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Former Wikileaks Spokesman Destroyed Documents
bs0d3 writes "Former Wikileaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg claims to have destroyed more than 3,500 unpublished files that had been sent from unknown informants and are now apparently lost irrevocably. Among the files destroyed are the US gov's 'no-fly list' and inside information from 20 right wing organizations. Daniel Domscheit-Berg is now known as one of the founders of openleaks."
I would really like to have seen the No-Fly list. My older brother has been "randomly selected" for several flights in a row and I strongly suspect it is a name association with someone else. But our democratic republic uses "secret lists" now to persecute people. What can you do?
Assange said the material would also have insider information from 20 right-wing organizations. Domscheit-Berg would not confirm that.
If what DDB claims are true, he also destroyed five gigabytes of internal documents from the Bank of America. Seriously, how can anyone trust OpenLeaks when one of his founder completely disregarded the wishes of the whistle-blowers to expose what they perceived as wrong, immoral, and/or of public interest? His excuse that he wanted to "protect the sources" is over-the-top ridiculous given that the track record of Wikileaks is impeccable regarding source protection (alleged cablegate leaker outed himself as per alleged chat transcript.)
I was really looking forward to have Bank of America being exposed, especially after reading this piece.
In the end, DDB exposes himself as ultimate retarded prick.
The essential point is that Daniel Domscheit-Berg does not trust that Wikileaks can guarantee the safety of the documents. He agree to return them as soon as it is safe, however it does not seem to be like that.
There are more weird things going on like a long continued throwing of mud onto openleaks/daniel by julian/wikileaks
i am not sure who is right, but this could be covered more deeply by somebody who submits it to his journal
If you want to kill something off, you don't fight it. You appear to support the cause, but you divert resources from legitimate organizations to your own. Then you f*ck up the job, thereby protecting your actual sponsors.
Which organizations' documents were destroyed? And were they completely destroyed? Or does Domscheit-Berg still have a list of the names of the informants that can be used to encourage future good behavior?
Have gnu, will travel.
Right. Because so much of this would really protect informants. Like the no-fly list? Unless they randomly included a name in the middle that would show that it was a certain person's copy of the no-fly list how would that harm any informant? And if there was a random name surely multiple copies of the list could be found and you can combine the two and leave out whatever names aren't found on both of the copies.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
There are two things an architect of a whistleblowing platform must never do: revealing the identity of informants and accepting submissions without publishing them. I despise Domscheit-Berg for keeping WikiLeaks from publishing that data. Who knows what risks were taken to get this information on that hard disk.
On se Internetz nobody noes your German.
Rather than just raging against DDB, maybe his side of the story should be heard as well.
It goes somewhat like this:
Once upon a time, there was a big fallout between Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheidt-Berg, and Julian kicked Daniel out.
Daniel took his personal hardware with him, which happened to contain this hard-drive full of leaked documents.
A couple of other wikileaks staff sided with Daniel and also left. This included the so called Architect, who took down wikileaks submission-site for the following reasons:
- he built it
- he knew it was insecure
- once he was gone, there was no-one left to fix it
Given that Julian accused Daniel of stealing these documents in order to use them for his new site OpenLeaks, Daniel didn't wan't to publish them himself.
There have been attempts to give these data back to wikileaks, but these failed. Daniel insisted that after the loss of much of its technical staff, wikileaks had to prove that is was still able to protect the sources' identities. The CCC tried to mediate the exchange. Whatever happened here was not made public, so one can only guess what kind of mess it was.
Consider this:
Before the Republican party allied itself with the bible-thumpers...
The lack of awareness of history in that sentence is stunning.
The Republicans were "Bible Thumpers" from their very creation. The biggest motivation in their anti-slavery crusades was religious. Until the Democrats starting turning against the churches in the 1960's, every major American political party... Federalists, Democratic-Republicans, Democrats, Whigs, Republicans... had a huge, heapin' helping of the Bible in their platforms. Even when parties opposed each other, they often used Biblical citations in their party planks. Both the conservative and progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th century were largely motivated by religious concerns. The Temperence movement was religiously based. The progressive movement was religiously based.
"Bible Thumping" in politics is part and parcel of American history. It's been deeply intertwined in American politics since the nation came into being.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Why this person is still able to freely roam the streets without fear. someone betrays people, like this, and still is able to live a normal life. noone stops them on their way home and holds them accountable.
There's nothing more pathetic than an Internet bad-ass.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
noone stops them on their way home and holds them accountable
What are you waiting for? Go beat him up, since that's your notion of accountability. Or is it? What did you mean by that? Should he be killed? Should he be photographed, 'shopped, and circulated as head transplant donkey porn?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
...a pre-crisis or post-crisis Superman?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Yes and if you go far enough back liberal means modern-day libertarian. Conservative and liberal are labels that really only make sense in a time and place context. Which is why a little tiny part of me dies whenever people refer to parties with similar names 200 years ago in relation to modern politics.
And the Progressive Party was an offshoot of the Republican Party created by Republican Teddy Roosevelt, an environmentalist and monopoly buster. "Libertarian", "Progressive", "Democrat", "Republican", etc all representing different beliefs depending upon the timeframe you look at.
Which brings me to the silliness of party loyalty. Even if beliefs aren't shifting in your lifetime party loyalty is counterproductive. If you are a party loyalist then your party can ignore you, they already have your vote. Meanwhile the other party can also ignore you because there is nothing they can do to receive your vote.
If you want your opinion to count you can not be loyal to a party. You must give every candidate a chance and make them earn your vote through their policy positions.
moonbender's is probably as full and even-handed an explanation of the wikileaks v. openleaks altercation as can be put in a few short paragraphs.
The WL v OL business is an odd mess, and with deletion of data has become odder, but also clearer. A reason given by D-B for breaking from WL was "protection of data". An initial intention thatD-B asserted was to set up "media-partnerships" to provide "improved screening" for leaked data. The stated intentions, in themselves, suggested more agenda than the "battle of egos" explanation, which was roffered then, and since, and is usually raised in popular press coverage.
With a block of data carried away, that block, according to both sides, containing a combination of leaked embarrassing-to-government data and leaked embarrassing- to-"right-wing neo-nazi" groups data, and the embarrassing to "right-wing neo-nazi" group (government opponents) part being released to a "media partner", and the embarrassing to government part being destroyed, politically biased "data protection" and "media (and other) partnering" are indicated.
In analysis from beginning to present, with smoke-and-mirrors glare and obscuration stripped away, D-B's purpose does appear to have been, from the beginning, to control damage. With the selective release and destruction of specifically different parts of data from a single block, that D-B's purpose has been and is damage-control for "partners" appears confirmed.
Why could that person not simply send the same list to Wikileaks again? Is there some reason why they would not or have not done so?
Sure it was only 5GB of data. Let me just upload that again, I'm sure that security at BOA will not catch me the second time, even after being alerted to the leak.
"Clownwear is the new camo? Someone should alert the authorities."
Don't listen to him, it wasn't the luggage, it was the red nose that tipped them off.
Well, lets say you have collected info from your employer about their wrongdoings or shady actions. (Just a random example.) Also lets assume you would like to not be thrown in jail for making it public.
So you obtain the information from your employers computer system, you smuggle it out on a CD or USB stick and you pass it on to Wikileaks. The next step is to get rid of any evidence which might connect you to the event. Erase the USB stick and drop it into a river, delete any notes, uninstall whatever tools you might have used to obtain the information.
Now the situation has changed, for some reason Wikileaks has lost access to the info, but your employer is aware of the fact that there was a breach. Likely your employer will start an investigation, trying to find out who the whistle blower was and start a security audit in order to prevent a similar breach to occur in the future. (Unless they are a bank in which case they just to hope it won't happen again.) You might even be watched already because you are in the list of suspects. Would you submit the information again? Maybe, but things just got a lot more risky, and your trust in Wikileaks is much diminished.
Wikileaks released documents from China and North Korea as well, They've never had an unbalanced animus against the US; it's just the US media and government are loudest about complaints (and understand the Streisand effect the least.)
currently, there are no repercussions for being a public enemy and harming millions.
To whom are you referring? I consider people who treacherously steal hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents, and those who help them do so while also making those documents available to the regimes in Iran and North Korea to be, indeed, public enemies. Certainly that betrays the trust of millions of people, and harms many, both directly and indirectly. Certainly being held in jail while facing trial for doing so counts as repercussion, wouldn't you say?
Or are you complaining that a person who deletes a bunch of stolen documents is the one who is the public enemy? Or is that person only a public enemy if the deleted documents are unrelated to people with whom you agree on one matter or another?
There are all sorts of repercussions for not meeting society's expectations. Everything from losing your publicly elected or appointed office to being killed by SEALs in your not-very-secret Pakistani compound or going to jail for running an investment Ponzi scheme.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
CHRISTIAN, n.
One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
What, did he smash a hard drive or something? Please tell me he didn't just click "Delete" and move on!
For that matter, how do you lose something irrevocably?
I trust that he also got last weeks offsite backup as well then.