WikiLeakS.org again has a Tor Hidden Service for encrypted anonymised uploads - http://suw74isz7wqzpmgu.onion/ over 7 months after the previous one was abandoned.
The Official Tor "Blog" , which does not accept any comments or feedback from the public, has this report of the Keynote Speech given on behalf of Julian Assange at the HOPE hackers' conference in New York, by Jacob Appelbaum.
The usual rumours abound that there were FBI or other US Government Agents waiting to arrest / "talk" to him at this conference, but why they would wait until then and not do so as he came through US Passport Control is never explained by the media.
There is also a very rare, very brief, status report about the WikiLeakS.org website infrastructure:
HOPE 2010 Talk / Current status
Hello,
Jacob Appelbaum is speaking today on behalf of the project at the HOPE2010 conference. He will cover past, present and future developments of the project. For further information please visit the conference website: http://www.thenexthope.org/.
Now some general NEWS.
The submission system is up and running again (yes also reachable via Tor for those that do not trust SSL). Some important changes that you should be aware of:
* we moved the location of the submission system to https://sunshinepress.org/
Without telling anybody and without establishing a link of trust between the two domain names (see our previous blog article)
* The tor submission path uses a new hidden service address located at http://suw74isz7wqzpmgu.onion/
Some good news at last !
Although slow, a Tor enabled session (download and install the software from https://www.torproject.org/easy-download.html.en) does End to End Encryption between your Web Browser and three randomly chosen Tor relay servers in the Tor anonymity cloud, almost certainly some or all of which will be in foreign countries.
The final 4th hop to the Tor Hidden Service is also encrypted.
More importantly Tor makes Communications Traffic Data Analysis very much harder , even for well resource opponents like Government intelligence agencies (who obviously also make use it themselves)
SSL for the other services like the websites will take some more time until it is available.
What is so difficult about purchasing and installing another Digital Certificate to replace the old one, before making other changes to the infrastructure ?
Those users that do not like to install a generic IRC client can use the webchat again which is located at https://chat.wikileaks.org/ and connects to our internal IRC server. We added some additional means of protection to the IRCd to prevent the leakage of users identities.
This IRC chat system is all very well for reporting errors on the website etc. but is is absolutely not suitable for preserving the anonymity of potential whistleblowers.
The archive is now back for some time and we are still working on it. The most visible changes so far are the support for torrents and magnet links for files referenced in the archive, a facelift of the design, content cleanup. Public edits are still disabled but will be enabled again. Public comments will be disabled until we have an appropriate solution in place. We removed some stuff to hide the identities of the users working on the wiki as well as protecting the identity of people visiting the site. For example external links always use a trampoline now to make sure that 3rd party sites do not know where you came from. Furthermore we deleted all accounts not used for a year as part of the cleaning process.
We have meant to comment on the "trampoline" before. Why did they waste their time with this feature ?
It just looks and feels like another creepy hidden visitor tracking system, even if it is not meant to be that.
If they had not disabled the SSL version of the website, then there would already have protection against sending HTTP_REFERER environment variables to the external web pages which are linked to in the WIkI. Similarly if people do not simply click on a link, but Open in a New Tab or New Window, especially in the Private Browsing modes of most modern web browsers, then this information is not sent anyway.
Generally the technical staff is pretty busy putting the resources you granted us to good use. We are still extending the network with new machines, but will provide a dedicated interface for this type of help soon (email just does work for this kind of task).
Should this read "email just does not work for this kind of task" ?
Please do not make it a Twitter interface !
We have switched the complete system to a new architecture.
What was wrong with the old one ? Did it not scale properly ?
Why not publish a high level description of this architecture, so that WikiLeakS.org can be advised on how not to make elementary mistakes, again.
Until they do so, their hopes for lots of local versions of WikiLeakS.org to spring up organically around the world in parallel, will be still born.
If you notice that something does not work as expected please drop into the chat and talk to the staff there.
WikiLeakS.org has a world wide audience.
Is there really someone lurking in the IRC chat room 24 / 7 ?
They will be able to either relay your message or get you in contact with someone who can look at the problem.
The WL teams want to thank everybody for their support and patience.
By WikiLeaks on July 17, 2010
We are glad that someone is trying to sort out the technological mess that the WikiILeakS.org project deteriorated into.
We can dream that they will publish some PGP keys....
There is also the whole question of anonymous Mobile Phone Communications. Many more people have access to these than to fast computers and internet connections.
Surely the WikiLeakS.org technical team should be creating or promoting mobile phone SMS text and MMS message anonymous submissions systems ?
You don't really need to find out what's going on
You don't really want to know just how far it's gone
Just leave well enough alone
Eat your dirty laundry
Dirty little secrets
Dirty little lies
We got our dirty little fingers in everybody's pie
We love to cut you down to size
We love dirty laundry
Sifting through this mostly non-technical Keynote Speech, a recording of which (approx. 1 hour 20 minutes) is available at:
http://drop.io/thenexthope_wikileaks/asset/ioerror-hope-wikileaks-20100717-mp3
[link via boing boing]
seems to refer to a planned Web Chat system.