WikiLeaks' Anonymous Leak Submission System Is Back After Nearly 5 Years

Sparrowvsrevolution writes: On Friday, WikiLeaks announced that it has finally relaunched a beta version of its leak submission system after a 4.5 year hiatus. That file-upload site, which once served as a central tool in WIkiLeaks' leak-collecting mission, runs on the anonymity software Tor to allow uploaders to share documents and tips while protecting their identity from any network eavesdropper, and even from WikiLeaks itself. In 2010 the original submission system went down amid infighting between WikiLeaks' leaders and several of its disenchanted staffers, including several who left to create their own soon-to-fail project called OpenLeaks. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says that the new system, which was delayed by his legal troubles and the banking industry blockade against the group, is the final result of "four competing research projects" WikiLeaks launched in recent years. He adds that it has several less-visible submission systems in addition to the one it's now revealed. "Currently, we have one public-facing and several private-facing submission systems in operation, cryptographically, operationally and legally secured with national security sourcing in mind," Assange writes.

Comments

Re:Thank god they're using Tor

[circletimessquare]

yes, it was originally intended for spies and dissidents in regimes hostile to the free flow of information to share information

that the us government is plugged into it from the ground floor doesn't change that fact

since then

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

In 2004, the Naval Research Laboratory released the code for Tor under a free licence, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) began funding Dingledine and Mathewson to continue its development.[20]

In December 2006, Dingledine, Mathewson and five others founded The Tor Project, a Massachusetts-based 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit organization responsible for maintaining Tor.[23] The EFF acted as The Tor Project's fiscal sponsor in its early years, and early financial supporters of The Tor Project included the U.S. International Broadcasting Bureau, Internews, Human Rights Watch, the University of Cambridge, Google, and Netherlands-based Stichting.net.[24][25][26][27][28]

ah yes, those great crushers of freedom: the EFF, human rights watch, and now wikileaks

i'm certain the NSA has enough sniffing going on on enough tor exit nodes to kinda sorta figure out who you might be if it was important enough to them

but the point is simply that without tor, that ability to sniff still applies, but even more so. tor isn't bulletproof. it is but one more tool in your toolbox for cloaking and anonymity. combine it with other tools and methods and it is quite useful

tor is simply a good deal, not perfect. what is?

but if you are in moscow or beijing or tehran, and you want to divulge something nasty about those governments, you're certainly free to not use tor, because apparently only washington dc hurts people to keep secrets?

Re:Thank god they're using Tor

[circletimessquare]

sniffing one node won't help

sniffing a lot of nodes won't help

sniffing ALL of them (or, in practice, at least the great majority) let's you do timing, target, and content analysis: taking the entire firehose of tor exit node packets, inspecting them, profiling them, and drawing the connections

this is obviously not remotely doable for almost all organizations in the world. except an organization with the reach, resources, and abilities of the NSA. would you really be surprised if the NSA was actively seeking and tracking almost all tor exit nodes in the world? i wonder how many tor nodes the NSA just flat out started in the first place on their own initiative to guarantee a sizable chunk of awareness of what is going in and out

such a difficult effort will get you some useful information. not everything, and not all the time. but you *will* find out some interesting things, some of the time

thus, "kinda sorta figure out who you might be"