How to leak a secret and not get caught

How to leak a secret and not get caught
Newscientist ^ | 12 January 2007 | Paul Marks




Leaking a sensitive government document can mean risking a jail sentence - but not for much longer if an online service called WikiLeaks goes ahead. WikiLeaks is designed to allow anyone to post documents on the web without fear of being traced.


The creators of the site are thought to include political activists and open-source software engineers, though they are keeping their identities secret. Their goal is to ensure that whistle-blowers and journalists are not thrown into jail for emailing sensitive documents. That was the fate of Chinese journalist Shi Tao, who was sentenced to a 10-year term in 2005 after publicising an email from Chinese officials about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.


According to the group's website www.wikileaks.org, its primary targets include China, Russia, and oppressive regimes in Eurasia, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. It is not limited to these countries, however, and people anywhere will be able to use the site to reveal unethical behaviour by governments and corporations. "Targets include China, Russia and oppressive regimes in the Middle East"


Normally an email or a document posted to a website can be traced back to its source because each data packet carries the IP address of the last server that it passed through. To prevent this, WikiLeaks will exploit an anonymising protocol known as The Onion Router (Tor), which routes data through a network of servers that use cryptography to hide the path that the packets took.


(Excerpt) Read more at newscientisttech.com ...

Posted here specifically because it is a Miscellaneous TAA topic, but, TAA nations are being targeted by this group.

Interesting, but when that cat is out of the bag, it will cut against everyone. There may indeed be intended target nations, but the internet has a funny way of going sideways.

Oh I know that, lol. I just post the material, I don't make it up :)

How fast do we see that site being populated with American documents? Fakes, and forgeries or even non-sense in general. I see the potential for mega-conspiracy theories coming to life with an unregulated release of information on that site.

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Originally Posted by Brian Baldwin

How fast do we see that site being populated with American documents? Fakes, and forgeries or even non-sense in general. I see the potential for mega-conspiracy theories coming to life with an unregulated release of information on that site.

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Precisely. Being a site dedicated to "leaks", you can't exactly fact check very well. Not being able to fact check would make much of the material dubious at best. How many disgruntled ex-employees, ex-officials, would love a chance to slam a former Boss, a former Dept?

A few gems might pop up in there, but if it gets high volume use, they would be lost amidst the gravel.

Somehow, someway, the site moderators will need to fact check and weed or else it'll spin into a giant "Titor" style mess of fear mongering and baiting.

I know we'll end up having people come to this site posting links to that leak site as proof. We'll have to rule those links as unreliable and not proof at all. It'll be a mess.