Former Wikileaks Spokesman Destroyed Documents 469
bs0d3 writes "Former Wikileaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg claims to have destroyed more than 3,500 unpublished files that had been sent from unknown informants and are now apparently lost irrevocably. Among the files destroyed are the US gov's 'no-fly list' and inside information from 20 right wing organizations. Daniel Domscheit-Berg is now known as one of the founders of openleaks."
Re:Tragic... (Score:2, Informative)
You're confusing (like another poster in this story) the No Fly list with Selectee List [wikipedia.org].
The No Fly list literally says you are not allowed to fly. The "Selectee List" is a list of people the government is suspicious of but doesn't feel rises to the level of banning them from flight.
Re:Tragic... (Score:5, Informative)
This is just the latest in an epic series of back-and-forths between DDB/OpenLeaks and Julian Assange/Wikileaks that has been going on for a year or so, particularly in the German scene/press. The first order of business seems to be: Don't believe everything you read, there has been a lot of misinformation spread by both sides, by other people who are involved and, worse yet, speculation by those that are not. Despite the fact that DDB looks like the bad guy, and I'm virtually certain he will be absolutely crucified here on Slashdot, DDB might just be a tragic figure and it's likely that there are no really good guys involved; Wikileaks and OpenLeaks were caught in a crossfire of Egos.
DDB left/was fired from Wikileaks because he felt the organisation was in some way corrupted/they felt he was a corrupted. Other people left along with him, people that were apparently important to the basic functionality of Wikileaks. DDB subsequently wrote about about Wikileaks and started to talk about an alternative leak sites, OpenLeaks. The book contains fairly serious allegations against Wikileaks and Julian Assange.
Purportedly, DDB (or possibly: one of the other people leaving WL) took those files because he did not think they were safe at Wikileaks. Note that the files do not contain any information on the identity of the leakers, Wikileaks simply does not store or even collect this information. They wre removed, not copied, and apparently Wikileaks did not have an extra copy (or the extra copies were all taken or destroyed). They were, of course, encrypted and he (or his allies) may or may not have access to some or all of them. Sidenote: At least one of the datasets he may have destroyed now (60k emails of a German neo-nazi party) made their way to the German media in some way, months ago. That may have been a coincidence, however, the newspaper involved is now a "media partner" of OpenLeaks. End of sidenote.
DDB says he never had any intention of looking at or publishing the stolen data himself, and that he intended to return the files to WL, once WL has shown itself to be trustworthy (whatever that means). He also once intended to hand over the files to a trusted third party, people from Germany's Chaos Computer Club. He never followed through with this promise. He was recently thrown out of the CCC, an extraordinary measure, due to this but mostly other events related to a sorta-kinda security audit of OpenLeaks (this alone would require several paragraphs of explanation).
Anyway, DDB had this very sensitive data, which he didn't want to give to WL, and pretty much no one else either. He also had the encryption keys. I think initially he talked about just deleting the encryption keys in order to prove that he has no intention of using the leaks himself. But if you don't trust him, why would you believe he deleted his keys? And now he apparently figured the only course of action left was to "simply" delete the files themselves. I don't quite understand that final bit, either.
I have tried to summarize a very complex situation full of half-truths and unproven allegations to the best of my ability. Note that I have absolutely zero inside information, I know no one involved, this is all public information (though fairly inaccessible to many Slashdot users due to the language barrier).
Re:"Bible Thumpers' (Score:3, Informative)
Well not exactly. More like after the great awakening it became deeply intertwined. I wouldn't describe many of the founding fathers as particularly religious. You have Thomas Jefferson who famously tried to rewrite the bible.
Many of the founding fathers associated the church and faith/superstition with the monarchy and oppression.
Re:Tragic... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Tragic... (Score:4, Informative)
The two words started out synonymous. The word libertarian was coined by Proudhon and he specifically stated that he coined the phrase as an alternate name for anarchism in his treatise because the French government of the time had banned "anarchist literature".
Outside of the US (the only place in the world where people in favor of capitalism call themselves libertarians - everywhere else socialist-libertarian is a tautology) the two terms are still incredibly close in meaning. Libertarians differ from anarchist in their proposed replacement of the nation-state structure not in their shared desire to get rid of it.
Most libertarians embrace the idea of direct democracy, having every citizen vote on every single issue, combined with massive decentralization (to prevent a tyranny of the majority problem) - most anarchists favor the same.
But while most anarchists favor political equality libertarians generally hold that economic equality is just as important and that, in fact, economic imbalance must always lead to power-imbalance.
Then again communist-anarchist philosophy says the exact same thing (but with a radically different proposal on how to reach it - libertarians favor an open-market with mutualist worker-run businesses rather than top-down hierarchic businesses while anarcho-communists favor a money-less society without even inter-business competition).
The short version is - what Americans think they know about political philosophy is atrociously incomplete, ignorant and mostly just plain wrong and the rest of the planet tends to scorn the people you call libertarians for being, well not libertarian at all.
Ironically - one of the great libertarians of our time is an American. But very few American's would call him that, least of all the people American's call libertarians. Rand Paul is NOT a libertarian (Rue Paul is actually more of one !) - but if you want to find a real libertarian, go look up Noam Chomsky.
Re:"Bible Thumpers' (Score:4, Informative)
What?
First off, Thomas Jefferson re-wrote the Bible to make it less miraculous - he famously removed such minor things as the resurrection, for goodness sakes. It's pretty much as non-religious as you can get after taking a razor to the pages of the Bible, unless you go so far as to cut out everything. Furthermore, pretty much all the historical evidence we have indicates that Thomas Jefferson was a deist, which was about as close as you could get to atheism back then while being intellectually honest; keep in mind that before Darwin came up with the theory of evolution, some form of Creationism was the best theory available for the origin of the species - and in order to have creationism, you must have a creator.
Secondly, Martin Luther didn't re-write the Bible, he translated it. There's a huge difference: although he might have incidentally made changes in order to translate it into German, his goal was to produce a German copy of the Bible that was essentially the same as the Latin version, except in a different language. That's not rewriting, that's translating - it's the same book, in a different language. Although what you said was trivially true (he did write it again, or re-write the book), the implication does not match your point at all. I will grant that he was very religious, though.
Thirdly, Joseph Smith didn't even touch the Bible, he just added a whole lot of gibberish on top - kinda like the New Testament (the Even Newer Testament?). Furthermore, pretty much all the historical evidence we have about the man points to him being a crook who snookered a bunch of people into his new religion, and did it primarily for the lifestyle it would offer him. He didn't write the Book of Mormon for religious purposes, he wrote it for the polygamy.
So that's one for three on "most religious", and one for three on "rewriting the Bible" - and unfortunately for your point, they're not the same ones.