patron of a WikiLeaks server or other parts of our technology, adding more pillars to the stability and balance of the WikiLeaks platform. Servers come trouble-free and legally fortified, software is uniquely challenging. If you can provide rackspace, power and an uplink, or a dedicated server or storage space, for at least 12 months, or software development work for WikiLeaks, please write to wl-supporters@sunshinepress.org."

Comments

Freenet

[Sanity]

It seems that Wikileaks should operate over Freenet. Leaks could be submitted anonymously that way, and also distributed anonymously. The advantage would be that it would be entirely decentralized, so there would be no organization vulnerable to legal action.

Freenet has been slow and hard to use in the past, but its improved quite a bit. It is the obvious platform for something like Wikileaks. Of course, there is nothing to prevent people from mirroring content on the web (since installing Freenet, like any piece of software, is a hassle). But at least there will be an unimpeachable backup of all data on Freenet.

Re:Freenet

[Splab]

TOR is already proven to be pretty unreliable since the exit node can sniff all the traffic, have enough exit nodes and you can track your target.

Re:Freenet

[0100010001010011]

Why not that of which we do not speak?
It's distributed world wide, mirrored about everywhere, everyone has access to it, it's fast as hell (maxes out my connection), you can post massive binaries to it, text files. Most places have up to 400 day retention now. It would be trivial to setup a script to repost stuff every 100 days. Put everything in a 7za and it shouldn't take up too much space.

If the RIAA/MPAA hasn't figured out how to touch it, I doubt many will.

Re:Torrents

[ThePhilips]

I'm surprised nobody yet thought up a BitTorrent analogue for HTTP - to offload/share traffic from busy sites.

I guess latencies are the problem, but faced with information being not available at all, higher latencies are probably a good compromise.

Sites like Wikipedia or WikiLeaks could definitely benefit from such technology.

Re:Irresponsible

[chdig]

A career that was ruined because something became publicly available is a career that should be ruined

What if the "something" that became publicly available had absolutely no direct bearing on the career of the person (ie sex scandal)? Could this not be a reason for why the U.S has so many seemingly perfect, dull, boring politicians that are good at playing the game, but bring no dynamicism to the political arena?

I'm the type that understands that sometimes backroom deals are best left in the backroom, and that people should stop interfering and meddling in personal affairs. Context is everything, and your black vs white argument might be right in some situations, but very wrong in others.

I agree that wikileaks needs to exist, and it gives freedom to those of us with less power and connections. Still, the power it has can be wielded wrongly, turning people like you into those that you're railing against. Your argument makes it sound like you would like power more than you would fairness.