WikiLeaks proposes tracking verified Twitter users’ homes, families and finances
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
People who work for WikiLeaks are still probably involved, but they are no longer in control. Ever since late October, their behavior across all of their Twitter accounts has been markedly different.
It's entirely plausible that the video interview was not actually Assange.
AFAIK there has been no cryptographic verification, that's the only thing that could prove all is well.
(Which, come to think of it, is a lot more likely than actors as disparate as Sean Hannity, John Pilger, the Swedish prosecutor, the Ecuadorean embassy and Pamela Anderson all being very happy to pretend to interact with a Fake Assange who keeps making very similar arguments to the inexplicably-disappeared Real Assange.)
This is simply not true. An NSL cannot be used to compel access to any communication content—and certainly not control of an account; they're limited solely to metadata (e.g. phone call records, IP addresses, billing metadata, etc.). I'm not a fan of NSLs, and strongly support repealing the section 505 expansion, but it behooves no one to lie about what an NSL is and what it can compel.
Not WikiLeaks, but "WikiLeaks Task Force" (@WLTaskForce). I'm not even sure it's widely known who exactly is behind that account, though it's interestingly a verified account itself.
UPD1 After some googling it seems the account is listed as official on wikileaks.org:
"Follow our official accounts @wikileaks, @wltaskforce, @communitywl and @wikileaksshop."
https://wikileaks.org/What-is-Wikileaks.html
But it was added recently (after 16 Nov 2016):
https://web.archive.org/web/20161116072950/https://wikileaks...
(via https://www.reddit.com/r/WhereIsAssange/comments/5h2qqp/can_...)
UPD2 Article about "Wikileaks Task Force":
https://motherboard.vice.com/read/wikileaks-is-making-a-twit... (4 Oct 2016)
So in the sake of transparency, they would be tracking themselves, right?
The link you posted still mentions the others though.
I think what Wikileaks wants to build is a social graph of influential and powerful people (big enough names to have a blue check mark) using their tweets. Then weight and couple that with information on family relations, job, living place and so on - available from other public sources (i.e. Wikipedia biographies, LinkedIn or official websites).
Sounds like an interesting idea.
But man; Wikileaks is sure getting a lot of negative press. I guess if you want to play the game of politics you better start weighting your words like a politician.
That means that in the tech world they have been shunned and marginalised, like everybody who didn't bitch too much about the existence of Trump.
Now it doesn't matter whatever they say or do, they'll get negative press. They are blacklisted.
If you purport to be holier than thou, you'd better make damn sure you at least stick to your story.
I'm not some defender of wikileaks or Assagne, I just don't think who they are is all that important.
When I first heard of wikileaks a decade ago on slashdot, Assange was a tosser with some unpopular opinions and perspective. He also believed in the utility of releasing the entirety of source material to the public instead of a regular news outlet that limits it to the topics they have the time and interest to investigate and write. The broad strokes have remained constant even if the details haven't.
Ever since then, the press has been trying to find meaning in the Wikileaks dog-and-pony show. A circus that they themselves were complicit in creating. They've been trying, and failing, to understand this guy since 2010. The muddled mass of hot takes but no real insight is what they've been dumping onto us in the meantime.
Now that you can apply to be verified, just about anyone can get the blue checkmark. You just have to provide proof of identity and fill out a form. I didn't get verified through the manual process even though I worked at a fairly prominent media org. But working in non-media, I got accepted within a couple days by filling out the form.
Check out @Verified's following-list and you'll see lots of similarly non-influential people on there: https://twitter.com/verified/following
The measure of "power" and "influence" has always been a subjective assessment, whether it's PageRank or the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/02/11/palanti...
Now it is a platform for some insiders pushing an agenda. Data is solicited, filtered and used to push in a direction. Wikileaks has become a player.
I think what they are trying to do is a standard journalistic thing of building influence network, but they managed to say it in a very creepy way and of course WaPo grabbed it and run with it.
This is what radical transparency looks like, by the way. It is consistent with and logically flows from Assange's long-stated philosophy. Basically, what the crowd on this website was defending when Wikileaks first came onto the public scene.
Here's what Twitter has to say about verified accounts:
>What types of accounts get verified?
An account may be verified if it is DETERMINED TO BE AN ACCOUNT OF PUBLIC INTEREST. Typically this includes accounts maintained by users in music, acting, fashion, government, politics, religion, journalism, media, sports, business, and other key interest areas.
Public figures are those we elect and put in government service, at least that was the original intended definition. Seems we've drifted from that definition into a rather dystopian one, with Assange.
The courts disagree with you on that point, also including celebrities, business leaders, athletes, etc.
Position in government is only one avenue by which people exercise power or achieve fame.
And even for public figures, there are and/or should be (depending on jurisdiction) limits. Their family, for example, are people with their own rights, often don't fit the "public figure" definition, may be minors etc etc.
I also don't remember ever defending radical transparency, and I wouldn't even characterise Assange's actions as consistent with it. Or could I have an archive of his emails, please?
https://twitter.com/BethElderkin/status/817461392462807040
"Wiki leaks falsely ID's someone while trying to demonstrate why a mass dox list isn't a terrible waste of their time."
Once upon a time Wikileaks was about holding governments to account. Apparently that was too hard because privacy violations appear to be the theme these days.
How they respond to the Trump administration when it's in power will tell us a lot about what's happening at wikileaks.
But it seems like the world needs more diversity in Wikileaks-like services. I feel like they have done important work in the past, and it would be a shame for that to end.
> I think it is high time that we address the elephant in the room. I am not saying to stop what we are doing, but we need to band together and get wikileaks to prove themselves, or we need to take everything read with a grain of salt.
Surely we should be taking everything we read with a grain of salt?
Not sure if that's laughable or not. The fact a PGP sig still hasn't been used since the date of the alleged "takeover" is a very strong point against complaisance.
"Here's why X CNN writer is supporting a war in Iran - his wife's cousin is an executive at Y weapons maker."
I'm also skeptical of the power of money to motivate people to do anything like that. If it were happening on any scale, they're doing a pretty remarkable job of hiding it.
The sooner the general public realizes how stupid it is to give these companies their private information the better. Maybe then the internet can move past this phase and become more sane.
Unless something tangible appears all this exercise is a big waste of time.
"Broken" means "doesn't work". In the context of GP's post, the suggestion is that attempting privacy through obscurity doesn't work/is ineffective.
Similarly, the burden of legal proof for libel or defamation are different for public vs private figures. An obscure YouTube vidmaker has a substantially different burden of proof than does a popular Youtuber when it comes to certain scopes of libel/defamation.
Yes, there is a kind of privacy you can expect in your own home. But some right to privacy is preserved even if you go out the in public
To elaborate, for many people, the concept of privacy is already compromised when they discover sites like pipl.com. Pipl.com already has data-mined information for every American with a SSN. If you have a credit history, like the kind you provide to a landlord when applying to rent -- Pipl has that too, that's why it can list where you have lived in the past, and who you lived with.
But that's a fairly old situation; private investigators have been using LexisNexis/Accurint to do those searchers for more than a decade. And fancy things like satellite photos of where you live? Reason Magazine did that back in 2004: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1870509
(the impressive feat, IMO, was not the photos, but the ability to custom publish 40,000 print covers, using the technology and infrastructure at that time)
But does that mean privacy has been compromised? Sure. Or, maybe. The ambiguity in possible answers is a huge contrast compared to the answers you'd get if you asked "Is Dual_EC_DRBG secure?".
But if you think that privacy is unambiguously compromised, given what I've described...here's what I mean. There's a difference between LexisNexis/Accurint/etc. (never mind ad companies, which is a whole different thing) having your normal next door neighbor's information. It's another thing if a highly-followed Twitter account tweets a link to Pastebin with all of that information.
Perhaps the original commenter didn't mean that, but that's what I think of when I think of the average person's privacy being compromised.
It seems like there are a few die-hards left who thought Assange and Manning were the greatest thing ever exposes the big bad USG, and are refusing to acknowledge the obvious: wikileaks exists so the FSB can run agitprop against its geopolitical foes.
Edit: I'd just like to point out the fact that all of these downvotes are flooding in at 3:00 am PST on a Friday night. Can anyone think of a timezone that might coincide with?
Accusations of astroturfing or shilling without evidence are not allowed on HN. Rushing to that as an explanation is, invariably, evidence of sloppy thinking—or maybe non-thinking, of the kind that political passion leads us all to. It should have been obvious that there are many countries where people were reading HN at that hour and that you'd given plenty of them plenty of reason to downvote. It's embarrassing to see a comment here insinuate that only Russian spies could possibly disagree, and just as embarrassing to see how many users upvote such an absurdity.
This community is deeply divided on divisive issues. People on all sides need to conduct themselves more civilly than this, so please don't do it again.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13343037 and marked it off-topic.
No. It means to release publicly available documents (docs -> dox) about the subject of a journalistic investigation - usually by amateur journalists. When professional journalists do it, it's just called "journalism".
We need more accountability from public figures. Moral fibre is a rare element among the top 1%. If they can't regulate themselves, then someone else ought to do it.
We need an incentive for people to pay their fair share of taxes and to behave ethically - Protecting your public reputation is a good incentive.
The law is simply useless when it comes to ethical matters - Radical transparency might be a better solution.
Public figures currently have way too much control over their public image.
Why?
This already exists. It's not just for verified Twitter users either. You have used this "database" yourself. You and your family are already in it. Wikileaks will use this "database" to raise awareness of just how dangerous it is. It will rile everyone up and create a groundswell of action to thwart it. When the outrage reaches it's peak, the name of the "database" will be revealed:
It's called Google+Facebook+Twitter+LinkedIn+Reddit+Yahoo+Amazon+Apple+Youtube+Pinterest+Instagram
EDIT: typo
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/5cgwau/has_wiki...
Somehow this comes out as slashing out from WikiLeaks. They seem to be really out of touch. Maybe because Assange is behind it.