Court Orders Twitter to Turn Over User Info in Wikileaks Investigation. Last week a U.S. Justice Department court order was made public that directed Twitter to provide information on several of its users. The subpoena was made in conjunction with an investigation the U.S. Attorney General is making into the actions of the whistle-blower site Wikileaks and its leader, Julian Assange.
The document demands user information for “rop_g; ioerror; birgittaj; Julian Assange; Bradley Manning; Rop Gonggrijp; Birgitta Jonsdottir for the time period from November 1, 2009 to present.” “ioerror” is the Twitter ID for Jacob Appelbaum, who spoke for Wikileaks at a conference last year. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out on Salon, Appelbaum, Jonsdottir and Gonggrip were three of the producers of the video that showed a helicopter attack that killed Reuters journalists and others in Iraq. Among the information demanded are names and user names, credit card and bank numbers, addresses, “connection records” (showing when they logged in and for how long) and telephone numbers. S Comprehensive WikiLeaks Timeline (UPDATED) As we mentioned before, “Wikileaks was not a story, but an ongoing continuum of stories… It’s a story that is destined to keep on giving.” In that short time since that post, it has indeed done just that. WikiLeaks — its actions and the reactions to them, the implications of what has happened around the whistle-blowing site — has given birth to an extremely complex and ever-changing situation.
In lieu of summing up a situation that has not come to a tidy conclusion, we have put together a full timeline of WikiLeaks news and analysis from our site. Read through from our earliest coverage (February, 2008) to our most recent (today) and you should have a reasonably complete sense of why WikiLeaks is important. WikiLeaks, Censorship and the Watchdog WebFebruary 18, 2008 Wikileaks Calls for Help in Taking Whistle Blower Site to the Next LevelNovember 28, 2008. Wikileaks and Publishers to Partner on Whistleblower StoriesOctober 9, 2009 “Iceland establishes strong free-speech laws.
Wikileaks Calls for Sarah Palin's Arrest. The official Twitter account for Wikileaks has posted a press release this evening drawing a comparison between the controversial rhetoric from public figures that some believe contributed to the attempted assassination on Saturday of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the even more explicit calls from public officials for violence against Wikileaks spokesperson Julien Assange and others. The organization called for public figures making such calls to violence to be arrested and charged with crimes.
Assange is attributed the following quote in the release: “No organisation anywhere in the world is a more devoted advocate of free speech than Wikileaks but when senior politicians and attention seeking media commentators call for specific individuals or groups of people to be killed they should be charged with incitement — to murder.
Those who call for an act of murder deserve as significant share of the guilt as those raising a gun to pull the trigger.” From the release: Appsfire: The Must-Have App Sharing App (iPhone) I tell people about the Rachel Maddow iPhone app all the time; almost no one has heard of it, but it’s great. From now on I won’t just tell them about it – I’ll share a link to it by email with just a few clicks in the new iPhone app from Appsfire, just approved by the App Store last night. Appsfire is a handy little service that makes it easy to share collections of your favorite apps with other people. There are a variety of ways to use it, but using it on the iPhone is the most pleasing, straightforward and clearly useful.
This app indexes all your other apps, makes it easy to share with anyone and shows off the most popular apps shared by all users and users in your geographic region. Using the app couldn’t be simpler and it fills a need many of us have felt since getting our phones. That said, there are some things about the app that could use some improvement. Several of us tested the service and found that it only captures about 70% of the apps on our phones. Wikileaks and Publishers to Partner on Whistleblower Stories. Best known as a site that indexes and verifies leaked documents, Wikileaks exists as a space where whistleblowers, journalists and bloggers can speak out against corruption without fear of employer or government retaliation. According to a recent article in IT World, the organization will soon offer publishers a chance to get in on the action.
The group will give publishers the opportunity to embed a Wikileaks submission form on their websites. The idea is that users will be able to anonymously upload material, and Wikileaks will verify it. In return for embedding the form, the publisher will receive the verified documents under embargo and will be the first to publish the story. From here, Wikileaks republishes the story on its website and distributes it freely. In the past, whistleblowers like Mark Klein have had to act on their own to call out an injustice. By offering users an easy method for submission, Wikileaks improves the system of disclosure.
Photo Credit: hughelectronic. Wikileaks Plugs the Leak While It Waits for Funding. If you woke up today thinking this would finally be the day you would leak that top-secret document, you might want to hold off for another day. Wikileaks, the Internet home for whistleblowers world-wide, has temporarily shut its doors to concentrate on fundraising. "We protect the world", it now says on the front page, "--but will you protect us? " The front page now hosts a statement about the site's current status and a plea for donations. According to the statement, the site is currently overloaded by the number of readers. It says that, while the site has raised $130,000 to date, it needs $200,000 to continue its operations, and $600,000 if it were to pay all of its staff. "We have received hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others that we do not currently have the resources to release," the statement reads.
This Week in Online Tyranny. Jordanian student sentence to two years in prison for IM. Imad Al-Ash got two years in prison for the last refuge of the scoundrel, lèse majesté. (If you want a quick rule of thumb for tinhorn dictatorships, check to see if lèse majesté is on the books.) During the five months leading up to his sentencing, the Jordanian secret service tortured the kid.
He had allegedly sent an IM criticizing the King of Jordan. Kenya introduces toll-free SMS to report hate speech. BurstNET shuts down 70,000 blogs over terrorism scare. China now plans to “deanonymize” cell phone users. The United States plans to “deanonymize” the Internet. Saudi arrested on the most ridiculous charge yet. Turkish citizens hit the bricks to protest online censorship. Injustice photo by Dustin & Jenae DeKoekkoek Instanbul photo by Neil Sequeira. Iceland Passes Proposal to Become 'New Media Haven' If you're looking to say something contentious on the Internet, then Iceland is the place to go. The Icelandic Parliament unanimously passed a proposal yesterday to make the country a "new media haven" in an initiative inspired and strongly backed by Iceland-based whistleblower website WikiLeaks. The proposal, entitled the "Icelandic Modern Media Initiative", "resolves to task the government with finding ways to strengthen freedoms of expression and information freedom in Iceland, as well as providing strong protections for sources and whistleblowers.
" According to the text of the initiative, Iceland hopes to become the international home of news organizations worldwide by way of providing these protections: The legislative initiative outlined here is intended to make Iceland an attractive environment for the registration and operation of international press organizations, new media start-ups, human rights groups and internet data centers. Wikileaks Releases 91,000 Afghanistan War Documents Online. The wiki-based site for whistler-blowers, Wikileaks, today released what it called "an extraordinary compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010.
" "The reports, while written by soldiers and intelligence officers mainly describing lethal military actions involving the United States military, also include intelligence information, reports of meetings with political figures, and related detail. " On a dedicated page for the reports, WarDiary, the editors explained their choice in releasing these documents. "This archive shows the vast range of small tragedies that are almost never reported by the press but which account for the overwhelming majority of deaths and injuries resulting from the war. " The information on the site is provided in a number of formats data, including CSV, SQL formats, month-by-month and KML mapping data. Wikileaks says it has held back some material. It is possible the information came to Wikileaks via Army intelligency's Pfc. WikiLeakiLeaks: Open Attack or Honest Attempt At Media Transparency?
Gawker has had enough of the tight-lipped Wikileaks and its elusive founder, Julian Assange, it would seem. According to a blog post this morning, the media outlet decries the website to be “about as open as North Korea”. In response, it has launched the hilariously-named Wikileakileaks, “your source for Wikileaks-related secrets, documents and rumors”. Gawker writes that, “it’s time to give Wikileaks the Wikileaks treatment – expose it to the same sort of radical transparency it advocates and see what turns up”.
The Wikileakileaks (no, it’s not a rare Hawaiin fruit) page offers a laundry list of what Gawker’s looking for, including documents relating to Assange’s recent sexual molestation charges in Sweden, information on finance and funding or information on upcoming leaks. According to Wikileakileaks, the editorial process for posting any tips or leaks will be using “the highly-scientific criteria of ‘does it look legit? '” Police in 14 Countries Raid File-Sharing Hosts And Hit Close to Wikileaks. Authorities cracked down on file-sharing sites across Europe yesterday in a major operation two years in the making, Swedish officials told media.
The raid is getting special attention because one target in Stockholm is best known for hosting part of Wikileaks.org, the site where whistle-blowers have leaked highly sensitive documents from governments across the world. But authorities said the real target was not Wikileaks, but the highly-active pirate network known as The Scene or Warez Scene, which encompasses 48 sites. Seven locations were raided in Sweden, according to the file-sharing news site Torrent Freak, including a university. Raids were also reportedly carried out in the Netherlands, Norway, Germany, the U.K., the Czech Republic, Hungary and Belgium, where the request originated. Several torrent sites including Pirate Bay were down for users in some countries today. The extent and precise targeting of the raid suggest that it was a dedicated effort to crack down on piracy. Wikileaks Loses Funding, Claims Government Blacklist to Blame. Wikileaks, the wiki-based site for whistle-blowers, has been facing increasing pressure from the U.S. government since its July release of more than 90,000 war documents from the war in Afghanistan.
Today, the Guardian is reporting that this pressure has finally hit where it hurts the most - in the pocket - as the site's funding has been blocked. The Guardian article quotes an email supplied by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, saying that Moneybookers, the site that had been collecting Wikileaks' donations, terminated the business relationship due to external pressures. When Assange emailed to ask what the problem was, he says he was told in response by Daniel Stromberg, the Moneybookers e-commerce manager for the Nordic region: "When I did my regular overview of my customers, I noticed that something was wrong with your account and I emailed our risk and legal department to solve this issue.
Currently, the Wikileaks site says it is down for maintenance. Wikileaks Founder: Media Reports of Iraq Document Release Based on "Tabloid" Blog. Over 250,000 U.S. Diplomatic Documents Released by Wikileaks. Wikileaks had set this afternoon as the date to release another round of secret U.S. government documents - this time, over 250,000 classified cables from various U.S. embassies. Hours prior to the documents' publication, Wikileaks tweeted that the website was experiencing a "mass distributed denial of service attack. " But whether or not the site goes down - it's functioning, albeit slowly at this time - the documents released today have already been distributed to a number of international news agencies who are publishing their findings from the trove of leaked documents.
Today's publication marks the latest in a string of secret government documents published by the rogue media organization. In July, Wikileaks released the Afghan War Diary, containing over 91,000 reports from the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. Contents of the Correspondence As these documents capture some of the day-to-day correspondence between the U.S. Media Coverage, Government Reaction. Wikileaks Moves to Amazon Web Services - ReadWriteCloud. Yesterday we reported that Wikileaks' web site suffered a denial of service (DOS) attack just before the publication of its most recent cache of documents. The site was down for only a few hours, according to Forbes' Andy Greenberg. Today, The Guardian reports that Wikileaks turned to Amazon.com's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) service to get back online and survive the DOS attack.
There are various ways to conduct a DOS attack, but most methods work by placing an enormous burden on a server. For example, one might make a huge number of frivolous requests for pages of a web site until the server is overloaded. Wikileaks originally claimed it was receiving a distributed DOS attack. A self-described "hacktivist" using the name th3j35t3r took credit for the attack, and claims it was not a distributed DOS attack. The Guardian says that the EC2 pricing model makes the service less vulnerable to DOS attacks. Siprnet, the Secret Internet Network Where the Latest Wikileaks Documents Originated.
While much of the focus on Wikileaks addresses the legal, ethical, and security ramifications surrounding the release of secret government documents, the publication yesterday of 250,000 diplomatic cables also raises a number of questions about the existence of, as well as the security of, such a large database of classified government communications. The word "SIPDIS" in the header of these cables points to their origin. SIPDIS stands for Siprnet Distribution, meaning the communications are part of the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network. Siprnet was created in 1991 and is used by the U.S. State and Defense Departments to transmit classified information, up to and including information marked "secret. " It's a separate system from the ordinary civilian Internet, managed by the U.S. military.
Siprnet Expands After 9-11 Securing Secrets that Need to Be Shared. Amazon.com Drops Wikileaks - ReadWriteCloud. Weekly Poll: Should Amazon.com Have Dropped Wikileaks? - ReadWriteCloud. Wikileaks' Assange May be TIME's Person of the Year. Amazon.com Explains Why It Dropped WikiLeaks - ReadWriteCloud. Wikileaks Loses its DNS Service - ReadWriteCloud. PayPal Announces It Will No Longer Handle Wikileaks Donations.