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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.
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.
The don't want to find the identity of the verified person.
They want to know where they work.
They want to know where they live.
They want to know who their loved ones are.
They want to know where their loved ones work and live.
What better way to keep someone in check than to send them a photo of where their spouse works or where their child goes to school?
Not to mention they are really bad at it - they replied to a guy making fun of them and linked his LinkedIn profile to taunt him saying he spent 10 years in Government. Except they didn't post his linkedin. He has his linkedin page one degree of separation from the personal URL on his twitter profile. They picked out a guy with a similar name. Good job.
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.
If he behaved this way towards regular people, folks like you might see it differently
Actually, he does. Read your sibling post. He doxxes people who disagree with him on twitter. He doxxes people who donate to politicians he doesn't like. He doxxes government officials when some agency annoys him. For fun, he even doxxed every woman in Turkey back in July. (Met a Turkish babe who wouldn't give you her cell number? Wikileaks has your back, bro!)
So its no real mystery what he wants to do with this information. These days he's basically just trying to run his own personal crowd-sourced KGB.
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.
...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.
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Um... All I pointed out was that they have only seen the part of the report that was unclassified, all the evidence is in the non-public classified part that Trump has seen. Even Trump seems to be accepting that evidence, just not that it had any influence over his victory.
Clearly, since the GP hasn't seen the classified report, making the conclusions they did is not warranted.
Also, verbal abuse of whites? You are hallucinating again. Whoever you think I am, I'm not.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC