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Openleaks Goes Live
Underholdning writes "Ars technica leaks the story of OpenLeaks launching. OpenLeaks is an alternative to WikiLeaks, with a few differences. 'OpenLeaks will not accept or publish documents on its own platform, but rather create many "digital dropboxes" for its community members, each adapted to the specific needs of our members so that they can provide a safe and trusted leaking option for whistleblowers.' Time will show if this will live next to WikiLeaks, or they will compete. For more information, check out the OpenLeaks website."
First leak : Obama is really an American.
When you bring down or threaten one site, six more pop up in its place. I would have thought that the lessons learned from fighting torrent sites would translate to government. I guess they'll never really learn.
Row row row FIGHT THE POWAH!
This is something I wouldn't have predicted, and I'm wondering if it's going to be along term trend. It's potentially a powerful game changer, and with such power, comes massive responsibility and impact. I hope that those pushing the leaks keep a fairly balanced view of the world so the cause doesn't consume them and push them to the extremes. Because if that happens, it becomes worthless again (and very damaging).
Funnyhacks - Wierd, unusual, and fun hacks
I wonder how long it is until a government or "evil" corporation creates one of these to get the leaks first hand.
and who will do its advertising, so that the mass media will HAVE to carry the leaks into the headlines ?
if you think material will just get carried into headlines and prime time news because of the contents, dont fool yourself - entire american public is unaware of what ACTA is, even as of now, despite it has been internationally fought over by all major players in the world. so, its indeed possible to keep public ignorant.
wikileaks is using the publicity assange generates through media and publicity stunts. in case you noticed, assange is always making the opening for a new leak a few weeks before it is published, and continuing to generate publicity for the upcoming leak.
you just dont create a dropbox and expect leaks to be seen by people. corporate contolled media WONT use it. they have successfully kept any potential leak in the dark since watergate, until wikileaks.
openleaks must find a way to make advertising.
Read radical news here
Yeap, picked it like a scab
It's exactly what they're are doing! Lemmings!
Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?
[ST8Z6FR57ABE6A8RE9UF]
I don't get it.
Why can't whistleblowers just post their dirt to facebook? With their commitment to protecting users' data, it'd be all over the place in no time.
Unless Zuckerberg grabs it up to auction to the highest bidder.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It's one thing to post documents on-line that Governments would rather keep secret. It's another to do like Wikileaks did and edit video to fit their personal views. If these sites would just post and not add their opinion; credibility would improve.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
Egyptian authorities apparently pulled the backbone plugs. As a result of the Egyptians protesting, because the Tunisians protested, because of a Wikileaked document, from a US Embassy saying the truth - there was an old, fucked up dictatorship, that is no more. Egyptians have their work laid out for them.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Because whistleblowers need the protection of anonymity. That's why we have whistleblower laws.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So these guys plan to release only to 'need-to-know' news organizations, approved by themselves and some sort of vote process? Yeah, that'll work well. If the media won't touch a certain story shopped around by OpenLeaks, we'll never know about it. I don't trust OpenLeaks; I hope they fail hard.
Wikileaks had it right - public disclosure with a reasonable attempt to scrub names not directly responsible for the crimes being exposed.
Because the people making leaks would rather not be thrown in prison, sued for everything they could ever earn, have a mysterious accident, have their families brutally massacred or be disappeared through extraordinary rendition. The whole point of wikileaks was to protect the source from identification and therefore harm.
Manning and Assange are both clearly protected by that whistleblower law. Wait a sec...
Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?
[ST8Z6FR57ABE6A8RE9UF]
Because wikileaks is already that organization. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6isk_4xsC8
The fact that WikiLeaks publishes documents and that its editor in chief is a union member (for journalists) means that even though it shares information with entities like NYT, Guardian, etc, they're protected in a manner that OpenLeaks is not. In a similar fashion, Cryptome is also protected because it publishes material.
I strongly suspect that the folks behind OpenLeaks have not done thorough research into the legal positioning here of themselves vs WikiLeaks and could easily find themselves in a boiling pot.
I, for one, would not want to be caught being a middle-man involved in the exchange of confidential material - which is what OpenLeaks is putting itself up for. I can easily see them being charged with aiding and abetting here....
Does he have a beautiful mane of white hair? Cause that's what I want in a leaker. Also charming gray eyes to go with it and dirty socks.
On the other hand, if they just posted raw content people would claim they're not journalists and, therefore, should not have protections under the first amendment.
Wait, didn't they claim that anyway?
Who knew...
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
So, after watching the video... it looks like they've invented a wiki... for leaks... amazing concept really.
Citation sorely needed. I've seen this view popping up all over the place. Has it honestly not occurred to you that the information was leaked because that's what the people in general wanted to know about? And that they have a limited capacity to review and redact the information?
Just because you don't like what's been leaked does not mean that there's a political bias involved. It's much more likely that the decisions are being made based upon the levels of interest and an attempt at providing for the common good rather than a vendetta against the US.
Wikileaks did not expose Manning -- Manning did by being an idiot and talking about it. Assange did not blow the whistle, he merely published it, and is deliberately non-anonymous in order to be the Wikileaks Drama Lightning Rod, or something.
There's nothing really open about openleaks. Its more a dropbox which is then piped to news agents.
Should have called it closed-except-to-journalistleaks , but I expect the domain was already taken.
before one of these sites is used by someone with a bad agenda to leak misinformation that does something horrible globally. You think things are bad with the status quo? I can imagine many people around the world that for their own personal profit or simple love of chaos will some day use a popular site to "leak" information that will do more harm than all the secrets that are being held. I hope not, but I think there is more potential for harm than good in all this.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
I am rather skeptical...
I dont think they'll have the same edge as Wikileaks.
Wiki-Leaks seemed to be a bit one sided. Leaking information that fits with their agenda, and keeping out other information.
I have no idea where you're coming from with this statement. Wikileaks is exposing the corruption of power, be it in politics, bureaucracy, the banking sector, wherever. The information they've released is relevant for all Americans to understand their power structure -- regardless of any political stripe (note they don't favour the Democrats over the Republicans), as well as those whose countries wheel and deal behind closed doors with the United States.
While I think it would be very helpful to have an organization dedicated to releasing information specific to very particular cases, Wikileaks does a great job of releasing general information important for all of us.
--
Information is the key to democracy
I imagine this has been suggested before, and I'm sure *all* of these things have been uploaded onto it, but instead of all these single-entity whistleblower avenues why don't whistleblowers just upload their secretz onto Freenet? Is it because you couldn't verify the authenticity of a document that was uploaded completely anonymously? Is it because the secret war plans will just get lost in the shuffle between child porn and random flogs? Or is it because of the low visibility it'll receive? I mean, isn't this what Freenet was created for?
Openleak's first leak was Wikileak server's root password.
5 minutes later, Wikileaks retaliated by posting Openleak's SQL database password.
Can we stop this nonsense right here. We're an English centric community, which WikiLeaks is apart of. Is it surprising then, that most of the leaks, involve us? In these instances we've been behaving badly, and as such, they're mostly going to be negative.
Would you employ some sort of rating and quota system, such that we release 1 for every country, and go out of our way to balance it? What if we don't have access to material?
We're more interested in ourselves, and not our neighbours, because of this you're going to see more stuff about us. As it is, I'm always quite surprised how much WikiLeaks has actually leaked about non-English speaking countries.
Also, your signature is missing a closing bracket, unless it terminates due to reaching the end of the string. But that would still be sloppy pseudo coding.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
You mean like the Israeli government working with U.S. govt, and media outlets did during the flotilla raids?
..only makes them spread elsewhere. Although the motives of leak releases, as well as the people they're releasing them to may be called into question the fact is that there are now two (at least) leak web sites out there rather than one. If these things go the way of bittorrent trackers have there'll be billions of them in no time.
So essentially it doesn't matter what happanes to Assange and Wikileaks - they've sewn the seeds of a new age already, and this sort of leaking is here to stay.
What I want to know is how long it will take for enough bullshit to be posted on the new generation of leak sites to have them ALL loose public credibility.
I think its incredibly insightful seeing how people go from slinging shit at rednecks and hicks for being ill-informed pro-war nutters, but then go totally mental knee-jerk crazy over a video like this. I mean, do you seriously think all we need to see is the footage of the van being shot up, and thats all there is to a war crime? What about the history? What about the context? What about the pressure? What about the 30+ minutes of the dudes in the chopper saying they don't know who the people are or what they're doing, but that they're pointing something at the helicopter and generally acting suspicious? What about the audio of them repeatedly asking their superiors to confirm that they should open fire, because they aren't sure they should? I mean, it was a massive fuckup, no doubt, but its so pathetic how people like you think you're somehow better than 'Joe Sixpack' (or whatever other weaselly insult you want to use), but you repeatedly demonstrate you're just as easily lead by anything that backs up your equally narrow world view.
The edited version of Collateral Murder has 10,840,454 views. The full version of Collateral Murder has 1,981,488 views. Which of the two got viewed more and ultimately influenced people's perception of this event? The edited version starts with a photograph as an introduction of the Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, the driver Saeed Chmagh and also a photo of his son crying. Later while the actual helicopter footage is playing they are highlighted again with an arrow and text "Namir w/camera" and "Saaed w/camera" respectively. At no point do we see an arrow pointing at the guys next to them saying "Bad Guy w/rocket launcher" or "Bad Guy w/AK47". Most people will miss this because like myself I was too distracted reading the text next to the good guys. Wikileaks should have release only the unedited 39min footage because that is the truth. They can add all context in the description of the video if they want. To actually edit the footage down to 15min, add 3min of human context and to highlight one sided aspects of any conflict is... manipulation of information.
You could say that about just about any news source with the major difference of not being able to look at the original information. That is all I am saying and it renders the above posters argument meaningless and yours better applied to just about any other bit of film anywhere. I'll take your word for it about major bias in the edited version you saw but that does not change that there is also the almost unique opportunity to see the unedited version for yourself.
Almost nobody else is doing that. I'm looking forward to when major news networks decide that bandwidth and storage are cheap enough for them to start doing the same thing. Until then this complaint is far better aimed at CNN or many others and IMHO it's not worth getting upset about there either.
Thus the argument is baseless and better applied to every single other news source on the planet. If you've got some political axe to grind I suggest finding something real to rub it up against - there is bound to be something. Note that I am not defending the edited video I've never seen, simply pointing out that the above poster was either being ignorant of something very widely reported or deliberately misleading by omission.
Journalists and those that aspire to be journalists tend to get somewhat pissed off when they think other journalists have been deliberately targeted by military forces just for doing their job (there is a relatively large yearly death toll of journalists that die that way in many countries). How can you expect there not to be a bias in the edited video? However as I'm trying very hard to point out and the above poster was ignoring, there is the almost unique situation of being able to see the unedited footage.
Pointing out that other media outlets do the same and edit stories too does not defeat the argument that if WikiLeaks would simply release the information as found their credibility would improve. Yes they released the unedited version, so? only 1/5 of the people saw it, the rest saw the side WikiLeaks wanted them to see. Here is the analisis of the video done by a military guy who claims to have 4500 hours viewing aerial footage of Iraq: http://blog.ajmartinez.com/2010/04/05/wikileaks-collateral-murder/
including the much more valuable American lives
Nevermind the innocent Iraqis who didn't have a choice in whether or not to die? The ones who were simply bulldozed as if their lives were nothing compared to the US government's grand objective, and then insulted by being labeled "collateral damage", as if any mortal man could possibly hold the right to put value on another's life? How sympathetic.
Let's call a spade a spade here: at least the Americans who died chose for themsleves to go to war, fully knowing and accepting the risks. I'm not afraid to admit that I feel more sorrow for those who did not get to choose. Are you?
Insightful? Only if you have your head stuck up your own anatomy where photons cannot penetrate. Articles published will point out what you are seeing today in Arab unrest seeking political reform was brought about in part by Condoleezza Rice's speech in Cairo. And who is calling for stability in lew of democracy? Secretary of State Hillary Clinton! Of course you probably have been sucking from that portion of politics for a long time to garnish the opinion you just spewed out.
The only thing Assange sites have done is attack the very democracy's he claims to be aiding. That due to the fact that the portions of the world that are free are the only place such information can make it way out. In short, do to laziness and sloth, he is doing mankind a great disservice.
Provide some leaks we can use, like how to bring down truly oppressive governments in the world.
The 'edited' version could had pointed out that the air/ground force strike was all due to someone mistakenly calling it in. The WHOLE problem was with the spotter. The rest of what happened is exactly what you can expect when you call armed forces to act. Soooo.... who was the spotter? Why not the call for why he called in the strike? Who was this moron...
War is brutal; no sane man is eager to bring it forth. Equally insane is the expectation of restraint from parties in the conflict, no matter how hard they may try.
I wonder which branch of the security services is actually running it?
Who is behind openleaks?
Funny how this site just sprung up out of nowhere.
THAT IS WHAT THEY HAVE DONE
There is also the other stuff that pisses you off with probably a heavy handed bias that you do not agree with (I have not seen that version). That doesn't really matter much because they are preaching to the converted and the "information as found" is also there. They should have taught you fairly early on in school that different news sources have a bias and I'll bet that just about everyone that has followed a link to anywhere near wikileaks knows what they are in for.
It astonishes me that they get criticism for not redacting when they actually do so and then criticism for not releasing the unedited information when they actually released it. I have mixed feelings about wikileaks but here it looks like picking random complaints, trying to get them to fit and when they don't just repeating them as if they are true. I'm sure I'll get a good laugh out of it all when Geoffrey Robertson writes a book about this fiasco in a few years time, but until then just assume I know the weird shit put up as arguments and try to complain about something real instead OK? There is bound to be something.
Preaching to the converted? How convenient of you to draw the line as to who has seen the video. This is the rationale that makes sense to someone who hasn't seen both versions nor has the inclination to do so.
Is your point that you think people have not heard of wikileaks by now but somehow stumble across this video on wikileaks but not the other one?
Give it up and go after something real and not something better directed at any other news source on the planet.
You are making more assumptions again. Unlike you I have gone to WikiLeaks to know that both videos are available right next to each other. I also know that almost everyone clicks on the first one and not bother to see the second (full version). You keep bringing up the fact that because my argument can be applied to other news organization I have no validity in bringing this up? I don't get that train of thought. Not because a drunk can point at other drunks means one can't say something to him about his problem.
I read your comments and I can clearly see that there is a person with an elaborate mind. Yet, besides the sparks of seldom wisdom I also feel like you haven't explore or investigated the issue to the detail as you could. Either you are a wise/experienced person who is talking about a topic he hasn't fully explored based on the reliance that you are making broad generic assumptions? or you are just simply limited/lazy and arrogant maintaining and repeating the same point of view just because you can? Yes they released the full unedited version... so what? how does that matter in the real world? 80% of the people saw the skewed version.
The point that IMHO renders your argument worthless is that for the moment wikileaks is about the only place where you CAN see their original source information for the information they distribute. To use your analogy it is the equivalent of a sober guy pointing at the drunks.
My point, which you keep pretending to miss (or maybe it's late or something), is that the argument can be applied to other news organisations but NOT to wikileaks. You even linked to a site that adds their own fresh angle to that material which is not yet possible to the same degree with most news sources.
I'm hoping that other media organisations do similar things now that bandwidth and storage are cheap, but for now they don't.
Ignore the bais, everyone has bias and everyone knows where wikileaks stands by now. It is not relevant. What is important is the original is there so the bias can be sidestepped entirely.
Yes and no. I actually finally get your point but further thinking has brought up some points worth mentioning to you. The site I linked previously does bring their own angle but it is entirely irrelevant on the versions put out there by WikiLeaks. The blog actually has the edited version posted and any observations are made based off of that. It is not the access to the unedited version which brings the blogger insight and understanding of the events, it is simply his experience and understanding of such situations what eventually comes out through his analysis. That is precisely my point. WikiLeaks managed to decrypt a military encrypted video because they have access to highly educated people. The same people that have the understanding to know that most normal people watching that video would simply see a massacre happening. Guess what?... there is a lot more going on with a lot more variables happening, just not to the plain eye. Instead of putting the highly educated resources they posses in action to properly explain the events in the video, WikiLeaks simply twists the story around and pushes for martyr/noble angle to get the most exposure possible. The same techniques used in movies, the same techniques that work. You are giving WikiLeaks credit for releasing the unedited version as if that was their goal. The reality is that the unedited version was nothing more but simply the means to their existence. There is more to WikiLeaks than what you read here, go to their website and download the 3.1Mb containing thousands of torrents links. You'll find photos of Steve Jobs medical records claiming he has HIV, images of Scarlett Keeling death autopsy, photos of the love parade stampede in Germany and so on. You haven't gone to Wikileaks website nor have you seen the videos, nor have seen the thousand of articles they put out there... I ask... do you really know what you are talking about? or are you simply making very good arguments based of your high capacity to make them?