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WikiLeaks
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February 21, 2014New documents leaked by former NSA employee turned whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal that the NSA and GCHQ consistently spied on WikiLeaks in the past years, recording information regarding the people who accessed the site in the process, regardless of their citizenship The governments of the United States and the United Kingdom targeted WikiLeaks and other activist groups with tactics ranging from covert surveillance to prosecution. One document from Government Communications Headquarters, Britain’s top spy agency, shows that GCHQ used its surveillance system to secretly monitor visitors to a WikiLeaks site. By exploiting its ability to tap into the fiber-optic cables that make up the backbone of the Internet, the agency confided to allies in 2012, it was able to collect the IP addresses of visitors in real time, as well as the search terms that visitors used to reach the site from search engines like Google. Similar surveillance activities have been considered for targeting Pirate Bay users (for copyright-related purposes,) as well as Anonymous hackers (to counter their attacks against U.S. targets). Juliane Assange posted a message on WikiLeaks, calling for “the appointment of a Special Prosecutor to investigate the NSA, after documents show U.S. spying on WikiLeaks and its supporters.” “These documents demonstrate that the political persecution of WikiLeaks is very much alive,” “The paradox is that Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks organization are being treated as a threat instead of what they are: a journalist and a media organization that are exercising their fundamental right to receive and impart information in its original form, free from omission and censorship, free from partisan interests, free from economic or political pressure.”
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September 9, 2013The famous server that hosted Wikileaks during its controversial release of secret U.S. State Department cables is now for sale on eBay. It was going for $25,200 as of Monday morning. The Wikileaks server belongs to the Swedish Internet service provider Bahnhof. The company rented it out to the nonprofit Wikileaks in 2010, when the organization began disclosing highly-guarded U.S. government records. The server is a Dell Poweredge R410 blade server from 2010. The server was put on displayed for a while in as a museum at the Thule Brunkow Ridge data center in central Stockholm, as a symbol for our values as a hoster and ISP. The company can prove the authenticity of the item by showing Julian Assange signature on the hosting contract where the ID of this particular server is noted. The ebay item specifations read: “This is indeed the physical web server from which the leaked cablegate material was released, complete with hard drives, motherboard and everything! It can be plugged in and used immediately. We ourselves put it on a pedestal and displayed it as a museum item in our underground Thule Brunkow Ridge data center in central Stockholm, as a symbol for our values as a hoster and ISP.Note: The physical server is owned by Bahnhof. Wikileaks rented the server as part of a hosting contract. It was never used for any other client than Wikileaks.* For closer specification, see the page of the eBay auction. All hardware is original, including the hard disks. Those have however been erased according to the U.S. specification DoD 5220.22-M where every byte of the hard disk is overwritten several times. The original information cannot be recreated, not even by NSA” All profits from the sale go to non-profit organization Reporters Without Borders and to 5july.org, the 5th of July Foundation that works for freedom...
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On Saturday anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks released a treasure trove of files, that at least for now, you can’t read. The group, which has been assisting ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden after he leaked top-secret documents to the media, posted links for about 400 gigabytes of files on their Facebook and Twitter pages and asked their fans to download and mirror them elsewhere. You can download the files via torrent but since they are encrypted and Wikileaks has not yet provided the key you won’t be able to open them. The files have a very high level of encryption. The end of the files, “aes256,” likely stands for Advanced Encryption Standard-256 bits. It’s a way of locking up your files that even the NSA has approved for use on top-secret data. What’s in the files remains to be seen.
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Tweeting about wanting to write about somebody’s death by drone might come across as careless and insensitive. Time magazine senior correspondent Michael Grunwald sent a tweet on August 17th saying “I can’t wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange,” Grunwald, after receiving countless tweets criticizing his statement, decided to delete it but only after somebody pointed out that the tweet would give ammunition to Assange supporters. Journalist like The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, James Ball and Mosharraf Zaidi fired back about this stating it was unprofessional, vile, and not objective journalism. In response, WikiLeaks called for Grunwald’s resignation: “We have written to TIME magazine to ask for Michael Grunwald’s resignation” Grunwald later apologized on Twitter “It was a dumb tweet. I’m sorry. I deserve the backlash. (Maybe not the anti-Semitic stuff but otherwise I asked for it.)” Time simply released a statement, distancing itself from the tweet: “Michael Grunwald posted an offensive tweet from his personal Twitter account that is in no way representative of Time’s views. He regrets having tweeted it, and he removed it from his feed.” In the past, after WikiLeaks released thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables, several public figures, and commentators like Fox News’ Bob Beckel publicly stated their support for killing Assange.
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November 28, 2012WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange lamented a preliminary ruling by the European Commission on Tuesday that it was unlikely Visa Europe, MasterCard Europe and American Express Co had violated EU anti-trust rules with their blocks on processing WikiLeaks donations. Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union were among half a dozen U.S. payment firms to start the financial blockade just after the group published some 250,000 secret State Department cables in December 2010. DataCell, a company that collected donations for WikiLeaks, complained to the European Commission after Visa Europe, MasterCard Europe and American Express stopped processing donations for WikiLeaks. According to European Commission documents released Tuesday by WikiLeaks, two high-ranking U.S. politicians are responsible, at least in part, for a financial blockade that the organization claims has cut off 95 percent of its revenue. Wikileaks claims to have lost more than $50 million of donations over the blockade. Wikileaks has found 1 way around its financial blockades with a global payment method called bitcoin. Wikileaks has taken in over $32,000 equivalent in more than 1,100 separate bitcoin donations throughout the blockade (1BTC = $10.00) There is no question that WikiLeaks is a questionable site providing an online “drop box” to provide a secure and anonymous way for sources to leak sensitive or classified documents. Nevertheless, the United States has never charged WikiLeaks or any of its staffers with a crime, and neither have any other countries.
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November 1, 2012The Anonymous hacktivist community has released a new video to reveal the initiation of TYLER, an operation part of Project Mayhem 2012. Designed to be a WikiLeaks competitor the new project is scheduled to be done December 21 of this year. The digital voice states: “With censorship bills being passed and bills that attempt to rid us of our freedoms that this country was founded upon the time has now come to act. We have devised a plan to bring forth the final act of the evolution,” When asked about the future of WikiLeaks, the anonymous group said “Julian has threatened on at least one previous occasion to pull the plug on the project because the fundraising was not meeting his expectations. It was at that time that Anonymous began planning to field our own alternative disclosure platforms. Julian desperately needs WikiLeaks, and he is the only one that can pull the plug on the project. I rather think that so long as he is in dire straits, he will not do so despite any threats from him to the contrary.” TYLER will be a Wikileaks on steroids most have said. TYLER, will be based on decentralized, peer-to-peer technology rather than fixed, dedicated servers. If successful, in the same way as torrents need seeding parties, user participation will be necessary to keep information flowing. The hackers claim that this kind of project setup will be next to impossible to close or eradicate.
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August 14, 2012Wikileaks reports a government spy network using Trapwire to capture surveillance cameras in stores, casinos, and other businesses around the country. Apparently agents can use facial recognition software to analyze this footage for people of interest. The way Trapwire works is every few seconds, data picked up at surveillance points in major cities and landmarks across the United States are recorded digitally on the spot, then encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center. From what I have read the fortified central database center was in Maryland then I heard DC it’s speculation the truth is the location is undisclosed no one really know where it’s located. Trapwire was created by a private company named Abraxas which was founded by Richard “Hollis” Helms and is staffed by ex-CIA agents. They sold the product to various government agencies, local governments, and private companies. The US department of homeland security paid $832,000 to deploy Trapwire in Washington DC and the Seattle area. After the Leak Wikileaks got taken down for ten days do to DDoS Attack and is still down. This has happened in the past to Wikileaks after major leaks but never this long. A group called AntiLeaks claims responsibility behind the attack. The DDoS attack is apparently their way of making sure that the group can’t release any more leaks. When asked how long AntiLeaks would keep Wikileaks down there answer was “Forever”. AntiLeaks claims Wikileaks is a terrorist organization and they deserve to be down forever. Only time will tell how long they can keep Wikileaks down for my guess is AntiLeaks is a major player in the hacker group space and they have the resources to take Wikileaks down as long as they see fit.
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August 13, 2012Can some one say conspiracy Wikileaks reports a government spy network using Trapwire to capture surveillance cameras in stores, casinos, and other businesses around the country. Apparently agents can use facial recognition software to analyze this footage for people of interest. http://io9.com/5933966/wikileaks-reveals-trapwire-a-government-spy-network-that-uses-ordinary-surveillance-cameras Then mysteriously Wikileaks gets taken down for nine days do to DDoS Attack. This has happened in the pas to wikileaks after major leaks but never this long. A group called AntiLeaks claims responsibility behind the attack. The DDoS attack is apparently their way of making sure that the group can’t release any more cables. http://www.webpronews.com/wikileaks-has-been-down-for-nine-days-following-massive-ddos-attack-2012-08