WikiLeaks is struggling to stay online as millions of documents disappear

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikileaks-website-assange-hacked-documents/

by danso • 4 years ago

367 416 4 years ago

This website was dying already, ie. not being updated since Julian was imprisoned, but still a massive treasure trove for journalists and investigators. It is a very worrying sign of the times that it is vanishing, as the state powers seem to be fighting back against democracy and independent journalism.

seydor2• 4 years ago

Democracy is the State. Democracy however does not equal freedom

EDIT: i mean individual freedom.

mdp20213• 4 years ago

With "democracy" in «against democracy» the original poster clearly meant "that transparency that enables the decision and judgement of the People" (those conditions that allow the functioning of the empowerment of the People).

lynx233• 4 years ago

Even the most naive people learned that after COVID mandates.

t0bia_s7• 4 years ago

It depends on definition of freedom.

Are people in Africa free? Are they happy? Is you dependency on state and money a freedom? What about morale? Is it freedom to be narcissistic? Is it freedom to has millions different laws? Is it freedom to have imaginary choice of voting for someone who has money and someone who has even more money? Is it freedom to be forced to use platform that collects data about you? Is it freedom to live in society where fear drive politics?

pifm_guy• 4 years ago

I'm kinda surprised efforts like this aren't more heavily sponsored by other countries.

Like if you were Russia or Iran right now, paying a bit of money to keep wikileaks' servers running would seem like money well invested.

Synaesthesia3• 4 years ago

Wikileaks was going after any and all state actors, including Russia and Iran, nobody wants their dirty laundry aired.

xiphias2• 4 years ago

If millions of people die in a war in Russia, the government doesn’t feel anything, because they are not the ones going to war. If their own people turn against them, they feel it.

qikInNdOutReply3• 4 years ago

Cause there leaked documents were/are on it as well. At some non-ideologic point the interests of all state actors meet. The might makes right mentality of a seasoned bureaucrat is the same everywhere. Which is why the narrative of Wikileaks being funded as a psy OP does not hold up. Such a "attack" would only host one type of document and its journalists wouldn't "attack" all governments equally.

But hey, if i betrayed the fourth pillar of democracy and suffered from cognitive dissonance therefore, this not being supported by the "evils" behind it, would be woven into some nice story too.

H8crilA2• 4 years ago

Like if you were Russia or Iran right now, paying a bit of money to keep wikileaks' servers running would seem like money well invested.

Who do you think paid for those servers in the past, lol. Seems that the GRU has defunded the project, though - they must have other higher priority projects.

Some details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRU#Unit_74455

gasull2• 4 years ago

I don't think it's about funding. WikiLeaks likely has enough money from BTC donations a long time ago.

The know-how is in Assange's mind, and he's in prison.

vitium_casiri• 4 years ago

It's amazing the amount of crazy stuff people trick themselves into beleiving due to their hatred of Trump. Wikileaks works for Russia? This wikileaks?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-11893886

llanowarelves• 4 years ago

democracy is a threat to Our Democracy

lamp987• 4 years ago

#NotMyDemocracy

ki_2• 4 years ago

well. what if the public consists of 10% independent thinkers and 90% that follows whatever propaganda gets shoved through their eyes and ears. And if you can use your current power and money to create the most propaganda. Are people really voting? Or is the money/power that does the voting? And this is not some invented theory, if you question people why they believe what they believe, you'll discover quit fast that they dont know why they believe what they believe, except for, they were told so, by friends, tv, media, etc etc. It's easier to copy opinions (and be angry) than to establish your own.

ccbccccbbcccbb3• 4 years ago

Our Demarkacy

dalbasal10• 4 years ago

Democracy is alway a threat to democracy.

hellfish5• 4 years ago

Our Democracy

Meme of the year

andreygrehov• 4 years ago

I like to say it in a slightly different manner: Democrats have won, but not Democracy.

mrtksn16• 4 years ago

I think they lost quite a bit of public support when they selectively leaked documents during election time.

kome3• 4 years ago

I guess they leaked what they had; leaks are not bipartisan

throwawaythekey2• 4 years ago

I'm not sure if I buy this. Any sufficiently motivated leaker could just release to another source if wikileaks were blocking important information.

AndyMcConachie• 4 years ago

I've honestly been amazed in these past few years how many people have started hating Wikileaks for leaking things that didn't agree with either their interpretation of the world, or made their favorite politician look bad. The only interpretation I can draw from it is that many people crave ignorance. And when they're confronted with something that challenges their ignorance they blame the messenger.

Overall I find the sentiment pathetic and cowardly. I want to know what my government and powerful people are up to. I have a right to know it and Wikileaks was giving me information about this.

IMO people who get angry at WL for telling them what powerful people and governments do behind their back are pathetic bootlickers.

noduerme6• 4 years ago

I was such a massive and uncritical supporter of Julian Assange for his breathtakingly ballsy attempt to free information... right up until the moment he threw his chips in with the FSB, the ultimate disinformation crew who believe all information is only a set of lies waiting to be discovered and people waiting to be manipulated. Since then, fuck that dude. He didn't live up to the promise. Whether out of cowardice or greed, he betrayed his own beliefs under pressure, and it has unfortunately tainted everything he ever touched. The world of distributed whistleblowing could have been better with any avatar besides him, but then again almost anyone in that position would have been assassinated in character. My main beef with him is that he pawned himself to Putin when the 2016 election was on the line, and it's entirely unclear why he did that.

At least I understand why Snowden eats and spews Russian crap all day. Poor guy got stuck in the wrong airport. Assange is much more insidious.

px438• 4 years ago

Watch the Laura Poitras movie "Risk"[1] if you want a really good feel for why Julian has every reason in the world to disrupt the possibility of a Hillary Clinton presidency.

It's an amazing movie that came out at a really unfortunate time for Laura, in that it got lost in the noise of the dcleaks drama. Anti-Julian people hated the movie because it humanized him too much, and pro-Julian people hated the movie because it made him look weak. It was a deeply personal look into the life of a man who suddenly got caught up in the polarizing shitstorm of the 2016 elections.

The leaks definitely came from GRU hackers, but it seems like the GRU was super careful to sell it to Julian as a DNC insider leak, and in his excitement to stick it to the Clinton campaign, he probably overlooked a lot of red flags that he might have caught if didn't have a personal grudge to satisfy.

I voted for Hillary, and I'd do it again, she'd have made a fine US president. I also seeded the hell out of the Podesta emails, because people deserve to know about political corruption. I also believe that the espionage crimes that Julian is charged with are 100% horseshit, and going after journalists like that sets an incredibly bad precedent coming from a nation that purports to be a world leader in press freedoms.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_(2016_film)

VoodooJuJu• 4 years ago

They lost support when they leaked information about the side that mass media is aligned with.

anothernewdude• 4 years ago

It's not really. While they managed to make the news, and were the most prominent, they are hardly the most effective at providing leaks or whistle blowing (assuming you believed that was their purpose)

coffeeblack• 4 years ago

The state powers as well as certain radicalized groups. Terrifying how easy it turned out to wash people’s brains.

r7212• 4 years ago

"DDoSecrets Is the New WikiLeaks" (from https://newrepublic.com/article/163106/ddossecrets-new-wikil... (2021))

UPD Another news story from 2022: https://therecord.media/how-ddosecrets-built-the-go-to-home-...

NKosmatos• 4 years ago

https://ddosecrets.com/wiki/Distributed_Denial_of_Secrets

sdze• 4 years ago

how stupid it is to use a common and known term to the public and inflate it with a completely different subject matter.

vintermann6• 4 years ago

They wish. (And the agencies backing them wish.)

Wikileaks had the public backing of, and was composed of, people who had proved the painful way that they weren't working for governments or other established interests.

Merely getting access to flashy hacks will never win DDoSecrets that.

Assange paid a huge price for being the organization's public face, but it wasn't for nothing. It could never have worked as well as it did unless someone was willing to play that role.

luma• 4 years ago

Assange was directly working with Russian intelligence so let’s not pretend that they were somehow above politics.

_visgean2• 4 years ago

I think the bigger trend is to cooperate with bigger news papers to leak larger data sets. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Consortium_of_In...

DoItToMe813• 4 years ago

Bullshit. Unlike Wikileaks, of which the 'Russian intelligence' smear has never been substantiated, DDoSecrets works with organizations that are indirectly and directly financed by intelligence agencies and smears those outside of this information complex. Namely, Wikileaks.

They work with the OCCRP, which is made up directly of intelligence shills like Radio Free Europe, and groups funded by the NED. That's the agency the CIA used to finance armed groups in Nicuragua after the Iran-Contra affair. This is not an independent organization.

0dayz2• 4 years ago

Source? It would sound more credible if you didn't poison the well, Wikileaks is far from a neutral organization[1].

Such as suggesting Syria chemical attack was false flag[2].

[1]https://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/6/14179240/wikileaks-russia... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks

momirlan• 4 years ago

Rubbish, not when DDOS hacked GoFundMe, exposing Freedom Convoy donors in order to help Justin Turdeau's irresponsible government shut down public dissent in Canada. That put them squarely in the far-left, antidemocratic, not to mention criminal activist category. As if we didn't know that already

coding123• 4 years ago

so they released 10m docs and no one actually helped out by downloading them an republishing them

Synaesthesia3• 4 years ago

There certainly was a wave of publications when it first came out, and still many investigative reports can be found using wikileaks as a resource, particularly the diplomatic cable leaks.

shp0ngle2• 4 years ago

Some things are really toxic to touch, like the democratic emails leaked (probably) by Russian state agents.

kome3• 4 years ago

well, it was interesting stuff, proving how the primaries were heavy biased against Sanders https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/11/02/ex...

I think, that overall, it was an interesting and meaningful leak. Not just "toxic".

atemerev• 4 years ago

So? The leak has happened. All interested parties have already seen these. Now they are just an academic dataset, like Enron emails.

1337shadow4• 4 years ago

Like the biden laptop story. We must hide information that can be used by far right republicans to prevent Trump from being elected and starting WWIII with say, Russia. Did I get it right this time hn ? :)

stephen_g• 4 years ago

Craig Murray, who I trust, claims to have collected the information from a DNC insider in the United States. Conveniently, the claims of “Russian hackers” was never actually investigated (although the claim was repeated again in the Mueller report), it was just an assertion from CrowdStrike.

hellfish5• 4 years ago

What do the politicians have to hide? Why does it matter who the leak comes from?

I could give a shit less if X foreign govt leaks the info, the politicians are the ones we should really be concerned about

encryptluks2• 4 years ago

There are some on Archive.org.

ForHackernews• 4 years ago

Where are the torrents for this stuff?

kreetx2• 4 years ago

I bet they are accessible somewhere, it's just that the place everybody knows is breaking down.

jeffhuys• 4 years ago

archive.org

px438• 4 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20220914090411/https://file.wiki...

EGreg• 4 years ago

Why don't they just use IPFS? I have seen Wikipedia put on IPFS and become uncensorable: https://blog.ipfs.tech/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/

I have never understood why it's called "wiki" leaks... what is wiki about it?

varjag3• 4 years ago

Nothing. It was to get assangeleaks that whiff of collaborative spirit and openness (which was never the case).

kreetx2• 4 years ago

Are you saying one couldn't leak documents on WikiLeaks if you wanted to?

acdha2• 4 years ago

IPFS isn’t uncensorable. The only thing it changes is that there isn’t a single DNS name which can be revoked or blocked. Otherwise, a government can follow the same process: resolve an IP, get it taken down or block it nationally, repeat.

realusername• 4 years ago

That's much harder to do though, they need to continuously monitor new nodes and make sure blocking the IP does not have too much side effects unless I misunderstand how it works.

ggm• 4 years ago

At the time they launched I believe they used wiki software as an organising principle, it provided free text search, tagging and indexing.

harvie2• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

shp0ngle2• 4 years ago

This is kind of end of an era.

And because of geopolitics, there aren’t that many friends of Assange left in the west. Sad, I guess?

1337shadow4• 4 years ago

Hackers use to fight against governmental corruption back in the days.

Whereas nowadays, they cover up for them.

What a great testimony about the decline of western democracy.

krmboya• 4 years ago

It subjectively seems to me that upto the mid 2010s hacktivists were mostly against government power abuse, but nowadays they seem to be mostly against right-wing leaning targets

EdwardDiego2• 4 years ago

I'm not sure how you can have millions of docs disappear, but not all of them.

It just sounds like their web-app is being severely throttled on CPU or memory or similar, so can't hit the indexes it needs to?

Cthulhu_3• 4 years ago

I'm no expert, but maybe it's disks that are failing; not catastrophically, but causing enough read errors to make most files unavailable.

whatever1• 4 years ago

Literally the one thing that should have been in the blockchain and it is not.

MallocVoidstar2• 4 years ago

What blockchain lets you store terabytes of data permanently?

TekMol• 4 years ago

Arweave

ccbccccbbcccbb3• 4 years ago

Wikileaks is a spent material at this point, its taskforce has been retasked with other, more topical objectives of the agenda.

sschueller• 4 years ago

By that you mean the US has managed to indefinitely imprison an innocent journalist to silence the truth they didn't like.

ccbccccbbcccbb3• 4 years ago

By that I mean that all you see in the media is but a spectacle.

Did Wikileaks achieve anything else but raising the degree of angst and learned helplessness in mere mortals of this world? Maybe there occurred a revolution somewhere against the entities whose corpus delicti was leaked? Any supreme moron convicted? Anything positively changed in the global state of affairs?

Nope, all it did is communicate the message about how both utterly corrupted and invulnerable those entities are, and everyone trying to expose their crimes is doomed, like the character of Assange.

In simple words: Wikileaks == controlled opposition.

rippercushions• 4 years ago

The symptoms sound like the website is in dire need of basic maintenance. Who's paying the bandwidth bills if there are no admins left? And surely there are mirrors of the site out there?

renewiltord• 4 years ago

Pity. There were some good ones there. I'm actually a bit upset about this one document that described data centers and network topology. I have it somewhere on one of my computers, though. And soon only I and a few others shall have it. Haha!

Aeolun• 4 years ago

I guess that means we now need to visit the internet archive to find those documents?

germandiago• 4 years ago

Who is behind this move? That is the important thing. States, of course, or people that work for them.

IfOnlyYouKnew2• 4 years ago

Yes, a decade after Wikileaks was, briefly, relevant, it’s time for „states“ to move against them. For some reason.

potatototoo99• 4 years ago

They haven't forgiven Assange either.

dane-pgp• 4 years ago

I suppose the conspiracy theory answer is that the Democrats only became motivated (or petty) enough to illegally(?) attack the WikiLeaks website after Assange caused Hillary to lose.

For most of the period between her losing the election and now, Trump has been in power, and Biden has had more important things to focus on than getting revenge against Assange/WL/Russia. (Also, it would be hard to maintain plausible deniability if the website started failing right after Biden took office).

0atman• 4 years ago

This seems like classic DDOS symptoms, right? It's not that the documents are gone, they're inaccessible.

oriettaxx• 4 years ago

omg

SRE here with many pro-bono hours, if anyone is able to let their IT team

forgotusername6• 4 years ago

What is the goto place now for sharing data that governments don't want you to share?

px438• 4 years ago

https://ddosecrets.com/wiki/Distributed_Denial_of_Secrets

hellfish5• 4 years ago

In February 2022, after many anonymous donors supported the 2022 Freedom Convoy, DDoSecrets began providing journalists and researchers with a hacked list of donors' personal information from GiveSendGo

Oh sure. Go give a government organization government leaks. What a great idea!

_visgean2• 4 years ago

https://www.icij.org/ these guys handled panama papers or you could go to guardian https://www.theguardian.com/securedrop or any similar medium.

senda2• 4 years ago

The Guardian have arguably the worst track record for handling leaks.

vkou• 4 years ago

The press of governments hostile to them.

dalbasal10• 4 years ago

Apropos of WikiLeaks itself, does anyone remember "information wants to be free."

As years go by, the www is decreasingly capable of disseminating information without monopoly, government or some other official backing.

Basic web technologies are designed to make documents available. This should all should be trivially achievable using early 90s computers. Maintenance/sysadmin shouldn't be a major hurdle.

Yet... Here we are.

sbergot• 4 years ago

The full quote is "Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. That tension will not go away."

saurik• 4 years ago

More originally, and with more context (as the ways and reasons in which information "wants" each of these things matters).

On the one hand you have — the point you’re making Woz — is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable — the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other.

slim• 4 years ago

yep, datalove

noduerme6• 4 years ago

On a purely technical level, suppose you currently wanted to start a site like wikileaks that hosted all this insider pirated leak shit. Where would you host it? Think of your top 10 onshore options and then all your offshore options. Could anyone even launch that site now in 2022? Is there still a nuke shelter in Denmark and a basement in Norway willing to physically protect you? Realistically, how would you do it and maintain any reasonable uptime when one government or another was dedicated to shutting you down?

Ten years ago you could do it and possibly even change the world. Today it's not possible. Even hint at it, you're toast... it's that you couldn't even get an access point to try (without being murdered before if you uploaded something).

Gasp0de• 4 years ago

Just host the data on the darknet somewhere with hundreds of cheap VPS as internet facing fronts. Some countries still have strong protection laws for journalists (e.g. scandinavian countries, iceland) where these VPS would probably stay up for a while.

noduerme6• 4 years ago

afaik wikileaks archive is still available as torrents and on Tor onion. Both protocols are extremely compromised..

SilverBirch6• 4 years ago

To be honest your best bet is probably obtaining a stolen credit card, sticking it up on one of the big cloud providers and then rest safe in the knowledge the second you release the data it's going to be copied a thousand times over by journalists and political operatives. If you really want to continue your campaign, just continually pop up with new stolen credit cards on various cloud providers, the barrier to entry is so low now.

noduerme6• 4 years ago

So I'm trying to pretend you realistically have something huge to expose... and want to make it through the week or possibly the rest of the month without going to jail. Booting up a site on Amazon with a stolen CC is probably not that smart.

> it's going to be copied a thousand times over by journalists

not really if it's a fucking terabyte of data

sneak• 4 years ago

The big cloud providers have encountered this many times, and are experts at combatting drive-by fraud like this.

The largest and default "big cloud provider" in the US is also a retailer and might be the best organization in the world at detecting and preventing credit card fraud.

testplzignore• 4 years ago

I would sell it on Amazon as "baby formula". That way I could even make a profit! Only half joking.

mrguyorama10• 4 years ago

If you tried that nestle would sue you for not killing enough new mothers.

TEP_Kim_Il_Sung6• 4 years ago

Visit CRYPTOME, the limited hangout version of wikileaks.

jonathanstrange9• 4 years ago

That's a US intelligence outlet. Still interesting, of course, but not a substitute for WL.

arminiusreturns3• 4 years ago

For all those who keep spouting this Russia leaked it nonsense, former NSA technical director William Binney along with some others did the technical anaylsis which showed the leaker used a usb drive to copy the emails.

I also specifically remember doing a deep dive on the limited Crowdtrike report... which based their entire argument around a list of IPs in the Netherlands they somehow labelled as "known Russian IPs", but never provided any evidence for or methodology for.

The servers were never provided to the FBI, and Crowdtrike is extremely questionable as an organization for other reasons.

Furthermore, the accusation that Wikileaks was selectively publishing doesn't stand up to scrutiny, with it being fairly obvious in context they were trying to get leaked docs about Trump too. Even then, who was controlling the Wikileaks twitter then? I doubt it was Assange himself.

I started reading Assange when he was a cryptophreaker in the 90s, and it's been a wild ride to watch inteligence agency character assassinations become so effective at forcing a narrative that supposedly educated people around HN have gobbled up. I'm proud to see the pushback that does exist though.

All that said, Assange's childhood in what is likely to have been an intelligence front cult, has always made me just a bit wary of him, but to me it always felt more like a person who barely escaped and was transformed by it into what he became. (again, a lot of this context people don't know because they never read his stuff pre-wikileaks)

nova220332• 4 years ago

https://www.techdirt.com/2017/08/16/stories-claiming-dnc-hac...

William Binney's "analysis" is a little suspect.

The servers were never provided to the FBI, and Crowdtrike is extremely questionable as an organization for other reasons.

So, to do proper forensic analysis, I need to physically take the servers? I can't log in and take all the data?

ALso, please enlighten us...Why is crowdstrike "suspect?

arminiusreturns3• 4 years ago

No, his analysis is not. He talked about how they even directly tested from servers in a few of the potential countries for real world data transfer speeds and they couldnt reproduce the rate. He also explains how it fits a FAT32 filesystem very well. VIPS has a long history of being corrwct and way ahead of the curve, hence the frequent character assassinations.

As someone who has had formal forensic training, your statement about physical servers made me laugh! Have you never heard of chain of custody? Even if someone provided image files the break in chain of custody by a third party would make the evidence useless.

As for Crowdstrike, even before 2016 they had a reputation in the industry. When it came to the Russiagate stuff, I think the following article is a good start.

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/06/17/fbi-never-saw-crowdstr...

stefantalpalaru• 4 years ago

So, to do proper forensic analysis, I need to physically take the servers?

Obviously.

I can't log in and take all the data?

The DNC did not allow the FBI to do that either.

Why is crowdstrike "suspect?

Because Dmitri Alperovitch - Crowdstrike's Russia-born co-founder and former CTO - is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Because Shawn Henry - Crowdstrike CEO - admitted in a December 2017 congressional testimony that they had found no proof that data had been exfiltrated from those DNC servers they had exclusive forensic access to.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 4 years ago

What function did WikiLeaks serve when there is already independent journalism? Was their anon file drop system ahead of it's time?

Cthulhu_3• 4 years ago

Pretty much, yeah; it was thanks to Wikileaks and the technologies they pushed that made media implement ways to anonymously report things to them. If I recall correctly, that's what Assange had to teach the journalists at the time.

vintermann6• 4 years ago

Read a book about the history of Wikileaks, and you'll find out.

Independent investigative journalism was, and is, in a sorry state.

Even most of the best investigative journalists operating today defend a two tier system, where you have to trust them. You don't get access to their source documents.

For instance the notorious Hunter Biden laptop, was never published. Not even by the media hawking it. Only supposed excerpts from it have been published.

The same is true for ICIJ releases like the Panama Papers. Some people have access. You don't.

Assange was determined to fight that, to provide to the public the source material journalists use, so that you don't have to trust him (or anyone) that they're being selective, or slipping in their own details.

Wikileaks was also the first anonymous submission platform, by many years.

James Dolan and Aaron Swartz, who worked at the second one, are both dead by suicide. The latter after harsh persecution by the US government. It's likely that one or both of them earlier secretly worked with Wikileaks' submission system.

So yes, it was important.

omegacharlie• 4 years ago

This is all very interesting. Makes one wonder about the reliability of contingency plans by WL in case of indefinite absence of Assange.

Cthulhu_3• 4 years ago

There WAS supposedly a dead man's switch; numerous encrypted multi-gigabyte files have been shared over the years, and the theory was that their keys would be released if Assange or one of his associates didn't hit a button every X amount of time. But that doesn't seem to have materialized.

hosteur• 4 years ago

I don’t think any deadman’s switch has been confirmed by Wikileaks. They did however publish insurance files which are supposed to contain full unredacted archives of various leaks. One such insurance file was exposed when an either incompetent or malicious journalist at the guardian revealed the encryption key in a publication.

A deadman’s switch would be a specific mechanism to reveal such key. But the existence of it has to my knowledge never been confirmed by WL.

nova220332• 4 years ago

https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks...

“We believe it would be much better for GOP to win,” he typed into a private Twitter direct message group to an assortment of WikiLeaks’ most loyal supporters on Twitter. “Dems+Media+liberals woudl then form a block to reign in their worst qualities,” he wrote. “With Hillary in charge, GOP will be pushing for her worst qualities., dems+media+neoliberals will be mute.” He paused for two minutes before adding, “She’s a bright, well connected, sadistic sociopath.”

argentier2• 4 years ago

Given the disaster of the Arab Spring, which the Clinton state department supported, he's not far wrong.

The destruction of Libya alone, and the sociopathic gloating on daytime television, should disqualify Clinton from holding high political office again.

She also brought the neocons into the State Department with predictably appalling results.

petee2• 4 years ago

Good maybe my phone number and social security number will finally be deleted and not continually used for scams.

My info was "shared" as part of a hack/accounting dump. Wikileaks has little useful value that can't be found through other means

warinukraine• 4 years ago

Weird, this data is what Wikileaks claimed they took out.

petee2• 4 years ago

I was unaware they were doing that. I haven't checked lately but I could still find it last time I looked

grzaks• 4 years ago

Still cryptome.org up and running since 1996

senda2• 4 years ago

Sad to see support for Assange disappear from HN, a lot of your talking points are vague empty slogans. There has never been proof Assange was a Russian asset even if he was God forbid someone gave you information to make informed decisions.

The sad truth is you want to believe the lie, and you're upset at being woken up.

mint2• 4 years ago

That is correct, people are a tad miffed at WL + JA for earning their trust that WL stands for transparency … only to betray and squander it on being the gru intelligence launderer in order to get the kremlin approved potus. All just because of a mutual grudge the leader had.

Had WL been transparent that JA was motivated out of his grudge against Clinton and antipathy of the US and put that disclaimer out clearly, then I suspect people would feel less betrayed by his lack of transparency as he burned their trust.

Also, while it was apparent at the time to those who avoided a fox instilled Pavlovian response to Clinton that a trump presidency would be a bad thing for America and rampant with cronyism and corruption, now with hindsight everyone is faced with that factual reality and how russia benefited in spades.

For those who’d trusted JA it really stings when stark reality shows them he was actually trying to get themselves to shoot themselves in the foot all along. Realizing one had been hoodwinked doesn’t breed fuzzy goodwill.

DrScientist5• 4 years ago

I don't understand the level of JA/Wikileaks hate - reading the comments it seems to be mostly American ( DNC leaks related ).

I do wonder, when the party in power changed, but the damaging leaks didn't - it started to become far too apparent that the problem wasn't Bush or the republicans, the problem was America - irrespective of who was in charge.

Maybe that's too hard for many American's to accept, hence the shooting of messenger instead, rather than facing up to the uncomfortable truth - that America's vision of itself, doesn't reflect reality.

alexfromapex• 4 years ago

It's not America that causes these types of problems, its our banking military industrial complex.

DrScientist5• 4 years ago

Let me be clear - I'm not blaming American's per se ( though they do share some of the blame - the idea that America can do no wrong because it's America, is surprisingly pervasive even among highly educated people ).

I think it's quite clear that democracy is failing in the US - why else would you have father and son or husband and wife as presidents or almost presidents.

Clearly the statistical chance of them being the best on merit is quite slim.

So yes there is institutional capture.

It's not all bad though - the US is very dynamic country, there is a chance of change.

tiahura• 4 years ago

Many people dislike moralizing egomaniacs that view themselves above pedestrian norms and ethics.

DrScientist5• 4 years ago

Not sure what you are referring to?

Yep he is different.

But I see the main difference as him having oodles of integrity and courage, in contrast to going for the quiet life in the middle of the herd.

A lot of the accusations that have been thrown at him frankly don't bear detailed examination - the whole assault thing, the idea that he put US operative lives at risk, the idea he was in cahoots with the Russians, the idea he was active in hacking rather than being a journalist receiving information from a source.

In my view, this is all mud thrown to dehumanise him, so nobody complains when he is effectively tortured and imprisoned for life for telling the uncomfortable truth.

tlb• 4 years ago

Assange's original theory was that WL would create a "secrecy tax", making life difficult for evil orgs that had to keep secrets. But as far as I can tell, WL ended up damaging regular orgs more than evil ones. Because:

- minor scandals within regular orgs created large damage because the members have high ethical standards. While the members of evil orgs didn't care how corrupt their leadership was.

- evil orgs were more effective at keeping secrets, so most leaks were from non-evil orgs that didn't think they had much to hide.

That these second-order effects would end up dominating the first-order effects Assange intended wasn't obvious in advance, so I don't blame the guy for not foreseeing it. But at this point, we have to consider the "leaks in general are good" theory thoroughly discredited.

q1w25• 4 years ago

It's actually amazing that more transparency did more harm than good.

Essentially, the evil groups weaponized the tool of transparency.

DrScientist5• 4 years ago

Do you have an example of a 'minor scandal' with a regular org?

DiogenesKynikos6• 4 years ago

This depends on your own subjective view of which organizations are evil, and which aren't.

WikiLeaks' biggest document dumps were about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and about American diplomacy around the world. The latter also revealed countless local scandals that were big news in different countries (for example, about corruption in Tunisia, which helped spark the Arab Spring).

I don't see any credible argument for the idea that WikiLeaks did more harm than good. What decisively turned American liberals against WikiLeaks was the publication of the DNC emails, which revealed a real scandal (the DNC trying to stack things against Bernie Sanders during the primaries) that had real consequences (the head of the DNC having to resign). American liberals turned against WikiLeaks for that largely partisan reason (the fact that Democrats were desperate for scapegoats after their election loss to Trump made the backlash against WikiLeaks even worse), while American conservatives wouldn't like an organization that leaks American state secrets anyways, so Wikileaks was left with no support in the US.

WikiLeaks is struggling to stay online as millions of documents disappear

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