Julian Assange speaking at the Frontline international press club in London, on Tuesday 24th October 2011 claimed that:
On November 28th, the one year anniversary of CableGate, we will launch our new generation submission system.
That includes, not just, a public interface, but also several other mechanisms that are necessary to deal with an attack on the entire internet security system, that has been established over the last few years, by intelligence agencies and criminal groups.
(See the previous WikiLeak.org blog article
Julian Assange promises a new WikiLeakS.org submission system to launch on 28th November 1st December 2011)
However the press conference in London was postponed from Monday 28th November to Thursday 1st December at an unannounced location (which turned out to be the City University), before a pre-registered audience of picked journalists.
None of these picked journalists seemed to ask any technical questions or any questions about Assange's Extradition to Sweden case.
So where were the details of this "new generation submission system." (remember that the old one has been broken for over 2 years now) ?
There was no such launch immediate announcement , nor a date for a future launch.
There were no technical details at all
Neither was there any hint about a "look and feel" prototype or whether or not the source code would be made public to be examined by independent experts or the public
Even so, some media outlets are incorrectly reporting that a new submission system has somehow been launched !
Instead there was the announcement of yet Another Wikileaks Spin Off website which "revealed" some 280 documents, mostly sales brochures and presentations about surveillance industry products, which are used both by legitimate Governments to help track down criminals and terrorists and by illegitimate Governments to suppress political opponents and freedoms (some Governments do both at the same time).
http://wikileaks.org/the-spyfiles.html
The French media partner Owni has produced a snazzy interactive map of from this small dataset:
All of these documents appear to have been already published on other websites and (until some of them are removed) many are still available on the manufacturer's own corporate websites.
Nobody has so far managed to find any of these documents which was first made public by WikiLeakS.org,
This market research was actually done by by Privacy International (Eric King @e315) and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and by associates of the German Chaos Computer Club e.g. buggedplanet.info (domain name registered by Andy Mueller-Maguhn @mueller_maguhn) etc.
So what exactly did WikiLeakS.org contribute to this research ? WikiLeakS.org and Tor associate Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) has been doing his own research into say, satellite phone / data links for use in "Arab Spring" countries but he probably would have done this even without Julian Assange anyway.
Julian Assange provided a media sound bite, by asking if any of the assembled picked audience of journalists had an iPhone or a BlackBerry (Julian raised his own hand to both of those) or used Gmail. He then vaguely claimed that they were "all screwed",but he provided no specific examples of which of the list of products could actually be used to snoop on journalists or innocent members of the public without their knowledge.
Presumably Privacy International and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism etc. whose representatives spoke briefly on the platform dominated by Julian Assange, are happy with the media coverage generated, something which may not be possible soon if Assange is extradited to Sweden and is held in custody again.
Some of their supporters, this blog included, are not so happy to see Julian Assange claiming all the credit for this research project, none of which actually involved the supposed WikiLeakS.org anonymous whistleblower leak submission and publication system at all.
Recent Comments