Ex-Hacker Calls on Wikileaks Head to Step Down Following [...] Identity Breach | Hacker News Reader

Ex-Hacker Calls on Wikileaks Head to Step Down Following [...] Identity Breach

dailytech.com

16 pointstptacek20 comments

Lamo tells us he sent the logs to Wikileaks "To see if they'd be true to their ethos, and publish something, even if it incriminated a source, or if they'd cover it up. I wanted to pose a catch-22.

Um, yeah...

We have since established contact with Nadim Kobeissi, a hacker whose conversations with Adrian Lamo were also leaked.

These are being presented as Wikileaks choosing to identify people who send data to them. While it's a bit difficult to parts what exactly happened, it sounds more like it was really that Wikileaks got hold of some of Lamo's IM sessions and published those. Which seems quite reasonable, given that he's apparently selling people out and spinning inconsistent stories about why.

Nadim alleges that he's the one who provided Assange with the IM transcripts, and that Assange outed him along with the transcripts.

Is he absolutely sure he was the only one who could provide Assange the transcript?

So, you provide a private chat transcript to someone who is in the business of making things public... and then complain that by making that transcript public, they have identified who sent it to them.

Please tell me that's not accurate, because it's completely retarded.

I like this logic. "Anything you tell Julian Assange is fair game". Why, Manning could rightly have expected to be outed directly!

No, it's the difference between "someone sent me this file" (should always be expected) and "so-and-so sent me this file" (should not be expected). If the file you sent is something that by its intended contents (as opposed to hidden metadata etc) could only have come from you, then WTF are you doing sending it in for publication if you don't want people to put two and two together?

I don't think he intended for it to be published. He may have made this insufficiently clear, though...

Look, more drama. You know what's something that "ideal wikileaks" wouldn't have that "real wikileaks" clearly does have? This much drama.

You seem to really dislike Wikileaks. What is it about them that bothers you so much?

I think, in order of importance to their mission, they are:

* A publicity vehicle for their founders.

* A left-wing political cause (note: I say this as a left-liberal).

* A "fuck-you" to the mainstream media.

* An honest broker of leaked information.

I think when you hang up your sign offering to handle the most sensitive information people have to offer, it's incumbent on you to be above reproach. Clearly, Assange doesn't believe that: he's editorialized their most publicized disclosure to date, throwing their bias and handling of everything they do from this point forward into question.

Sadly, I have to agree. They have, nonetheless, done some good and interesting things; but with Iceland's new "Wikileaks" law, I'd be perfectly happy to see some "competitors" spring up...

> it's incumbent on you to be above reproach

I don't think it's possible to be above reproach in this day and age. Can you name even one famous person who doesn't have haters, deserved or otherwise?

In a recent interview, Assange mentioned that in the first days of WikiLeaks they used to make the leaked files available, without trying to publicize them. The result was that nobody noticed them. They soon realized that they needed to become editors too, otherwise they would have little impact. Whether you like it or not, Assange's drama whoring has allowed him to become very powerful and to deliver quite a bit of impact. Drama is a means towards an end, and Assange has exploited people's craving for drama in a very smart manner.

You say that their goal is to publicize themselves, but to me it seems they're mostly burning bridges with the rest of the world. So, what does publicity buy them? Fame is useless if you can't monetize it, or at least extract something worthwhile out of it.

I think their actions show them as primarily an anti-establishment group (or possibly a "give us money" group) that has chosen to operate by means of leaking information, rather than a information leaking / transparency group that just happens to often piss off the government and needs a bit of funding to keep going.

I think the problem is that Wikileaks is not journalism and the people running it don't even claim to be journalists.

There's also an issue that I think the author of the (lengthy, but worth it) New Yorker profile nailed:

Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.

If you haven't read it: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_...

Horrible style. They repeat a good couple times how Wikileaks compromised sources not once but twice and go on rambling how no wikileaks source is secure. More like confused ramblings than anything else. It's impressive what passes for journalism these days.

Surprise: you are not secure. You never were and you'll never be. If you really want to leak confidential info anonymously, you have to hide your identity yourself and trust nobody else to do it.

This is a misleading summary of the story. The allegation isn't that Wikileaks has poor operational security; it's that Assange was given documents that later leaked, and that are alleged to only have been leakable by him. This article alleges that Assange deliberately broke opsec.

I am curious. If Alice and Bob have a private conversation and Bob knows he leaked this conversation to Adrian and then the conversation is made public, how can Bob be absolutely sure Adrian, but not Alice, leaked the conversation?

It's a tangled mess right now. Anyway, if you are a spook leaking info, you should, at least, cover your steps. During my life I have many times been in possession of secret datasets (not government-lock-me-in-jail-secret, but very secret anyway) and I am quite sure they were tainted in ways they would be traced directly back to me if they ever leaked. It's very easy to watermark files.

> This article alleges that Assange deliberately broke opsec.

Nadim's first-hand account of what happened says "Wikileaks did not out me as the source. An independent entity verified the logs, and I basically outed myself."

Source: http://db.nadim.cc/dtresp.txt

I'm inclined to trust the stories of those directly involved before any indirect accounts thereof, but that's my prerogative.

Does it count as being "outed" as a source if you want them to? If anything, it appears that they're doing this to protect Manning, their source. I'm not clear on how this can be some horrible breach of journalistic ethics or whatever if the sources agree with being outed to protect other sources.

The only ones getting burned here are Poulsen/Lamo and they're the ones who outed a Wikileaks source, Manning, who foolishly bragged to Lamo about being a Wikileaks source. I don't think Wikileaks can be blamed for not protecting him, because there's nothing they could do to prevent him from bragging.

The central notion that you can't trust Wikileaks to keep your identity secret doesn't follow for me. Wikileaks didn't tell Manning to go brag about his crimes to Lamo and they're leaking things designed to protect him (ibid). Lamo isn't, to my knowledge, a Wikileaks source. And Nadim gave them this data to help protect Manning.

What am I missing here, exactly? What's the OPSEC breach you're talking about? Leaking something Nadim asked them to leak?

This whole farce is a blatant and indirect DoD psyops attack on Wikileaks and Assange. So it's okay and even expected now for the US military to attack journalists and the grey-information-area of their domain? I thought only nations like "Communist" China did that. And here we all thought our civil liberties were worse off under Bush...

Remember the WL leaked secret DoD document containing the Pentagon's own plan to counter WL? Their plan was to cause a big enough PR incident to scare any future whistle-blowers into silence by creating the public perception that no matter who you are, if you leak extra-ordinary, critical national security information, then it's 100% guaranteed that you will be publically outed as a whistle-blower.

Isn't it remarkably convenient that the Pentagon's plan is exactly what is now occurring with Lamo's bizarrely out of place participation in this whole fiasco? There sure are a lot of false and scary headlines attacking the credibility of WL! I realize the other logical possibility is that the Pentagon plan to attack WL is itself a fake, and Lamo is doing all of this on purpose to stage an "attack on WL", so that WL can turn around and say "see! the Pentagon is attacking us!" You can't get better PR than that if it really blew up.

But when your lead source is also your lead witness, you have a serious credibility issue and have to assume the entire story is fiction. We may never know the truth.

And much like when you owe Don Corleone a "favor", after you get arrested for the kinds of crimes they did, and then the Feds hook you up with a sweetheart deal with the prosecution, it's pretty obvious who is the master and who is the puppet. Also consider the history of Lamo and Poulsen, and especially go back to Poulsen's self-promoting NYTimes hit pieces on Mitnick in the 90's. Then ask "who is the most probable liar, these guys or WL?"

It's only a bonus that they can also create a media smokescreen around themselves to muddle an already subjective matter. From reading their writings and interviews over the past few years, they both come off as self-promoting fame whore types focused on selling an image of "hackers." Like drunken Hollywood starlets stumbling around a crowd of TMZ paps, their inserting of themselves into whatever issue they are "reporting" makes it impossible to take them seriously as journalists. (Only Hunter S. Thompson can be allowed to get away with that.)

I bet this makes them even more valuable as Federal snitches, since everyone will assume the reason Lamo and Poulsen even have anything to do with this incident is because they're promoting themselves. It's a fantastic cover that prevents the spot light from casting shadows off the puppet strings.

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