{"id":57421,"date":"2015-05-11T12:00:46","date_gmt":"2015-05-11T11:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=57421"},"modified":"2015-05-08T17:58:30","modified_gmt":"2015-05-08T16:58:30","slug":"wikileaks-finally-brings-back-its-submission-system-for-your-secrets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/05\/wikileaks-finally-brings-back-its-submission-system-for-your-secrets\/","title":{"rendered":"WikiLeaks Finally Brings Back Its Submission System for Your Secrets"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s taken close to half a decade. But WikiLeaks is back in the business of accepting truly anonymous leaks.<\/em><\/p>\n

On Friday [1 May 2015], the secret-spilling group announced that it has finally relaunched a beta version of its leak submission system, a file-upload site that runs on the anonymity software Tor to allow uploaders to share documents and tips while protecting their identity from any network eavesdropper, and even from WikiLeaks itself. The relaunch of that page\u2014which in the past served as the core of WikiLeaks\u2019 transparency mission\u2014comes four and a half years after WikiLeaks\u2019 last submission system went down amid infighting between WikiLeaks\u2019 leaders and several of its disenchanted staffers.<\/p>\n

\u201cWikiLeaks publishes documents of political or historical importance that are censored or otherwise suppressed. We specialise in strategic global publishing and large archives,\u201d reads the new page<\/a>, along with the .onion url specific to Tor for a \u201csecure site where you can anonymously upload your documents to WikiLeaks editors.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe thought, \u2018This is ready, it should be opened,’\u201d WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson told WIRED in an interview. \u201cWe\u2019re hoping for a good flow of information through this gateway.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a statement posted to the WikiLeaks website<\/a>, the group\u2019s founder Julian Assange wrote that the new system is the result of \u201cfour competing research projects\u201d launched by the group, and that it has several less-visible submission systems in addition to the public one it revealed Friday. \u201cCurrently, we have one public-facing and several private-facing submission systems in operation, cryptographically, operationally and legally secured with national security sourcing in mind,\u201d Assange writes.<\/p>\n

The long hiatus of WikiLeaks\u2019 submission system began in October of 2010, as the site\u2019s administrators wrestled with disgruntled staff members who had come to view Assange as too irresponsible to protect the group\u2019s sources. Defectors from the group seized control of the leak platform, along with thousands of leaked documents. Control of that leak system was never returned to WikiLeaks, and the defectors eventually destroyed the decryption keys to the leaks they\u2019d taken<\/a>, rendering them useless.<\/p>\n

WikiLeaks vowed in 2011 to relaunch its submission system<\/a>, announcing that the leaks page would reappear on the one-year anniversary of its massive Cablegate release of State Department documents. But that date came and went with no new submission system. In the following years, Assange seemed to become preoccupied with WikiLeaks\u2019 financial difficulties, including a lawsuit against PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and Bank of America for cutting off payments to the group, as well as his own legal struggles. Accusations of sex crimes in Sweden and fears of espionage charges in the United States have left him trapped for nearly three years in London\u2019s Ecuadorean embassy, the country that has offered him asylum. The goal of getting Wikileaks back in the anonymous leak submission game got sidelined.<\/p>\n

The group, and Assange in particular, has also become more focused on the modern surveillance challenges to any truly anonymous leaking system. That, too, has delayed WikiLeaks\u2019 willingness to create a new target for intelligence agencies trying to intercept leaks. \u201cIf you ask if the submission from five years ago was insecure, well, it would be today,\u201d says Hrafnsson. \u201cWe\u2019ve had to rethink this and rework it, and put a lot of expertise into updating and upgrading it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hrafnsson declined to comment on what new security measures WikiLeaks has put into place. He was willing to say that the submission system has already been online\u2014though not linked from the main WikiLeaks site\u2014for weeks as it\u2019s been tested. \u201cAs always, we\u2019ve wanted to to make sure we can deliver on the promise that people can give us information without being traced,\u201d he says. Though the site remains in \u201cbeta,\u201d Hrafnsson adds that \u201cwe wouldn\u2019t have made it available unless we considered it to be as safe as it\u2019s possible to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite its years-long lack of a leak portal, WikiLeaks had continued to publish documents over the last few years, never revealing where they got them. In some cases they appear to have been directly shared with WikiLeaks by hackers, as was the case with the massive collections of emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor and the Syrian government. Or in other cases, the group has simply organized and republished already-public leaks, as with its searchable index of the emails stolen by hackers from Sony Pictures Entertainment.<\/p>\n

But few of those leaks have been as significant as those it obtained while its submission system was still online, most notably the leaks from Chelsea Manning that included millions of classified files from the Iraq and Afghan wars<\/a> as well as hundreds of thousands of secret State Department communiqu\u00e9s<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the years since WikiLeaks ceased to offer its own Tor-based submission system, others have sought to fill the gap. Projects like GlobaLeaks<\/a> and SecureDrop<\/a> now offer open-source systems that have replicated and improved on WikiLeaks\u2019 model of using Dark Web servers to enable anonymous uploads. SecureDrop in particular has been adopted by mainstream news sites such as the New Yorker<\/em>, Gawker, Forbes<\/em>, the Guardian<\/em>, the Intercept and the Washington Post<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In his statement on the WikiLeaks site, Assange notes that those projects are \u201cboth excellent in many ways, [but] not suited to WikiLeaks\u2019 sourcing in its national security and large archive publishing specialities,\u201d he writes. \u201cThe full-spectrum attack surface of WikiLeaks\u2019 submission system is significantly lower than other systems and is optimised for our secure deployment and development environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

One former WikiLeaks staffer contacted by WIRED argues that with several more mainstream outlets for leaks now available thanks to tools like SecureDrop, sources would be wiser to stay away from WikiLeaks\u2019 new submission system. \u201cAs a leaker\u2026You\u2019d have to be fucking insane to trust Assange,\u201d writes the former WikiLeaker, who asked for anonymity because his association with WikiLeaks has never been publicly revealed. He points to WikiLeaks\u2019 past decisions to publish large troves of raw documents, rather than ones carefully filtered by journalists to avoid harming innocent people. \u201cWhy would you go for Anarchist Punks Weekly instead of, say, the Guardian<\/em> or the Washington Post<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n

But the same ex-staffer also admits that Assange probably knows more about protecting leakers than many journalists dealing with sensitive sources. \u201cI do not believe that WL endangers sources,\u201d he adds. \u201cIn fact, Assange is likely far better trained than most to handle sources well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Assange, for his part, argues in his statement that WikiLeaks is bolder than other media outlets that might censor a leaker\u2019s materials. He points, for instance, to the relatively small number of Edward Snowden\u2019s leaks journalists including Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras that have actually been published. \u201cTo date, more than 99 per cent of Snowden documents have been completely censored by the mainstream press involved,\u201d he writes. \u201cWikiLeaks will continue publishing, as it has since its foundation, full archives of suppressed documents in strategic global partnerships. The 2.0 public-facing submission system is an important new method in our arsenal for recovering subjugated history.\u201d<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 wired.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s taken close to half a decade. But WikiLeaks is back in the business of accepting truly anonymous leaks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57421\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}