Are you volunteering?
The Wikileaks "insurance.aes256" File
- Thread starter Oliver
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Are you volunteering?
BenBurch
Gatekeeper of The Left
I defined a hypothetical motive. Not all who have motive for a murder become murderers. It takes opportunity, for example. But clearly, if a terrorist wanted to damage the great nations of the world, and that is what is represented to be (and not 30,000 spam emails) then killing Assange might be worth the risk.
A Laughing Baby
A baby. Goo goo ga ga
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Supposing that someone were weighing the worth of Assange's life in terms of information received, do you think that a one-time dump of insurance.aes256 would outweigh the potential future information received from the continued existence of Assange, and by extension, Wikileaks? Surely if someone is thinking in terms of supply-side economics they will consider the implications of their actions in the long term.
Christian Klippel
Master Poster
Somehow i have problems to follow your line of thought. Maybe you can explain that a bit further?
The only people who could be concerned are probably the ones that already know what could be in there. The threat of killing someone because of blackmail only works if that someone is the only one who has the information that poses a "threat". Then, by killing that person, you eliminate the threat.
However, this is not what we have here. That file is out in the public for quite a long time. You can be pretty sure that there are already some people who have the full passwords/decrypt-method for that file, given to them by Assange. So if anything happens to him, they could publish that information in turn.
Of course that assumes that there really is something useful in that file, and that it not just a huge collection of lolcat pictures.
Calling it blackmail is borderline. He is not going around saying "i want x from you, and if i don't get it, i will publish y". For me, blackmail goes hand in hand with extortion, and there is no sign of any attempt at extortion here. Does he want millions of dollars? Private jets? No. He just wants to be left unharmed.
I guess that an US ambassador telling Switzerland to think twice about granting Assange any kind of shelter does not count as an attempt at blackmail, now does it? Sorry that i have the article in German only, here it is.
Greetings,
Chris
Peeking a bit further at your second link shows that these are NOT actual passwords for the file, only random words for which the encryption algorithms don't report errors. This will happen in average for one out of 256 incorrect passwords.
Oliver
Penultimate Amazing
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You realize that the Text of the Bible is about 4.22 Megabytes in size and 1.4 Gigabytes of text* is about "280 Bibles" ... [if the insurance file is nothing but textfiles]
Compressed the size of the Bible is less than 1 Megabyte - so 1.4 GB of compressed text* is the size of more than 1400 Bibles. [if the insurance file contains nothing but compressed text files]
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Christian Klippel
Master Poster
Hello svenax,
thanks for peeking a bit further. I just found these links with a quick Google search and only skimmed through them.
Greetings,
Chris
Oliver
Penultimate Amazing
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I don't know about you, but I certainly want to know what my Government is doing behind my back and against my interests. And Wikileaks leaked quite a lot info from the German Government and German Corporations.
joe911
Critical Thinker
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Yes, this is true, for standard text files. I'm guessing there would be a range of files in there, pdf...doc.. there could even be videos in there [Pure speculation,of course] The size of the cable collection alone was 1.6gb according to the Guardian;
"The 1.6 gigabytes of text files on the memory stick ran to millions of words: the contents of more than 250,000 leaked state department cables, sent from, or to, US embassies around the world."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/28/how-us-embassy-cables-leaked
I believe he was saying that there might be people who would be willing to kill Assange (like enemies of the US, for example) in order to find out what is on the file.
BenBurch
Gatekeeper of The Left
Correct.
Christian Klippel
Master Poster
Ah, OK, thanks. I misunderstood Ben's post then.
Well, i can agree that there could be such a risk, but somehow i doubt that someone would do that. First, the file is rather "old", so it's questionable if there are any new leaks in it. Second, as A Laughing Baby already said, it would be pretty stupid to kill someone who most likely will publish much more "secret" information in the future. And last, there is always the chance that the file is just random data and has no real content at all. Anyone who thinks about killing Assange to get access to the supposed data in that file will surely know all that as well.
The risk to lose a good information source is just too high. Lets not forget that regular espionage is still going on, and there they probably get access to information that's much more sensitive. WikiLeaks is just the tip of the iceberg, it's only a very few who decide to get that info out in the public and thus send it to WL.
Greetings,
Chris
Oliver
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I guess someone misswrote in that Guardian article - or there were non-text files on that stick as well. My guess is that all the cables combined may be about 10 Megabytes in compressed form.
Oliver
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Wrathernaut
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What do you mean, "again"?
No, a life insurance policy.
You know, with all the grandstanding of the US government that Wikileaks' publications are damaging and threatening lives, can you cite one reason why Wikileaks wouldn't publish the unredacted documents? I mean, when you hear the USG, the damage has already been done anyhow.However, they've failed to yet identify a single person whose life would be threatened by the publications.
Personally, when confronted with such hypocrisy, I would be very much tempted to do just that.
IIRC, the number of people with access to documents classified as "secret" is 3 million.
Again, as in I stated that I've already stated my opinion that his holding "more damaging" information hostage is blackmail.
Life insurance policy, good way of putting "I've stolen your wallet and I have a gun. If you don't let me leave with your wallet, I will shoot you."
And I'd forgive the government for not saying "Well, if you'll look in document #36,727, Mohammed Al Tunis's name was clearly not redacted, so his life is in jeopardy because he is the guy who gave us the information which led to the capture of most of the gang responsible for killing of 30 people who weren't the right sect of the right religion."
Nobody but somebody with access to both the redacted and unredacted messages (and the will to compare them) could possibly identify the number of individuals whose lives have been and would be threatened by the release of unredacted copies of the documents.
And going by your numbers - if 3 million have access to this, don't you think that is already putting the knowledge out broadly enough for transparency without putting it in the hands of those who would use the knowledge for nefarious purposes? Considering how few of the documents released are labled to keep them from the eyes of foreign governments, they've been seen by millions of people, thousands? of them from other countries.
What's next, should all the witness protection program records be released to the public? For a lot of the informants from the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars, that's what these documents and the protection of them amounts to.
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Wrathernaut
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...hanistan-Taliban-hunting-down-informants.html
That is a clear example of people lives who are now threatened due to the release, who in most cases wanted to help security in their own country. Thanks wikileaks!
Wouldn't you say, that anybody who had been an informant now has their life in greater danger than before? Would future informants be less willing to produce information which could save lives, knowing that a future leak could identify them?
Conversely, what individuals have been now indicted on corruption charges from the release of the leaks? Any warcrimes charges brought up to anybody?
Clearly there is harm done from the release, and I'm not seeing any benefit from the "increased transparency" of these documents out in public.
Christian Klippel
Master Poster
How about extracting the informants now, giving them shelter in the US and protect them, and put fresh ones in place? Or are they not that valuable after all?
And then, every organization must be aware that at any time there could be spies within. I'm pretty sure that they already killed quite some people because they thought they were spies. One could play devils advocate and claim that because the information is out there now, non-spies are no longer under the threat of a false accusation causing them harm.
And what happened to the "collateral damage" thing? Keep in mind that the majority of the released information does not include details of informants/spies. So the few that got uncovered in the process can be seen as collateral damage, right? I mean, if killing lots of civilians at a wedding party is considered collateral damage as well.....
Well, it's not that this hasn't been tried. But guess who insists on being more or less invincible to such charges? Guess who is threatening countries who even think about charging certain people with that in case they put foot on their soil?
At least there is the benefit that they now know that they are doing a extremely lousy job of keeping their oh-so-important information to themselves. Which is something they always told us: that they can keep information safe. And that we should trust them, because, well, they can keep all the data they want to have safe.
It's now very clear that it is a very bad idea to blindly hand them over SWIFT data, passenger records, etc, etc, because they are unable to protect that data, despite their claims. This in turn hopefully leads to less data handed over to them, which results in less people getting endangered in case there is another leak in the future (and there surely will be).
Greetings,
Chris
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Christian Klippel
Master Poster
Sorry, but that's an invalid comparison. First of all, no real property was stolen, data was copied instead. And it was not about keeping that property for personal gain, but about having leverage to gain personal safety.
A more correct comparison, albeit not a very good one, would be "I helped to uncover some misdeeds/crimes of yours. Don't think about killing me, because in that case your home address will be published as well".
It obviously was not transparent enough, hence the uproar now.
Giving so many people access to sensitive information, and thinking it is safe, is beyond naive. The real problem is not that WL was able to publish such data. The real problem is that way too many people had access to it in the first place, if such data was to be kept secret.
And again a sub optimal comparison. As already mentioned, it's obvious that way too many people already had access to that information. While we can only speculate, i guess it's safe to assume that this information was copied before, and/or copied afterwards, but just not made public but instead given to governments/organizations in secret.
And it's not just a problem of giving so many people access to it in the first place. It's also about the way the data itself is structured. If it is meant to protect people, then it surely is a very stupid idea to put all relevant info in a single document.
I mean, take a look at what the STASI did. They kept extremely detailed records of their and their informants activity. Many people had access to that information. But at least they were clever enough to conceal certain details in the reports by using things like code names instead of clear names.
Heck, even today we have big problems to untangle all the connections, names, etc. in these STASI records, because they spread bits of relevant data over many places, like a big puzzle.
Greetings,
Chris
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Wrathernaut
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You asked for an example of those endangered by the release. I provided an example of a group of people threatened directly by the organizations out to kill them.
I'm still waiting for an equivalent example (and I'll try and not move goalposts if you give one) of the benefits of these releases.
It would have been amazing, if the release of the diplomatic cables caused an epiphany among the international community, and everybody said "Wow, we're really all on the same page with regards to North Korea?" and actually done something.
3 million people with access and *one* significant leak? I'd say that's a pretty good job.
Christian Klippel
Master Poster
As i have said, non-informants/spies in such organizations are now likely to be safer, because their paranoid leaders now may know better who that persons was, instead of accusing a lot of people and possibly killing them.
It is clearly a benefit if other governments now recognize that it is bad idea to hand out their data. This will help to prevent leakage of data about persons in the future, which in turn probably makes their lives safer.
You seem to ignore that it was one leak that got out to the general public. We have no way of knowing how much else was and is leaked, but which never gets into the public, because that info is given or sold secretly to other organizations and/or governments. Keep in mind that it is still very rare that such informations become public knowledge. It would be plain stupid to assume that just because we don't know of "secret" leaks that these don't happen. Quite the contrary, it surely is much more often happen in secret than in public.
Tell me, what poses a bigger threat: Informant data, names, etc. handed over in secrecy to other places, without people knowing, or having it leak into the public, so that everyone knows and people can take the proper steps to protect these informants?
If any informant and/or spy now dies because of the public leaks, then it is the fault of the people hiring/using them, because they did not protect them as well as they should have been. After all the threat was then out there for everyone to see, right?
If you had a safe with lots of money in it, and you become aware that the location as well as the lock's combination is out in the public, what would you do? Wait until someone opens it and robs all the stuff that was in there, and then in turn blame the person who leaked that info? Or would you go ahead and at least change the combination, if not putting the safe in a different place as well?
Greetings,
Chris