Wikileaks — Anonymous Whistle-Blowing 162
too_old_to_be_irate writes to tell us about a site that word got out on before they were ready. Wikileaks aims to be an anonymous and uncensorable repository of leaked documents, posted for commentary by interested parties. It's expected to go live in a month or two. From the site: "Wikileaks is developing an uncensorable version of Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the west who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their own governments and corporations. We aim for maximum political impact; this means our interface is identical to Wikipedia and usable by non-technical people. We have received over 1.1 million documents so far from dissident communities and anonymous sources."
This is going to get ugly pretty fast. (Score:3, Informative)
Wikipedia already has a credibility problem, but this?
Anonymous leaking of materials that may be totally unverified? I can already the giant wooshing sound of lawyers descending on this poor thing for defamation.
Besides, what's the point of such a site if countries like China and Iran can censor it by building a "Great Firewall" around their little corner of the Internet?
Oh, and by the way, thanks for posting all of your plans on the Internet before the site even goes live. Dumb script kiddies everywhere are going to blast your poor site as soon as it shows up.
Re:Are you willing to host ZyprexaKills.tar.gz? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Where is the wiki? (Score:5, Informative)
At that point John Young pointed out that instead of trying to raise millions on empty promises, they should do the actual implementation and work hard for a year or two on a shoe-string budget to prove that they are real. As a sarcastic ploy he suggested that if their goal is to fleece CIA (which is most likely to cough up $5M they're trying to raise), than they should ask for more. Astonishingly enough they took the joke seriously, and said they'll try
And John posted their mailing list discussion to the public (without the real names/addresses, which he said will come next), accusing them of simply being a scam to raise money.
abuse of moderation (Score:2, Informative)
Perhaps you don't remember this [harpers.org]:
Rumsfeld stood up in front of the press in the white house and said that people need to be careful what they say. If you follow the link you can see that this is about allegations of desecration of the Koran by U.S. soldiers. If that wasn't a warning, I don't know WHAT it was. You can find more on that story in the Washington Post [washingtonpost.com]. This was a case where abuse of prisoners (if we adopt their methods, we become them - of course, we already Are them, we just have money so we don't have to use humans as munitions delivery systems) had been reported and Newsweek was threatened into dropping the story.
If you truly don't believe that this kind of abuse goes on in the USA, then you are part of the problem. Waking up to reality and the fact that a government that will treat other peoples as subhuman doesn't think too much of you either is the first step towards a solution.
Re:Suck it, fascist AC (Score:4, Informative)
Care to cite examples? In the last couple of years I only recall a couple of cases where journalists were jailed, and it wasn't for what they wrote but for not revealing their sources.