WikiLeaskS.org has issued a request for feedback to their press release list:
Sunshine Press seeks your advice.
Over the last year, Wikileaks has catalyzed thousands of investigative reports in the mainstream press, over 60,000 blog posts and millions of web pages. We have changed national electoral outcomes and political platforms, exposed hundreds of assassinations, arms sales, many significant human rights abuses and billions of dollars worth of corruption. And we have "uncensored" numerous books and newspaper articles from around the world, taking on the legal risks that others would not, or could not.
We have never lost a source, never lost a case and have never been successfully censored.
More through luck, than by design.
It is too early to tell if some of the leaked document analyst / commentator or WikiLeakS.org readers anonymity has been betrayed or not.
Yet the project is still in its infancy and has yet to officially launch. We hit the ground running because we knew that the only way to understand how to approach our difficult goal, was to try. We now know our scale of operations must be increased thousands of
times before we can keep up with whistleblowers and world-wide censorship of other publications. And we know the fourth estate, and the "4.0" estate can not keep up with us already due their own limitations, which we are, in part, tasked to reform.We have radical ideas on what kind of economic, technical and organizational structures might be needed.We've learned a lot. And we want to change a lot.
But before we tell you our ideas in detail, we want you to tell us your ideas.
Tell us what we're doing right, what we're doing wrong, and how we can improve.Tell us your most radical ideas for our vision of justice and how they might be economically, politically, legally, technically and socially sustained.
From an offshore escrow center which economically sustains hundreds of "public policy paparazzi", to a series of investigative books called "Ban this Book", to extending the Wikileaks submission process to every newspaper in the world, to forming a private intelligence agency to subsidise investigative journalism, to betting markets on disclosed
documents, to moving our servers to satellite linked ocean going boats to storing classified embargoed documents in interplanetary radio bounces, to fomenting a quasi-religious movement of door-to-door source acquisition teams, to a substantial deployment of servers inside the Chinese censorwall, to exporting New York's new anti-"libel tourism" laws to the world via jurisdictional tricks, give us your most radical ideas and alliances.
- Would it really be too difficult to run the existing infrastructure properly, before launching any "radical ideas" ?
- Where is the high level public overview of the WikiLeakS.org security and anonymity systems architecture ? How do we know that either WikiLeakS.org own systems enhancements, or any "radical new ideas" are not simply re-inventing the wheel ?
- What is so difficult about publishing a new PGP Public Encryption Key or two , and using them for both the Digital Signature of official WikiLeakS.org press releases, and for postal encryption of files on removable media and for encrypting email file attachments ?
- How about a WikiLeakS.org system status page and RSS / XML syndication feed, Tor Hidden Service, Twitter, BitTorrent, email etc. (with Digitally Signed status reports) , which can reassure people when WikiLeakS.org is only suffering a temporary capacity problem, rather than having been censored ? This would need to be run from a completely different webserver from those of the the main systems.
I love this website, and the idea behind this website.
The analysis reports are a great step to dissecting the information and getting it out to the vast majority of people who aren't going to sit and read through legal documents.
I believe if you want to reach your goal, you must take it a step further and find a way to create video information.
I love the site, very excellent.
I don't know if what I'm talking about is particularly close to what your aims for the site are, but I'll mention it anyhow.
I wish it were easier to add information about specific nefarious individuals who are responsible for the spread of evil in the world and their interests and connections, lists of their social networks. You know, address, home phone number, all the names of all their business interests, as much information as possible. SSN if they've been particularly naughty. Not in the interest of vigilante justice against fascists, but in the sense of opening them up to social pressure to publicly disavow their actions and their colleagues.
In that vein, I would propose a systematic targeting of the particular individuals who are principally responsible for egregious offenses against the public good in the world of business, the media, and the political sphere. Who are the people who have become rich from corruption in government? There's an awful wide list. The social network that is the plutarchy is vast and largely unnamed. Who is running the defense contractors? Who is making the big campaign contributions? Who's out mobilizing the masses in talk radio, and who are their sponsors? Who is in power? Clearly they've been fucking it all up, and we don't even know exactly who they are, beyond the very most broad strokes. Give people the ability to see who is in their own town spreading evil, wherever they are, to empower them to stand up against injustice on a level that they can directly manage as they see fit. Right-wing talk radio hosts have long sent their soldiers to intimidate the opposition, going so far as to announce people's home addresses-- this is socializing that process and co-opting it in the interest of justice. If you associate with fascists, you should be unsurprised if no one else will do business with you, if your life is harder because you were greedy and elitist.
Quite simply, we need to make it easier to be prejudiced against the power elite and their most powerful minions. Cripple them financially whenever possible, hamstring their every move, open them up to the ugliest elements on earth. In other words, leverage the power of broad social networks to attack the individual nodes of the competing social network, you know, the one that wants us to all be obedient serfs for the eternal ruling class. Get networked surveillance systems going on a couple million bad guys in power suits. Because we can all name a dozen extremely rich and powerful men with nefarious aims. But who are their accountants, their lawyers, their advisors, their subcontractors, who are the members of the board that enable these creeps, that wait to step up to fill the role of oppressor should the position be vacated? These are the easier and more plentiful targets for those networked individuals seeking to restore freedom to the wealthy free nations, and a site like wikileaks is the perfect vehicle.
That is, if that's not too far off the mark for your aims. Expose the system of power to daylight, and its most hideous and evil portions will wither and die.
Also, more comprehensive investigatory journalism tutorials might be in order.
good on you WikiLeaks, someone has to be a superhero, and fight the villains, who else will?
I truly believe what you are doing is right, and here is an analogy of the way I see it ::
A police officer is allowed to search your house or car (with the correct documentation) to find illegal objects;
I believe that we all need a "Technology Police" that is allowed to do the same thing in an electronic medium;
Someone needs to step up and do it, who else will?
Perhaps studying the history of how police enforcement came into being might help you to envision some of the challenges ahead?