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WikiLeaks Starts Mass Mirroring Effort
A beautiful mind writes "WikiLeaks is asking for hosting space on Unix-based servers. The replication is implemented by a rsync+ssh based push that copies static files to a known path, authenticated via the private half of this public key. The complete website is a few GB in size, making it feasible to replicate on a large scale. The mirror list will be published when the number of independent mirrors reaches 50." Note: wikileaks.ch seems to be down for the moment, but eventually the above links may require that instead of 213.251.145.96. See also this WikiLeaks address finder. And for even more news, try this Twitter search.
Lower the barrier of entry even further, and just throw up a torrent or ten of static files which can be hosted anywhere, without fear of compromising your own server.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Since it's already released. It's already been revealed at least in Swedish news, that part of the encrypted "insurance" file that's been distributed via BT, is the *full* cablegate archive -- remember that by far most haven't been released yet, at least not to non-news organizations. And that's part of that file, and then some unknown stuff too. So if anything would happen to these guys that would piss them off enough, they'd just release the keys and boom, thousands of users would have this data.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
You don't give them your keys, you simply allow them to authenticate with their private key by adding their pubic key to your authorized keys list.
You control your server, so if you're paranoid take some precautions. Set up an account (or better yet, an accout on a new VM) specifically for this with limited permissions and access. If you're really paranoid, you obviously won't be doing this at all.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
The current leaks are out. You cannot put the genie back in the bottle. Syncing around the world will do no good if the centralized source synced against keeps vanishing and eventually stays vanished.
My point is, that the current damage is done. Yanking WikiLeaks offline is about preventing further damage, and when it finally does go for good, people will be left with a stagnant, yesterday's news version. A million mirrors of previously disclosed documents wont help future leaks get distributed, while the people mirroring the current ones are literally just stepping into harms way.
Operation Streisand!
Could this be the first real battle waged mostly in the digital world? Every free country is out to get this guy and prevent him from getting his word out. The outcome of this will speak volumes for the future for the concept of being able to speak your mind.
( yes, i know there is questions about legality of the data, but that isn't the real issue here )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
While I am kinda rooting for wikileaks in this, I think anyone who is considering to sign up to think about this:
1. you give them shell access to your host
2. you grant access on the basis of a ssh public key, which you're getting from an unencrypted page. It could be anyone's and it could be coming from anywhere.
Consider the risks carefully before you sign up.
Wikileaks: please put some more thinking into your backup plans, even if you have to come up with them in emergency.
So, being a US citizen here, and presently in the US, if I offer up a personal box, how much trouble am I in legally?
If I do get 'hauled in' what could I possibly be charged with?
As someone who isn't a US politician, I'm not equipped to fully answer your question. They're the ones with the power. They're the ones whose wrongdoings are being revealed. That's a really grim combination. I'm guessing that you're in exactly as much trouble as they decide and you'll be charged with whatever they feel like. Probably treason or some trumped up terrorism charge.
Understand this: patriotism in the US now means supporting the government, not the constitution.
The only thing you can do to protect yourself is educate as many fellow citizens as possible and vote for anyone who isn't in favor of the idiocy going on. If there are no non-idiot candidates left, frankly it's time to rebel. But that's just my opinion.
"Oh no... he found the
I live in Thailand and WikiLeaks is blocked here for some ridiculous reason. The more the 'authorities' around the world try to squeeze the balloon, the more it bubbles out somewhere else. So this is golden for me. The more they are forced to host their site in a non-conventional highly-distributed way, the easier it becomes for the people of Thailand to access it.
He is MY douchebag. He is the way i would want any douchebag to be like. I would share a flat with such a douchebag, at any given point.
As far as douchebags go, there were a lot of douchebags among the people who have pioneered this age of democracy that the power elite has made null and void.
Benjamin franklin used to strip naked and sit on a chair in the middle of a long corridor in his mansion, after opening the windows from both sides and ensuring that the corridor had good breeze.
Thomas paine was SO aggressive in his crusade against religion that, he set up a church of reason, and started a new religion.
i can go on and on.
in the list that can be made out of quirkiness, oddness, douchebagness of those people who now we see as pioneers of freedom or fighters of democracy, assanges alleged 'douchebagness' wouldnt even qualify in the top 100.
and it is as another poster had just commented: assange has done more than any western government did for freedom and democracy, since world war II.
our governments do not want us to know things they have done. this was supposed to be a democracy, in which people were in power, as 'we the people'. we have become 'them the people', who are herded.
wake up. wikileaks is what we have. assange and his team, are the ones doing it. support them. for your future and your children's.
Read radical news here
Never have mod points when I really need them. I've never seen people so terrified of the truth since.....well....hmmm.... I'd REALLY like to get a look at those Cheney Energy Task Force documents that they've been hiding from us for 10 years. I can hope that these will be leaked eventually.
http://lieberman.senate.gov/index.cfm/news-events/news/2010/12/amazon-severs-ties-with-wikileaks
"I call on any other company or organization that is hosting Wikileaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them. Wikileaks' illegal, outrageous, and reckless acts have compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world."
C.f. "There are times when we must all endure adjustment to the Constitution in the name of security."
Coincidence? I think not!
That's your list. Other people have their lists, perhaps overlapping. You have no more standing than anyone else to claim yours is the correct list.
As for the value of the Karzai assessments and English prince quips, they are what has focused public attention on these leaks, including the ones you agree are worth releasing. Without the gossipy ones, the corporate mass media of the world would ignore all of it, except as headlines about Assange himself, which would be largely attacking him, and counterproductive to getting the public to look at the leaks.
Which is in fact the main problem, that's now exposed. The NY Times wasn't directly given copies of these leaks, because they spun the last leaks to make it harder to get leaks to the public, the opposite of their role as supposed journalists. Most US media was exposed as at least subservient to government messages, however false and even inane, attacking the releases, and in many cases actively collaborating with the government to protect it from public perception. That's the government's job, to protect itself, and mixing the two is the most seriously bad fact exposed by this leak. It should now be perfectly clear to a lot more people that in the normal course of events our journalists collaborate with government on propaganda, rather than inform the public about what's done supposedly in the service of the people. Probably the greatest defect in our society, directly protecting the two others: bribery and reckless debt at every level.
The other big problem is just the ridiculously broad sweep of secrecy in the US government. Secret "security letters" prohibiting people telling even their wives they've been indicted, let alone the public that is named as the complainant in the secret court cases. Secret wiretaps on everyone, web email and phone. "National security" excuses that kill lawsuits by people imprisoned and tortured for years without any evidence there's even a reason they were captured. All "secret", so immune to any due process, yet in reality available to something like three million people with "security clearance". At least one of whom wasn't reliable enough not to leak this stuff to Wikileaks. Securing so much info among so many authorized people is probably impossible, yet the government pretends that it's necessary and practical - a huge waste, as well as a severe security risk in the much smaller amount of info that really should remain secret, at least for a while.
Then there's the big problem in international diplomacy itself. That applecart is letting the Iraq War go into its 9th year, the Afghanistan War go into its 10th, military action spreading to many countries, Iran continuing towards a bomb, N Korea actually bombing S Korea, genocide continuing in Sudan, drug wars consuming Mexico without releasing Columbia or any other country already in it... That applecart needs to be upset. The amount of damage done by these mostly petty revelations mostly damages the counterproductive complacency that US diplomacy cruises under. Indeed, despite the government's various whiners about how damaging these leaks are, the State Department totally refused to help Wikileaks redact the leaks - proving they value whining about it more than whatever's damaged by it. More truth reported to the public along the way would make diplomacy better, more effective, more trustworthy instead of just an ocean of lies no one believes.
This leak was a purge. The actual damage was small and localized. The actual damage done by the systems it upset is much worse. There is no end in sight for that business as usual unless it's upset. This leak is a chance for that to be upset. And as we now enter the phase of actual recriminations against someone not in the club of domesticated "journalists", including arresting Assange for "rape" and terminating Wikileaks access to the Internet without any due process, and perhaps even assassinating him or someone close to him as people including the Canadian prime minister have called for in public, there will be more backlash. And a hell of a lot of backlash against this incompetent yet tyrannical security state is both earned and long overdue.
--
make install -not war
I used to think this. Upon further consideration I changed my mind. Just because this is how thing have been done in the past, why does it have to be done this way now? Why can't we have diplomacy without back room deals? Why cant peoples REAL opinions be exposed and known.
I think if there was more honesty in the world things would be better. Maybe not easier, but better.
I donated money via pay pal on Dec 3rd, the day wikileaks had their account cut off. Pay pal accounts are often put on a 180 day hold. I called paypal to verify my money is no longer held in paypal. They said they can say nothing about the issue. They would not even send that to me in writing. They would not give me a dispute number or any other tracking number for my unanswered question. The only comment they had was to contact the better business bureau. Anyone know a good laywer willing to call the pay pal legal department and find out where my donation is sitting?
I think it is fairly obvious why wikileaks wants to use ssh/push method to mirror their data. They can't use polling because, frankly, with the way they are being pushed around and shut down all the time there is just no way to guarantee that any host, domain name or IP address they provide would be available for an extended period of time.
Push method with a specific public/private key would allow them to push content from anywhere, as they are being chased and forced to change servers and providers.
I thought it was obvious but may be worth clarifying.
Btw, the main site seems to be down again.
Candid assessments about Karzai's leadership : DO NOT RELEASE
... We are getting a different story o the truth, and that will blow into our face very quickly.
Why the heck not
In fact I recon the US goverment has had enough and they sent these files to wikileaks them selves.
Name calling of the Prince of England : DO NOT RELEASE
Big deal, what does it mean that diplomats are embarased ?
Nice try, United States Government.
Obi-Wan's last words apply here.
The only way he could be compromised would be if he released fabricated documents. He is being accused of a lot of things, but no one has dared question his honesty.
Unix (the free variants) can be fully audited down to the last bit if necessary (unusual/bar behavior can be much more easily explained and fixed with some investigative effort).
Windows is simply NOT up to dealing with high security needs.
And the actions of Amazon and many other corps play dirty with their customers when the State Dept or Pentagon tell them to. I don't think MS is any exception to that corporatist dynamic.
Unofficial Wikileaks mirror on I2P
Yes, the full link really is that long. That is because I2P does not fully rely on domain names... that b64 string is the site's public key which is also it's address.
* You need the I2P software (a FOSS project and free download) to use both of the above address. *
The announce thread for the I2P mirror is here.
Once the info for the new site propagates through the network, you can even access the I2P mirror *without* the I2P software using this URL. Of course, using this method you won't be anonymous.
A word about I2P: It's a network that provides anonymized IP-like communication using methods similar to Tor, but designed to handle torrents and other large loads efficiently. It is also less centralized than Tor, and taking down even 90% of the nodes (incl original ones) should still leave it running and accessible. It also has facilities for automatically mirroring files and sites. One downside is that configuring your browser to use the I2P Web is a manual process that must be done carefully. Overall though it seems to be pretty impressive.
So you thought Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn , Andrei Sakharov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Sakharov and other Samizdat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat authors were a joke. Gave them Nobel prizes. Now, when you have got your first real samizdat author, you know how it feels.
I think you're doing yourself a disservice to dismiss feudalism as necessarily leading to inequality or inherently unjust, especially considering the state of modern production technologies and their impact on the working class. For all it's faults, feudalism provides an individualistic economic system realistically capable of providing for all members of a society even in the absence of large-scale trade and finance.
While I agree with your sentiment, and most of your analysis, I'm not sure that we agree on root causes, ie. conspiracy of the elite. A democracy dominated by a working middle class is such an historical aberration that it's important to recognize alternate, more fundamental, explanations for it's decline.
Human work can be separated into two types: productive work and make-work. These should need no definition. Productive work is that which produces capital. Make-work is that which limits the destruction of capital. For most of human civilization, make-work has dominated. In fact, make-work could historically be considered to be the "sine qua non" of human civilization. There has nearly always been a glut of worthless people in all societies who need busy-work to keep them from destroying the tiny bit of progress eeked-out by the rest.
Make-workers gravitate towards low-skilled government-subsidized work such as construction and social services, security and government industries. They built the pyramids. They conquered Europe several times over. They built thousands of miles of transportation infrastructure, mostly by hand. But they consumed many times more resources than they ever saved or produced. They are paid more than they would in a productive position relative to their skills, yet cost less to society than they would if left to their own devices.
The important distinction is that make-workers have very little real political power, aside from their willingness to stop doing busy-work and start destroying things instead. To counter this, societies have developed simple mechanisms for eliminating make-workers who cannot be controlled: wars and prisons. Those who display a tendency to cause destruction are sent to prison. When the prisons fill up or become burdensome, prisoners are sent to war. If they come back with more resources than they left with, they are greeted as heroes. If not, they are ridiculed and minimalized.
In my view, middle-class democratic worker's paradises arise only for a short time, as the consumption of newly discovered resources enables make-workers to become productive workers temporarily. They then gain a modicum of political influence, proportional to the value of their work in exploiting the resource as quickly as possible. When the resource is consumed, work loses value, make-work again dominates, and democracy subsides.
The United States arose to exploit the natural resources of the Americas. Workers here had an extremely good deal, and lots of political power, up until the exact moment at which those resources were economically depleted. That was probably more than 20 years ago. It's time to recognize this fact, move on, and establish more efficient modes of production, rather than trying to re-erect a democratic worker's paradise without the resources to support one.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Let me tell you this, as someone hailing from a not-so-free country: these kinds of leaks would have much less effect in non-free societies than they do now in the free West. For a very simple reason: in the West, the freedom of press may be imperfect, but by and large it still exists. You can disseminate that information far and wide. Just look at the list of newspapers which published the stories based on the leaks!
From there we come to another important point: in democratic countries, the people care, and that translates into votes. Since elections are (again, by and large) free and fair, the politicians have to mind that. Even aside from elections, there are some expectations of courteous behavior from politicians - and we already saw some resignations stemming from all those leaks.
In a country like China or Russia? Puh-lease. For starters, no major newspaper would even publish it, so most people wouldn't know. The Net? If you publish within the country, it would be classified as "extremist material" and servers taken down quickly. Even outside the country, they can simply block you - yeah, you can use proxies etc, but vast majority of people simply won't know it's out there.
And even if they do, then what? Elections are rigged anyway. Candidates are hand-picked by those in power, so there is no real choice.
There is already heaps and heaps of information on various people in positions of power and importance in Russia, up to and including the president, that are enough to earn them several life sentences each if they were properly pursued by police and courts. That information is out there today, and has been out there for a while. And it's much more direct than what's in those leaked cables - we aren't talking about lying to electorate. We're talking about stuff such as important politicians running over someone with their car - a manslaughter! - and getting away with it unscathed. We're talking about massive financial fraud, which reflects on every single citizen. We're talking about direct connections to organized crime, and in some cases directly to violent crimes such as murders.
And yet no-one has done anything about it so far.
So, no. If you want to further democracy via transparency, you got to have democracy to begin with. Wikileaks works great in the West, and I'm glad that they are focusing their efforts where they can actually be useful. For other places, you need something else.
I'm intrigued- I've got a question that's been bugging me ever since the Wikileaks drama started, and I'm interested if anyone can shed any light.
Wikileaks is basically filling the same role as a newspaper- someone has sent them classified documents, now they're publishing them. If a government wants to stop a newspaper publishing something, they usually apply for an injunction order in a civil court. Failure to comply with injunctions can result in criminal charges, such as contempt of court.
Why has the US government not applied for an injunction on Wikileaks? The site hasn't actually done anything wrong yet; disobeying an injunction would be something they could actually nail them with. Why on Earth have we gone straight from "we don't like it" to "murder him in his sleep" without any intermediate legal steps?
Injunctions would presumably be easier to get than trying to smear Assange with sexual offences or take the site down with DDOS attacks. If Wikileaks were a newspaper it would certainly have been the first move by the government, instead of trying to strong arm them with illegal and semi-legal attacks.
Nice prose full of fluff that let's you try to blame the lower classes for their circumstances. The people who built the Pyramids were not paid, build them or die. Conscripted soldiers were not paid, fight or die. Infrastructure and paying the people cost us more money than that infrastructure produced? Even though citizens and businesses rely on this infrastructure every single day? How about all the "make-workers" in middle or upper management? How about whole companies setup just to stifle competition and leech(patent trolls). How about people in corporations/government to lobby & be buddy buddy with each other to lock out competition? How about an entire industry that was setup to make imaginary financial derivatives that had absolutely no value to them and plummeting the economy into the worst recession/depression since The Great Depression? There is a lot of spinning tires going on at all levels. Usually the people on the bottom are the ones who are actually physically doing the labor and "being productive", those above are usually whipping boys making sure the cattle is getting more productive each year. Rarely are the people at the bottom there because they have tenancies to want to blow people up overseas or stealing from people, more likely it's to survive and they do not have many resources around them to succeed.
Those who go to war & those who do crime usually have something in common: they're poor. The military & crime may offer them the quickest way out of their circumstances. Usually going to war means doing the bidding of rich men. Also I am not sure when was that last time we released our prisoners to go to war? I am not aware of us emptying any of our prisons to send inmates over to Iraq...
Usually middle-class workers "paradise" goes away because "the elite"/Corporatocracy sees that people are getting a bigger piece of the pie and devises ways to extract that piece to make their own piece bigger. This is partially a folly of "growth based" economies where nothing is ever enough. Find, exploit, consume, move on. Or what's been more popular as of late "Fraud, exploit, consume, move on". Most companies in positions are power are not there because they got there honestly. Exploitation, fraud, bribes, wars..etc... It's dirty power and nothing worth looking up to.
Please do define, what resources the middle-class exploited & depleted in the US that caused the downfall of the US middle class? I would suggest the move towards globalism has done more to harm the middle-class, but then again Globalism has brought us cheap plastic stuff from china, that was cheap because it's exploiting the Chinese people. Thought it's been bigger for corporations who can legally pay people slave wages.
How would you suggest we change our modes of production to be more efficient? Can you give some examples? Is that a euphemism for something else? Pointless fluff? Can you give some hard examples where the US can reinvent itself with "modern more efficient modes of production", yeesh sounds like I read that off a PowerPoint presentation.
I know I'm preaching to the choir, here, but human-nature says that most people (even Slashdotters) are watching this unfold without realizing they can be a part of it.
The WL episode is showing us that our own politicians would readily abandon core values of democracy in order to avoid embarrassment. It also clearly demonstrates that we live in a world where our personal communications can readily be disrupted at the whim of private corporations under pressure from these same politicians.
Democracy can only thrive with the uninhibited exchange of communications between individuals. If you want to help ensure democracy, do any of the following:
1) Run a TOR server ( http://www.torproject.org/ ). This is software that helps provide freedom and privacy by encrypting and distributing network communications. If you don't want to run TOR on your machine, rent a Virtual Private Server (VPS) and do it on someone else's box.
2) Support the EFF ( http://www.eff.org/ ). This organization understands technology and knows that in the digital age, information is power.
3) Support open-source distributed alternatives to web-based software-as-a-service. EveryDNS, Paypal, Twitter, Amazon's EC2, and even our beloved Google are points of vulnerability in democracy since their fundamental obligation is to shareholders instead of to an innate code of ethics. How would you find information if Google bowed to Government pressure? The only thing that will ensure corporations stay in line is the existence of alternatives such as a distributed search engine (http://yacy.de/ ).
4) Support open-source software by using it, contributing time or money to its development, and requesting that our Governments make policies to use it. The world would be a very different place if the power of public-key-encryption was kept solely in Government and Corporate hands. Only Free and Open Source Software ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open_source_software ) ensures that all members of society who use information technology are on the same footing.
5) Let others know what is at stake, spread the word. Democracy takes active participation, and this takes patience and explanation so that nontechnical Constituents have the understanding that you possess.
Our communications technology is only a tool and can be used to both facilitate democracy and better the world, or to enslave humankind. We are witnessing the first infowar of the digital age, and the powers that be will use it to push hard for bans on encryption, crackdown on peer-to-peer communication, and other information tools.
Will you watch silently and let information technology turn into a tool of repression, or will you take a stand while you still can? The race is on, do something!