WikiLeaks Threatens To Publish Twitter Users' Personal Info (usatoday.com)

WikiLeaks said on Twitter earlier today that it wants to publish the private information of hundreds of thousands of verified Twitter users. The group said an online database would include such sensitive details as family relationships and finances. USA Today reports: "We are thinking of making an online database with all 'verified' twitter accounts [and] their family/job/financial/housing relationships," the WikiLeaks Task Force account tweeted Friday. The account then tweeted: "We are looking for clear discrete (father/shareholding/party membership) variables that can be put into our AI software. Other suggestions?" Wikileaks told journalist Kevin Collier on Twitter that the organization wants to "develop a metric to understand influence networks based on proximity graphs." Twitter bans the use of Twitter data for "surveillance purposes." In a statement, Twitter said: "Posting another person's private and confidential information is a violation of the Twitter rules." Twitter declined to say how many of its users have verified accounts but the Verified Twitter account which follows verified accounts currently follows 237,000. Verified accounts confirm the identity of the person tweeting by displaying a blue check mark. Twitter says it verifies an account when "it is determined to be an account of public interest." Twitter launched the feature in 2009 after celebrities complained about people impersonating them on the social media service.

Comments

Re: Wikileaks

[Mike Van Pelt]

This would put many people in danger if they did this. I wont elaborate.

You think Julian Asshat cares? He blew the cover of people who worked with us against Al Queda in Afghanistan, and when questioned about it, said that anyone who worked with the United States deserved to die, so ha ha ha ha ha.

Wikileaks: Good ideal, pathological implementation

[shanen]

How did that comment rate an "insightful" moderation? The "funny" reply was much more insightful, but rather funny, too, so I guess that's a fair cop of sorts...

The ideal of WikiLeaks is that there is too much abuse of secrecy by powerful people and more of those secrets should be revealed. There is a real problem there, because in many cases the powerful people are doing terrible, even criminal, things because they think they can keep them secret.

The implementation is fundamentally broken, but I'm not sure how much credit or blame you can assign to Assange. "The system" of corruption, the oligarchy or kleptocracy, if you prefer, is already so well established and powerful that you have to be insane to go against it in the first place. Only someone with personality problems along Assange's lines could have created a WikiLeaks-type organization of any visible significance. Did you even know there are several similar organizations with sane leadership?

Another pathology was the financial model, or rather the lack of any. In chasing the money they wound up producing disaster porn, sort of like a low-budget CNN. Actually, insofar as WikiLeaks had smaller expenses, you could argue the RoI was higher. However it led them to focus on controlled timing for maximum market value of their "news" (AKA disaster porn) and also made them too subject to manipulation.

Just reading the official report now https://www.dni.gov/files/docu... but it was already obvious to me that WikiLeaks was used as part of a propaganda and disinformation campaign. WikiLeaks never had the resources to actually check the validity (or even the potentially harmful consequences) of the data they were publishing. Yet it was the drive to maximize the impact and market value that made WikiLeaks such a useful tool last October.

I'm suffering a bit of a recall gap here. What's the expression for a naive fool manipulated by someone of great cunning (such as Putin)? Oh yeah. It's "useful idiot". Not sure where he started, but Assange ended as a useful idiot.

Re:Wikileaks

[squiggleslash]

The article is false. Wikileaks does not wish to dox anyone. They wish to create a database of influence. Politician X votes a certain way, you can check and see he was paid off by Corporation Y. Journalist A working for Publication B is owned by Corporation C, which has connections to X, Y, Z, W.

No. The original tweet says nothing about politicians or anything related to sphere's of influence. The tweet, apparently now deleted, read:

We are thinking of making an online database with all "verified" twitter accounts & their family/job/financial/housing relationships.

This is what the article you're reading is about. After there was outrage, Wikileaks (or specifically https://twitter.com/WLTaskForc...) started back peddling, and then claimed everyone who interpreted the above as being a threat to dox as being liars.

Your spin doesn't match what WLTaskForce actually said, and neither does their spin. They said NOTHING about politicians. The vast majority of "verified" Twitter users aren't political at all, they're mostly actors, comedians, authors, and business people.

This was unambiguously a proposal to create a doxxing database. In an era in which Wikileaks is allied with a President-elect who ran a fascist campaign, that's terrifying.

Re:Where is the burden of proof again?

[AmiMoJo]

The public report doesn't include a lot of the detail and evidence. If you had the classified version it would probably nullify most of your criticisms.