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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.
Oh do please tell us, all you Wikileaks supporters, just how wonderful an organization it is, as it begins the process of trying to fuck over hundreds of thousands of people whose only crime was verifying their account.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's funny how they're only up in arms when other people do it. Also the headline doesn't really match the Tweet... If they're verified accounts, people kind of already know who is behind them....
They're totally willing to sell it to businesses (but not the US Government for some odd reason... guess they have to make a new shell company for that).
And nobody seems to care about all those NSA databases Wikileaks exposed.
Or maybe they will be once the NSA answers to Trump? I can only wonder.
... because the "rules" only allow for banning a Twitter account.
The Terms of Service have no legal standing outside the twittersphere.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
But on the other, if you give Twitter your personal information such as name and family relationships, what did you think was going to happen? It's too tempting of a target. People need to start saying "no" to social media companies that want to harvest every shred of personal information about them.
Use them pseudonymously if you must, but do not let them have that much data about you. It's a recipe for disaster.
Originally, I believe the idea of Wikileaks was to have a place for people to safely and anonymously without fear of retaliation, leak information people in power didn't want publicized.
Now in the last day, Wikileaks has come out against government leaks, and anonymity, and in support of retaliation against people (eg: Doxing). In our own little real-life version of Animal Farm, it looks like we're now near the end of the story.
Or like @ElliotHiggins said on Twitter:
Feels like WikiLeaks stared into the abyss, then fell into it, befriended the monsters, and is now looking upwards with them.
I get dumping documents from government agencies. Though, their motives are a bit bizarre at times. Disclosing hundreds of thousands of addresses of private citizens? What does that help? When will Wikipedia disclose those types of details on everyone within Wikipedia? Oh that is right, Wikipedia believes they can be opaque in operation, not transparent like they expect everyone else to be.
I don't think Wikileaks is related to Wikipedia. The term "Wiki" predates Wikipedia and isn't any sort of trademark of theirs.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
Not that this is a good thing, but I see a silver lining. The sooner the general public realizes how stupid it is to give these companies their private information the better. Maybe then the internet can move past this phase and become more useful and less creepy.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I get dumping documents from government agencies. Though, their motives are a bit bizarre at times. Disclosing hundreds of thousands of addresses of private citizens? What does that help?
The part that surprises me is that anyone is surprised.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Well, for starters, its against the Twitter T.O.S. not to.
Fuck. Brain fart.
Because they want that magic checkmark. That's why its only talking about "verified" users. There's no other way to verify an account actually belongs to a specific real person without exchanging some kind of real-world identification information. It looks like he's saying Wikileaks got hold of that database.
Its not all twitter users, just the verified ones. So relax, its not ALL twitter users they are doxxing; only 237 thousand of them.
This is "active measures" consistent and only supports the theory that wikileaks has been compromised. The stated purpose "(to) develop a metric to understand influence networks based on proximity graphs", and presumably shine light on those "hidden relationships/secret collusion" seems on the face noble. But the execution will/is flawed (I believe intentionally). A pillar of Russian propaganda is to sow confusion so that the target no longer has certainly of what is or isn't true and thus is more receptive to intentionally false narratives. There has been a consistent attack on the reputation of main stream media (some of it well deserved, some not) but that the end result has been to further the delegitimizing of western media and /their/ narratives and thus create a vacuum into which alternative and more friendly narratives can take hold.
Make no mistake this is a direct attack on the credibility of main stream reporters and their publications (the majority of which have verified accounts), and gives a free pass to the agent provocateur's who aren't stupid enough to have verified accounts or that have hidden their true identities. I hate being lied to and manipulated as much as the next person but there is a HUGE difference between being lied to by corporate interests for money (who at least require the window dressing of western society to exist) and being lied to by a hostile nation who's end goal is to end the influence of America on the global stage (and will destroy western society to achieve it).
I expect the troll army to pull their regular attack on this post so I've gone anon because I honestly am sick of dealing with them and have found it's best to just ignore them instead of giving them a larger attack surface. Also I'm not even American so I didn't have a political pony in this race or a reason to push my own false narrative. I'm just a /very/ concerned "neighbor" who's own country is in deep shit if you American's don't get your act together.
p.s. there is a reason Russia controls and filters internet access, they know it is impossible to defend against the very type of attack the USA is experiencing now. Perhaps we just need to "pull the plug" on the internet?
Does this read very serious to you? Do you seriously think that you can build a useful database for your AIs by having random strangers email you unverifiable info?
By way of example, what kind of unverifiable nonsense would we end up with in your case? That you picked the same online handle as someone named Mike Martin in Immokalee, FL who has been posting top quality stuff like "where is my moon?" and "I saw a broken human body in my neighborhoods" on Twitter? Or is the embarrassing part where they admit to using Windows XP on Deviant Art?
It sounds to me more like they're trying to make an ironic point about the people who already have such social media databases (Twitter, Facebook, the US Government...) have. Be sure to "voluntarily" hand them your entire profile next time you cross the border!
Anyhow, feel free to speculate wildly. It's more entertaining when I know that you're actually being serious.
These guys have gone ALL the way to the dark side haven't they?
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
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.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Look, I've read the actual report. It's garbage. Utter garbage. The FBI relied on the CrowdStrike reports without actually getting to look at the servers themselves. CS was paid by the DNC. You guys keep recycling the same crappy "evidence" and trying to find ways to rack up a higher number of organizations to whitewash it.
This report doesn't have new evidence of any kind, they have unsupported conclusions. The few technical details they offer are so bad as to be laughable. Russian "trolls"? How does that influence an election? People were convinced but unrebutted facts. We know that Donna Brazille gave away the debate questions. Russia didn't do that. We know that she went on the news and lied to us about "modifications" to the emails. I have, in my Slashdot history, gone into incredible detail on that point, even showing you where to get the DKIM keys from Hillary's own damned DNS server. And the other key from Google's DNS server. Both of which validate the body and the body hash of the emails. We know what Zulema Rodriguez did. I've discussed that in great detail here on Slashdot as well, I can find multiple independent videos, payroll records where MoveOn pays for her travel, photo credits for her in the "Trump Ducks" campaign that Hillary wanted, etc. At this point, the "PACs aren't allowed to collude with candidates" thing is a complete and utter joke on both sides.
I saw the NYT, WaPo, etc. stories. They did not present any facts, but simple bare conclusions of nameless insiders. I saw the ODNI report where the directors of the group that oversees the Coast Guard & co. said this was something Russia would like to kinda maybe do I guess. I saw all the crappy fake news here on Slashdot. Ooh! Someone is making DNS queries that might have something to do with a website Trump had made by a 3rd party and a Russian bank! Alert the press! Sorry, but that kinda proves that there is a media campaign to sling mud that only the truly gullible will ever fall for.
I also saw the completely unreported Todd & Claire scam site trying to frame Julian Assange. But I wonder how many of you know what that even is? How it enrolled in a crazy UN program to present itself as a "UN partner" (anyone can enroll, it gives no meaningful "partnership" and they were ejected from it). How many of you know that it was a complete scam site and all the profiles were using fake, mirrored images (they were trying to stop reverse image searches, but they chose some photos that were a bit too famous, as well as some where the mirroring was obvious).
I read the CrowdStrike reports. This is the best of the lot, but it's a sad lot. I don't need more secret evidence and unsupported conclusions. The techniques are not advanced and do not impress anyone who has even glimpsed at the NSA's TAO catalog. You have crap like an ancient version of P.A.S. that's freely available online, simple phishing attacks and a list of Tor exit node IPs.
For anyone who knows about security that isn't a partisan hack, this is a complete and utter joke. I paid attention when Clapper lied to Congress, I'm sure as hell not going to believe him based on secret evidence now. Willing to start a war over nonsense? We already did that. Oh, but there was more push-back then?
There is now, too, you just won't find it being reported by the same people at CNN who gave Donna those questions in the first place. You won't find it reported by the people at the Washington Post who helped the DNC unofficially add their party to the DNC's price sheet (who cares what the lawyers say?).
Everyone crying about foreign influence doesn't give a damn how much Saudi Arabia paid to the Clinton Foundation (it probably went to Diane Reynolds', err, CVC, err, Chelsea's wedding), nor Qatar (guess who runs Al Jazeera?). Don't care that they're a leading state sponsor of terrorism... but that's okay when they're an "ally" right? Just like our "allies" in Pakistan where Osama was somehow hiding right outside a big
..those wikileaks folks were just a bunch of nice guys.
...that Trump and his kids will somehow escape scrutiny.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
... anybody who still thinks that this organization is a force for good should take another hard look at their recent track record.
Or just arbitrarily downvote me, because they really don't like to face reality.
declare war on Ecuador and raid that embassy he is holed up in, drag Assange off to some dungeon and let lock him up and let him rot
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Risking the displeasure of a certain KGB capo mafioso I would have modded you up, were you not at 5 already. --Pack warm sweaters Norilsk can be nippy.
There's a fine line between stranding for something and trying to make people identify that thing with you. But that line is important: it's the difference between having integrity and building a self-serving cult of personality. Integrity means accountability; cult of personality means getting a free pass because of who you are.
Assange would like everyone to believe that disagreeing with him means disagreeing with the very concept of transparency in the exercise of power by the powerful. It's not.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The source just lists a bunch of tweets taking Wikileaks to task for their hypocrisy. Should be obvious how to gauge it.
Thanks, and if I ever got a mod point, I might give such a comment a "funny" (in the absence of a more precise mod).
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Hear, hear. I'd give you the second "insightful" if I ever saw a mod point to give.
(If I understand the [broken] moderation system, the first mod point has an advantage in setting the direction, but the mod doesn't really become visible until you get a second mod. Ergo, I only saw your legitimately insightful comment as a reply to my comment (since I normally search for "funny" and "insightful").)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
... and this is the first time in a long time that I have ever seen the first 10 or so upvoted comments.... all in almost perfect agreement. It seems everyone is finally working out that Julian is nothing by a narcissistic troll, who took a good idea, and destroyed it with his ego.