Twitter bans and purges links to journalist org for publishing BlueLeaks
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
> The group’s account, @DDoSecrets, was permanently suspended, a Twitter spokesperson told Gizmodo, citing the company’s policy against the distribution of hacked materials. The policy specifically prohibits accounts from sharing “content obtained through hacking that contains private information, may put people in harm or danger, or contains trade secrets.”
So I guess trade secrets are not in these leaks, but private information is certainly what Wikileaks is about. I think that the information of innocent people is more than enough reason not to host it, though. Just figured they'd want to clear the air of any accusations of favoritism.
Censorship always seems appealing for protecting sympathetic individuals, especially at its start when the cases are inherently worthy. But after the ruling power structure learns which levers to pull, censorship is inevitably used to protect and perpetuate the status quo at scale. This tragic arc was foreseeable over a decade ago when this trend of webcrapps was gaining popularity. Giving one entity power over the communications of hundreds of millions of users is an inevitable target for authoritarian control, and too concentrated to resist. But nobody wanted to listen, and now we're living the results.
No way to tell without looking at the source material though, which is the entire problem. Guess it's time to track down the torrent.
Checking out https://www.reddit.com/r/blueleaks/ , the examples I'm seeing are subpoenaed records from Google etc. Those people have already had their privacy severely violated by the police and commercial surveillance industry, so it's a bit ridiculous to say their privacy is now an overriding concern when it comes to transparency.
That subreddit does have some great tidbits and discussion, but is of course at risk of getting destroyed per the same whitewashing policies as Twitter. We can only cross our fingers that it continues to exist, because we lack appropriate tools to make sure it does.
Even the part about not having tools is wrong, people are already seeding torrents for this information and IPFS exists.
Also at this point, the data being out there is a done deal. So shutting down links and discussion is mainly shutting down analysis in discussion in more open spheres, rather than actually preventing bad actors.
My point about not having the tools is specifically about the subreddit discussion. If that grows, only to be chopped down later, it will be a net loss. Is there a better forum in which public analysis is happening, on IPFS or the like?