* If Wikileaks edits the content it can be criticized for tampering.
* If Wikileaks leaves malware in it can be criticized for circulating malware.
It may also give an excuse to search engines and other partners of the government to block the site on account of it hosting files that are infected.
A pretty nasty no-win situation.
Also think about what this means for the sources of the documents. It means that the surveillance and intelligence information from these firms was likely compromised. Yikes.
Why not? The New York Times and many other newspapers published the same data, and surely there's no problem hosting the NYT, so why is Wikileaks special in this regard?
This is getting ridiculous. Why doesn't Wikileaks just host all their content in a Git repository and use GPG to sign their releases?
Then it would be impossible to take down the site, and anyone could easily spin up a mirror.
Instead there's one monolithic distribution site which isn't decoupled from their submission network. The site is frequently down during a fundraiser, and due to how they run it other people can't easily directly contribute resources to run mirrors of the site.
I'm beginning to think that Wikileaks is not as interested in actually getting leaks out as it is furthering Julian Assange's personal indispensability.
Wikileaks is, as far as I am concerned, the textbook example of a site that should not exist.
Firstly, if you need Wikileaks in the first place, you have bigger problems.
Secondly, Wikileaks actively tries to place itself above the law. No-one should be above the law.
Thirdly, there is little that has been revealed via Wikileaks that could not have been revealed in the traditional way via a free press. Wikileaks may make things marginally easier, but if you're in the business of leaking private stuff only if it's easy, maybe you should reconsider your world view.
Finally, before anyone comes along and tells me how much good Wikileaks does, consider this: they also released the private membership list of an unpopular political party, causing very serious consequences for many members of that party. Whether or not you agree with their politics, that sort of action is way over the line. What about the anonymity of those party members?
It just doesn’t really matter what Wikileaks say on their Twitter account, the important thing is the documents they host on their site. They’re not a newspaper. They only ask that people examine the documents they publish. Their own impartiality and credibility is simply not an important issue. Maybe if there were known cases of Wikileaks intentionally taking parts of documents out of context to make things look damning, that would be a concern, but i’m not aware of anything like that. They are a conduit for whistle-blowing - if they are holding back documents that don’t suit an agenda then presumably the whistleblower would leak to some other outlet, so I don’t see a big concern there either.
Wikileaks does not operate much differently from any other media organization: they take anonymous tips, they publish them, they work with others to sensationalize their findings, they have internal biases, and they likely are beholden to whoever is financing or supporting them. If Wikileaks went away, it would be bad, but not much different than if any other news gathering and distributing service went away.
Wasn't Wikileaks ... uhm ... hosting their own domain in a different country? It didn't help much. I think with these things it's much more important to be able to reach many people. And then start worrying about what is the government going to do against the thousands and thousands of IPs (and people) who access your content.
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