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Anonymous Launches a WikiLeaks For Hackers
siliconbits writes "Despite countless WikiLeaks copycats popping up since the secret-spilling site first dumped its cache of State Department cables last year, the new generation of leaking sites has produced few WikiLeaks-sized scoops. So instead of waiting for insider whistleblowers, the hacker movement Anonymous hopes that a few outside intruders might start the leaks flowing."
This is an important point. Part of what authenticates leaked information is the identity of the whistleblowers, their staus as insiders with privileged access to information, and their willingness to sacrifice in order to publish information. Much of this is lost with anonymous hacktivists. In paticular, when all that's known of the source of information is that it came from an anonymous source, it's harder to disprove the common defense that the leaked information was cooked up by a hostile rival.
Whistleblowers are often protected from civil lawsuits, too, by whistleblower-protection laws. (Governments don't hate true whistleblowers! That's just a myth that the neo-anarchist movement has invented to justify their hatred of governments.)
They say they don't. You know, every whistleblower I've ever heard of had the system come after him.
We had a prison warden here in ZA -- a few years ago -- who let some prisoners take a camera and film the widespread corruption. (Buying a loaded gun from a guard, that sort of thing.) He was fired.
A little more recently, we had a teacher report fraudulent matric results (your final marks for high school). Got ignored, went to the media, government acts all outraged and launches investigations and all that stuff. Oh, the teacher just happened to get fired afterwards.
Then there's Manning in the USA. Leaking information about, you know, serious and violent crimes.
Please, feel free to provide some concrete examples of whistleblowers who were protected by the law. By the way -- I'm not an anarchist.