The 25th annual Chaos Computer Congress, was held in Berlin between Christmas and New Year 2008, and featured a session about the WikiLeakS.org project.
An mp4 video (needs Quicktime or similar player) is now available in English, of the session entitled Wikileaks vs. the World (.mp4) with Julian Assange, investigative editor, and Daniel Achberger (spelling ?), writer and analyst:
Julian and Daniel appealed for the critical involvement of this technically adept audience,of computer experts and "hackers", to help with the aims of the WikiLeakS.org project.
Daniel claimed that there was no bias in the WikiLeakS.org project, but that is something which many people, ourselves included, would dispute.
Julian mentioned a few of the project's successes, and some of the legal threats against it.
Thet raised a laugh from the audience when they revealed that the email sent from the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the German Federal Foreign Intelligence Service, asking for documents to be censored, and threatening legal action, was originally sent to the wikileaks@jabber.se email address, which is to do with instant messaging chats, but which,for some reason still, is the only email address on the WikiLeakS.org contact page, which can be cut and pasted, as all of the others are displayed as graphical images, to annoy email spambots.
That does not reflect well on the internet analytical skills and competence of the BND.
Julian repeated his controversial dismissal of blogs, that their authors never generate any original content or do any original research (a false generalisation) and highlighted the decline in the number of international media organisations and in the number of full time, paid investigative newspaper journalists. In the USA, apparently, there are now as few as 40 of them, 10 on the staff of the New York Times.
Julian also made the important point about how easily centralised online newspaper archives can and are being censored, usually by threats of expensive legal action (often using the United Kingdom's appalling "libel tourism" laws) . He also mentioned their habit of not drawing attention to the fact that an article, which has already been published and printed, has now been removed. and has not only ceased to exist, but appears never to have existed - a truly Orwellian re-writing of history aspect of modern censorship.
Daniel hinted at some future technical develops with the WikiLeakS.org project, possibly including the bundling of a WikilLeakS.org generated SSL/ Digital Certificate (since they do not trust commercial certificate authorities) with WikiLeakS.org customised Tor / browser software bundles and (linux) Live CDs etc.
He also hinted at some sort of "intelligent routing" of documents and website content, to cope with legal problems in different countries. This is something which sounds remarkably like selective self censorship by WikilLeakS.org itself.
Apparently not enough people know about, and use things like the hard to censor Tor Hidden Services or Freenet, to publish enough interesting things things which can be picked up by the media. Perhaps the mainstream media simply does not understand what a .onion URL is, or are too impatient with the inevitable slow download speed.
This video presentation gives an interesting glimpse about the WikiLeakS.org project and its future plans, which is not obvious from the website itself.