Given the popularity of Peer to Peer (P2P) networks for file sharing and the close links between WikiLeakS.org original web hosts in Sweden and their former links with The Pirate Bay "The world's most resilient bittorrent site", WikiLeakS.org leaked documents have always been available on P2P networks.
The recent Bloomberg news agency story
WikiLeaks May Have Exploited Music, Photo Networks to Get Data
gives prominence to some dubious claims by a US based Peer to Peer Network spying company called Tiversa.
Bloomberg and Tiversa provide no evidence of any direct link between the alleged
appearance of the US Military files on incompetently configured personal computer systems running P2P software (in contravention of the applicable computer security policies) and the publication of re-named files on Wikileaks, months or even years later.
The Bloomberg article itself lists the months or sometimes years between the alleged appearance of a few US military documents on P2P networks open to the entire internet, and the publication of what is alleged to be copies of the same versions of those documents on the old, no longer functioning, WikiLeakS.org wiki system.
They cannot have it both ways.
Either it is legal for everyone, including firms like Tiversa to monitor such networks (for money) in bulk, in real time, all over the world, "1.8 billion times a day" by running "rogue" monitoring nodes joined to these P2P networks, or it is not.
To attempt to claim that just because they monitored "4 IP address in Sweden", that this is somehow evidence that WikiLeakS.org themselves were trawling for documents on P2P networks, is an incredible double standard, given the amount of such trawling which originates from the USA and even from Tiversa itself.
Tiversa's cause célèbre. was their discovery of the US Presidential helicopter documents, something which strongly implies that they themselves also downloaded copies of such documents, both from the useless US Defense Contractor and from the alleged computer in Iran.
Such activity is itself certainly illegal in many countries and would probably amount to espionage according to the evil Iranian authorities.
Remember there is no proof that the discovery of an alleged download by a particular computer IP address actually means that any human has even noticed or read any such documents, in all likelihood they have not, simply due to the volumes involved - see the various internet snooping projects derived from Echelon by intelligence agencies like the NSA and GCHQ etc and their rivals.
Initially the WikiLeakS.org website just assumed that people would "seed" copies of their published documents into P2P networks. They later started to formally provided Magnet URI links to such documents on their download pages, but of course these are now no longer functional.
Perhaps OpenLeaks.org or any other successors to WikiLeakS.org, if they ever get off the ground, will also seed P2P networks and provide Magnet links as well.
There is a link on the current WikiLeakS.CH website and on its hundreds of risky mirror websites, to a compressed archive of BitTorrent index files, which can be used to download around 20,000 documents which have been published on WikiLeakS.org i.e. not the big "Bradley Manning" disclosures, which got their own dedicated web sites.
However, if you are planning to "research" these for your forthcoming blog or mainstream media article, tv documentary, book, film etc. remember your IP address will be tracked by Tiversa and other private sector and government spies.
Given the legally toxic nature of some of these WikiLeakS.org documents, depending on the legal jurisdiction you fall under, you may be breaking various laws by downloading or possessing copies of these documents e.g. government official secrecy, espionage, lèse majesté, copyright, contempt of court etc. . You should probably keep any files you download in an encrypted volume using, for example TrueCrypt
WikiLeakS.org has never bothered to provide any such warnings or advice to its readers.
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