The Economy of Wikileaks

StefanBerlin writes "Wikileaks is fast becoming one of the most politically important platforms on the Web. In this interview Julian Assange, the spokesperson, talks about its current situation and about the financial and economic background of Wikileaks. He also talks about why they cancelled the planned auction of the emails of Hugo Chavez's former speechwriter in Venezuela, and about Wikileaks' plans for a subscription model that could possibly solve the site's financial problems once and for all."

Comments

If every...

[Anachragnome]

If every single registered /. member donated ONE dollar, they would be back in business.

C'mon, folks. Give it up.

Re:If every...

[Anonymous Coward]

If every single registered /. member donated ONE dollar to me, I wouldn't have to read slashdot on company time.

Re:If every...

[maxume]

If you give $2, they won't notice me not giving $1.

Re:If every...

[interkin3tic]

Of course if it got out that you gave ONE dollar to an organization, that would be pretty embarrassing, you'd be seen as cheap.

And you know who might publicly reveal who gave exactly ONE dollar?

Wikileaks.

Discussion system like slashdot.

[lazy_nihilist]

What wikileaks also needs is a good discussion system for each story/leak. That way the audience also can directly participate.

Re:Discussion system like slashdot.

[Anonymous Coward]

The title and content of your post seem to be in opposition.

Re:Discussion system like slashdot.

[Philip_the_physicist]

Whilst I happen to prefer using a newsreader to a web discussion interface, the /. system is probably the best blog comment system I have come accross. The content of the comments (and sometimes the quality of the moderation) are less good, and the javascript should be made faster, but the design is good.

Re:Discussion system like slashdot.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

When shown an early Alpha of the slashcode by Alan Turing, Churchill remarked that it was "the worst electrical message board system, except for all the others that have been tried"...

An anonymous coward then called them both "cocksmoking teabaggers" and was promptly modded down. With extreme prejudice.

Re:Discussion system like slashdot.

[0100010001010011]

Why not post on that of which we do not speak?

It was set up as a 'discussion system' 20+ years ago. It's mirrored across the world rather quickly. There's even a Google front end.

There's MORE than enough bandwidth. Pirates figured out how to post binaries (and large ones at that) a long time ago. Make it a moderated group, tada. WikiLeaks replacement. Put a few servers up in countries with decent laws and mirror between those.

Re:Discussion system like slashdot.

[uncqual]

Check out the progressive web site DailyKos.com.

Although I certainly don't agree with a lot of their "content", their comment system is pretty spiffy.

The whole moderation thing is handled differently and the result of it is binary - "Hidden - REALLY, YOU CAN'T SEE IT" or, well, "Not Hidden", but that's really an editorial decision. Their decision is probably appropriate for their site, not so much for /.. (So, what is the correct way to end a sentence that doesn't ask a question but ends in /.? To put a double period results in a drooling slash...)

Their site is much faster and more obvious than /. and I'm sure the whole moderation level you want to see could easily be incorporated.

Their 'search for comments by xxx' function sucks, but hopefully that will be spiffed up in the upcoming DK4 version.

Have they

[JustOK]

Have they considered charging to NOT publish stuff?

Re:Have they

[Iguanadon]

That's a harsh way to put it. I would call it more of a "Protective Services" product.

You know, it would be terrible if this article came out detailing your illegal business practices...

In all seriousness, I'm curious how they verify submissions. All I could find was "The simplest and most effective countermeasure is a worldwide community of informed users and editors who can scrutinize and discuss leaked documents." What's stopping someone from making up a false story about a political/corporate enemy and submitting it to them?

Re:Have they

[BigSlowTarget]

Sure, they could sell advertising in the form of big black boxes pasted over the materials

Re:Have they

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Architecturally, probably not much. Unless you have a crack team of snoops and muckrakers who already know a great deal, perfect verification(especially of whistle-blowers who would prefer not to be identified) isn't going to happen. If you knew enough to confirm the document, you wouldn't really need the document.

That said, though, lying is hard and complex lies are even harder. Junior-high gossip isn't such a big deal and if you are just preaching the the choir virtually anything will do; but producing a document, or series of documents, that embodies a complex lie without tripping over yourself is really tricky.

There are the technical details(is the font anachronistic/unsuitable, letterhead, email headers, internal terminology, jargon, references) and the stylistic ones(can you write this in a single voice, or do you have to simulate multiple distinct writers, quite possibly using various degrees of formality within email exchanges? Do any of the people being imitated have publicly available writings?) and the plain nit-picky continuity/fact checking stuff(was Mr. X employed with title Y at time Z? What does the wayback machine say about foocorp.com in 1996?)

This is not to say that it is impossible, of course. Lying is perfectly possible, and frauds have been perpetrated, sometimes for extended periods. However, it is rather tricky to lie well. I'm sure that wikileaks will be the target of a misinformation campaign at some point, it might already have been. I suspect, though, that it will be partially protected by a few factors:

Since simply lying to people who are already convinced is easy and not very risky(since you don't need any actual inside information), there are already loads of places to do it and strong incentives to do it in the most sympathetic ones. Wikileaks is a sympathetic audience for whistleblowers and transparency enthusiasts(and probably a fair few conspiracy types); but if you have faked documents about zionist atrocities in occupied palestine or the secret one world government black helicopter conspiracy, there are fair more sympathetic venues.

As a means of swaying the undecided(during an electoral campaign, for instance) wikileaks is of mediocre value. As a repository of otherwise unavailable documents, it is good for "slow burn" stories that come out over time in the face of official denial, the sort of thing that dedicated investigators and wonk types can work onl; but if you just want to insinuate that your opponent is a draft dodger with a taste for satanism and child sodomy a week before the polls open, you can just hire a push-polling telemarketing firm and cover a broad swath of the voting public.

More generally, it is always easier to lie in the direction of what is already widely believed(whether or not this wide belief is well founded). If wikileaks dealt largely in personal scandal and gossip, this would be a very damaging fact(consider the so-called "cyber-bullying" which largely consists of slander and harassment of whoever is already unpopular in a given social circle). However, since that isn't their area of operation, it is less of an issue. Nobody thinks warm and fuzzy thoughts about secretive offshore banks, or shady quasi-privatized former soviet industries, or sinister clandestine intelligence agencies. Slander can hardly hurt them. Indeed, only proof compelling enough to move public outrage and/or legal power within a society against them will suffice to pierce the benefit of the doubt which they are typically accorded. Real documents have a hard enough time doing this, faked ones would have an even harder time.

Subscribers?

[Darkness404]

Doesn't having a subscription model kinda defeat the other point of WikiLeaks, that is that anyone can download, analyze and verify the sources? Wikileaks is a good source so you can actually check out the real information itself rather than worry about all the crap surrounding it. For example, the leaked climate e-mails, you had some sources saying it without a doubt proves that global warming is nothing more than a myth with falsified data to support it, and others saying that the e-mails told really nothing. Most of the sources didn't publish the e-mails so how does an informed person decide which is right? They go to the source.

While a subscription might be easy for journalists and other people who are making money off of Wikileaks to subscribe to, what about dissidents of an oppressive government who want to see for themselves abuses that the government did? What about the general citizen who wants the source? A subscription model fails and will simply lead to someone making a less-secure mirror of Wikileaks with all the files and such and Wikileaks loses.

Re:Subscribers?

[negRo_slim]

What if subscribers simply got to see content before non paying viewers got to see it.

Re:Subscribers?

[Darkness404]

It depends what "sooner" means. If sooner is 1-2 days, perhaps it wouldn't be too bad, but a week or more would have bad effects because of outdated information. The "mainstream" news tends to not focus on one topic too long unless it helps their agenda meaning that an important article might fade from public eyes quicker than it needs to be leaving it lost in a multitude of links.

Re:Subscribers?

[PCM2]

You're not thinking very far ahead. Who's to say that the people who can afford to buy the information will choose to disclose it? Perhaps they will only disclose it to other wealthy elite?

Also, consider this: Many revolutionary factions assume that when their members get captured, they will be tortured. They furthermore assume that nobody is strong enough not to sing under torture. So they set up a policy: keep your mouth shut for 48 hours. Suck it up for that long. After 48 hours, tell them anything and everything you want. Sing like bird. Tell the truth! It won't matter. 48 hours is long enough to erase any embarrassing fact, or any compromising truth, rendering any confessions worthless.

Re:Subscribers?

[vlm]

It depends what "sooner" means. If sooner is 1-2 days, perhaps it wouldn't be too bad, but a week or more would have bad effects because of outdated information

No need for an outdated "time intervals" here. Set a bounty. We figure it costs us $X to run this article, and we freely release it to the public when donations total $X, of course if you want to see a neatly watermarked copy right now, simply send a monetary donation of more than $1, up to whatever you think it might be worth, and we'll send you a nice watermarked copy, note we create and deliver your individualized copy in strict order of dollars donated, of course. Oh and by the way here is a snapshot of our current queue with dollar amounts and estimated processing time so you can intelligently balance your desire with your donation. That creates a nice long tail effect where a major TV network journalist will gladly donate the cost of a used car to scoop their competitors, yet a volunteer group or a poverty stricken individual (i.e. a student) in no hurry can get a copy for about the cost of an old fashioned paper newspaper.

They don't sell information.

[srothroc]

The thing that bothers me about the interview is that he says he's limiting access to information to artificially lower supply and induce demand; but that's not what they're doing. The information is still out there. Anyone who wants to give the information to someone other than wikileaks is able to do so. It's not "their" information to control or limit.

What they can and do control is the service that they provide -- namely: checking, collating, and hosting the information. I think it's an important distinction that needs to be made, though it may be semantics.

Charging is a very bad idea

[bl968]

Once they charge for subscriptions then they become a commercial organization and they would most likely be under the gun for more stringent copyright claims and enforcement. They currently benefit from the non-commercial use provisions of the fair use doctrine.

Why not Torrent large files?

[jonwil]

Why not make large (in terms of expected bandwidth use) files available through BitTorrent in order to take load off the Wikileaks servers?

You guys are missing the point.

[SteelRat]

I could explain it, but why not watch their presentation that they gave a couple weeks ago at CCC and actually understand what they're talking about firsthand.
Presentation page, big mp4 video, torrent.

BT for web pages -- easy but not done

[jonaskoelker]

Is there a BT technique that can be applied to web pages?

Sure, can it be that hard?

Give a URI of some resource. Have your web/torrent browser look for peers/seeds who have copies of that resource in some DHT. Ask those who have it to send it to them.

There's absolutely nothing stopping anybody from using BT as the application-layer transport protocol for HTML and other web content.

I'm no expert on P2P networks; maybe other kinds of protocols are better suited.

I think the hard part is making Microsoft implement this in IE, so that everybody will be able to justify switching to this.

Re:BT for web pages -- easy but not done

[Arancaytar]

A big problem is latency and overhead. The Bittorrent protocol is designed for asynchronous downloading of large, immutable data files, not serving relatively small web resources while you wait for the page to load. Particularly dynamic pages like a wiki, where you'd have additional latency+overhead due to the static files getting stale and having to be reseeded.

Naturally, the actual PDFs could be torrented, which would be a great idea. I don't think we'll see websites on magnet:// URIs viewable in the browser, though.

Re:BT for web pages -- easy but not done

[shaka]

As you say, the technology doesn't really work well for web browsing as of today, and I think you're correct in that WikiLeaks will implement something like this right now.

I do, however, think that this - or something like this - is the path we will eventually walk down, when the Wiki and the Blog have converged into a WYSIWYG/WYSIWYM capable editing platform for lots of different people and organizations.

I also think that this is where Opera Unite is pointing. DHT, the web and the Internet will be viewed as the same phenomenon 100 years from now, the next step up since the printing press.