I'm kinda surprised efforts like this aren't more heavily sponsored by other countries.
Like if you were Russia or Iran right now, paying a bit of money to keep wikileaks' servers running would seem like money well invested.
Like if you were Russia or Iran right now, paying a bit of money to keep wikileaks' servers running would seem like money well invested.
Who do you think paid for those servers in the past, lol. Seems that the GRU has defunded the project, though - they must have other higher priority projects.
Some details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRU#Unit_74455
But hey, if i betrayed the fourth pillar of democracy and suffered from cognitive dissonance therefore, this not being supported by the "evils" behind it, would be woven into some nice story too.
What makes it different is that Russia is expected to be like that. Not the US.
"The Democratic National Committee emails, provided to WikiLeaks ahead of the 2016 election by Russian state entities posing as rogue hackers, are similarly missing."
Imagine you leak some important classified information to Wikileaks and they don't publish it. You'll just send it somewhere else. There are hundreds of journals and thousands of journalists to whom you can alternatively send the information. It's frankly speaking stupid to claim that not publishing a leak "for strategic reasons" could somehow be harmful. It is also worth mentioning that journalists do that very often for a vast number of reasons such as national security, their own security, protecting contacts, protecting sources, fear of legal repercussions, political agenda of the editor in chief, etc. There is nothing special about Wikileaks in that regards.
What was special about Wikileaks was their policy of publishing everything with only minor redaction and, most importantly, without asking the befriended intelligence community for the green light first. That's what normal news outlets tend to do, unless they have a very high level story like Watergate.
Alexei Navalny was the last person attempting to change this, but he failed.
Also Russia has its own social media, search engine etc., so some information simply doesn't reach the common Russian.
Over here in eastern Europe as far back as in the 00s there was the concept of "Russian internet"(Runet) - it wasn't technically sealed off from the rest of the world, but was more a small, independent world in and of itself that exchanged information mostly internally, in Russian.
The know-how is in Assange's mind, and he's in prison.