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WikiLeaks Launches New Platform, Privacy Study
itwbennett writes "WikiLeaks has launched a new submissions platform, along with a study of the global trade in surveillance products. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told press conference attendees in London that all the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Gmail users in the crowd were 'screwed.' 'The reality is intelligence contractors are selling right now to countries across the world mass surveillance systems for all of those products,' Assange said."
What has always bothered me about that, besides the obvious conspiracy theories, is that he effectively allowed that accusation to take form.
Your mockery appears to have no basis - but the case against him does... there really are two completely random women, and he has admitted to having sex with them. What was he thinking?
One can say "well he's only human" - but somebody in his rather extraordinary position can't be 'only human' because the slightest of slip-ups just means you give 'the enemy' ammunition to use against you.
How such a (supposedly) smart man managed to slip up so badly, being fully aware of such things having been used against anybody in a leadership position since practically the beginning of time, defies belief.
If anything, if he really had to get some 'cos hormones will be hormones, he could have insisted on it being videotaped. Not because he'd be looking forward to the leaked Assange Sex Tapes, but as an insurance against such claims. Even if it would still have hurt his stature within the 'leaks' community, at least he wouldn't have had to deal with the personal quandaries he's facing now.
Running one's own email & XMPP server FTW and most of the privacy-invading features of Android can be disabled
Also no my life hasn't turned to shit, I don't spend 6 hours every evening trying to manage these things while wearing a tinfoil hat. Yes sometimes changes need to be made when SSL certificates expire (although I prefer self-signed for a lot of this stuff, as Governments can compel CA's to issue false certs I consider them of little value) or what recently happened was the guy who wrote my mail server stopped developing it and IMAP was always just around the corner so I finally had to install a "proper" email server which had a bit of a learning curve but it's not terribly unweildly either.
When non government organizations end up doing the tasks governments should be doing, but not doing, and end up getting prosecuted for it.
Read radical news here
Whatever happens now, both WikiLeaks and Facebook are driving "free thoughts" in some way.
And they try changing from both sides:
- Facebook is making way for a free world by not stopping hangouts for protesters, making way for the democracy as we know it; capitalism and "free" governments.
- Wikipedia, on the other hand, is trying to show us how far this has gone in our own free world.
There's no longer dictatorship but somehow there still are forces that try control us. That can be a good thing, however there should be a free press that can monitor our governments and global corporations.
We all know it, there is no "free press" when it comes to stuff that Assange tries to finger-point. He might not be the best and most street-wise person around, but I really respect him for giving up his life for this cause.