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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.
I'm a tremendous Wikileaks supporter, but this is clearly going too far. How will the new president be able to govern if Wikileaks is interfering with Twitter?
WikiLeaks originally looked like it could become one of the important institutions for government transparency and institutional crime, however they seemed to have ended up largely as an group looking to self-aggrandize their reputation. At this point they seem to be irrelevant, the important leaks like Snowden, Panama Papers, Swiss banking, etc. have not used them.
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 was a supporter when they were releasing information in a non-partisan and unbiased way. Now that they're basically a tool of the Russian government, and possibly of even worse actors, I think the time has come to write them off.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Wikileaks does not wish to dox anyone. They wish to create a database of influence.
So all those rape victims and mental health patients they doxxed last August were all influential politicos?
=Smidge=
No. The original tweet says nothing about politicians or anything related to sphere's of influence. The tweet, apparently now deleted, read:
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.