Let’s keep iterating on the takedown evasion strategies until they’re impenetrable. It’s the only hope the People have of actually being in control of anything important.
Well I wouldn't go that far. There are more $5 wrenches than there are people.
The real test here was Assange who embarrassed the U.S. military by publishing drone footage of them killing civilians not to mention everything else.
They got him on an individual level (IMHO by blatantly discarding any remaining vestigial pretense of abiding by the law) but-- the site is up.
After the prosecution of Assange and Manning and with Snowden in exile, they've mandated to basically stop the whole whistleblower phenomenon in its tracks. Which was probably a bigger goal than one easily-replaced website.
It feels a bit like the Arab spring, a lot of hope in the beginning and then it all fizzled out.
Yes it has, the spook-friendly Bellingcat. It filled a Wikileaks-shaped hole.
there's a huge difference in knowing that your data has been compromised (you hand out the keys to avoid torture) and not knowing, that alone justifies every hoop you have to jump around to have your data encrypted.
besides, it doesn't apply here since onion services were created specifically to host content anonimously, they don't know who to torture.
See: Belarus, 2020 or Iran, 2022 for recent examples