Save Wikileaks -- donate now or lost it forever | Hacker News Reader

Save Wikileaks -- donate now or lost it forever

wikileaks.org

142 pointsazeemazhar230 comments

Currently a poor CS student but I still donated 25 dollars. Wikileaks is one of only a handful of media organizations actually making a difference in the world; it needs to be supported.

I too think they're worth a few bucks. I found multiple releases of significant public interest there last year.

Why would their costs be so high? They should post a breakdown of where the money's going.

Damn straight. Their high costs are very mysterious.

I wonder if someone on the inside could leak something somewhere?

Leak the expenses, then we'll talk.

I posted their call for volunteers several weeks ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1023663

They never even replied to my email offering help, or to anyone else as far as I can tell. I'm still a supporter of their mission, but the organization seems pretty flakey.

I remember your post, and thought this might have been a dupe; however, it sounds the same, with the same lack of details. Did anyone receive responses to their offers of technical help?

not me - though I wrote in.

I emailed them the day they started asking, never got a response either.

Are they publically funded? In Australia?

>BOX 4080, University of Melbourne

>Victoria 3052, Australia

Yeah, that could explain a few things.

Through your support we have exposed significant injustice around the world—successfully fighting off over 100 legal attacks in the process.

Perhaps legal fees? They have volunteers, but I imagine there are more fees than just lawyers when you defend so many legal attacks. Although I would like to know more as well.

We should scrape this and provide archives in P2P so that the information isn't lost and hopefully they will do a similar spray of unreleased docs if they go down. I'll have a look for existing documents tomorrow.

http://cryptome.org/ There's some of the data here and a mirror http://mirror.wikileaks.info , I would hate to see this data die

The last internet archive snapshot was in April 30, 2008 but it gives a good feel for the kind of info that was there.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080430123942/http://wikileaks.o...

Some of their major scoops include:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080207141628/wikileaks.org/wiki...

By the way, there is a working mirror at http://mirror.wikileaks.info/ , last updated 21 December, 2009.

> The last internet archive snapshot was in April 30, 2008 but it gives a good feel for the kind of info that was there.

Perhaps. Remember, the IA embargoes their copies for 6-9 months as part of the arrangement with AltaVista.

>>We have raised just over $130,000 for this year but can not meaningfully continue operations until costs are covered. These amount to just under $200,000 PA. If staff are paid, our yearly budget is $600,000.

So does that mean the staff costs $400,000? If so, it's basically like they're saying "hey can you also pay for the 4 of us to live pretty for the year too?"

Edit: To be clear, I don't know how many people are in said staff.

Given all the upvotes on this post, I'm guessing I'm in the minority. But, I'm not a fan of wikileaks' ethics. Whistler blowers are important, and I have a lot of respect for their bravery, but wikileaks feels like a metalayer on top of whistle blowing that feels slightly gamey and a little celebratory.

It's rather unavoidable to venture a bit into self-righteousness or vanity when you voluntarily act on ideals. If wikileaks somehow maneuvered into to being the only repository for whistle-blowers, then certainly, their pride would do their a mission a grave disservice. Still, whistle-blowers find few places of refuge these days, and wikileaks has demonstrated substantial effectiveness in being just that. Actively protecting/encouraging whistle-blowers out of idealism, while also acknowledging the consequences of vigilantes pursuing such ideals (collecting too many eggs in too few baskets), need not be mutually exclusive. It's a zero-sum game, otherwise.

Don't you think whistle blowing needs a meta-layer? Say I'm some guy in some room and on my desktop sits a very nasty excel about illegal or unethical party payments. What do I do? I can send them to a newspaper, which may not publish them (for a long list of reasons). I may send them to several newspapers, in which case there is a better chance that they will be published. But then I have a pretty big chance of being found - several emails to several people, at least some not prepared to deal with confidential information. The more sensitive my documents are, the more risky it is.

Whistle blowing is often a very grey business. My actions may be somewhat but obviously illegal, and the bag guys may not be very but not so obviously so. It can backfire.

This is why the meta-layer is important. I just send one email, and I'm pretty secure that my actions are confidential. Worst case scenario is they decide not to publish it, in which case i'm not really worse of. If I want, I can try again with a classic news outlet.

hey sorry for getting so silent. but the best is the enemy of the good. Lots of issues about just how great wikileaks is for all this--but until there is something better then let's give them some support.

There have been some warnings that should WikiLeaks be sued in the US, all backers (PayPal trackable) could also be sued.

It was proposed that WikiLeaks should provide an untraceable payment method.

[citation needed]

Sorry, would like to, but can't find it anymore, was in 2 discussions recently about the self imposed Wikileak blackout. Wish I could supply a citation, sorry.

What happened with PayPal's freezing their account?

It apparently got unfrozen due to, ahem, popular request - http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/8192453527 .

Hmm, that's utterly unprecedented. I wonder what Wikileaks has on PayPal.

It's not unprecedented at all. People know people. You just call up some mid-level or senior PayPal rep, if you know one - and I know plenty of people who do. If there's a media shitstorm brewing, PayPal will also be responsive - it's business 101. PayPal have no interest in blocking Wikileaks, they're just caught up in their own bureaucracy and fraud protection measures.

I can confirm that this is the case. They're actually very reasonable if you're important/controversial/popular enough to get ahold of a rep.

It's not unprecedented. One example: http://www.hackersforcharity.org/259/paypal-shuts-us-down/ and http://www.hackersforcharity.org/265/paypal-makes-good/

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