Wikileaks 101 — What You Should Know

The story of WikiLeaks, specifically regarding the developments over the past week, is (I think) one of the biggest news stories of my lifetime … and yet, the majority of the people I talk to either don’t know or don’t care about what’s going on. Perhaps it’s because the conversations quickly turn technical, or maybe it’s because people don’t fully understand what’s going on right now.

A “wiki” is an online application designed to let multiple people share, edit, and read multiple documents. They can be broad in range like the well-known Wikipeida (a wiki-based encyclopedia), medium-sized (like the Dungeons and Dragons Wiki) or very specific in nature (the Lostpedia is dedicated to the television show Lost).

WikiLeaks is a wiki of leaked document. It launched in 2006, it is non-profit, and it’s public — meaning, anyone who wishes to contribute documents to the site can. And while many people who work on or contribute to Wikileaks prefer to remain anonymous, one who does not is its director, the very public (and now infamous) Julian Assange.

There is good reason that most of the people working on WikiLeaks wish to remain anonymous. For example, after publishing the Australian Communications and Media Authority censorship blacklist in March of 2009, German police raided the home of Theodor Reppe, registrant of the German WikiLeaks domain name. Earlier this year, Jacob Appelbaum represented and spoke on behalf of WikiLeaks at the annual HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) conference. According to Wikipedia, “[u]pon returning to the U.S. from the Netherlands, Appelbaum was detained for three hours at the airport by U.S. agents, according to anonymous sources. The sources told Cnet that Appelbaum’s bag was searched, receipts from his bag were photocopied, his laptop was inspected, although in what manner was unclear. Appelbaum reportedly refused to answer questions without a lawyer present, and was not allowed to make a phone call. His three mobile phones were reportedly taken and not returned. On 31 July, he spoke at a Defcon conference and mentioned his phone being “seized”. After speaking, he was approached by two FBI agents and questioned.”

The debate as to whether or not what WikiLeaks is doing is even illegal is a hot topic. Members of the US Government says it is, and that the release of classified government documents amounts to treason. WikiLeaks, for its part, says they’re not the ones who leaked the documents in the first place — they just made them available.

Last week, war was declared on WikiLeaks in cyberspace. First, an enormous distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was waged against WikiLeaks’ servers, knocking them offline. WikiLeaks then migrated to Amazon, but after the attacks continued, Amazon gave them the boot, citing a violation of their terms of service. That’s a pretty common excuse companies use when they want (or are forced) to terminate your business agreement. In fact, yesterday, PayPal closed WikiLeaks’ PayPal account for — guess what — a violation of their terms of service. In the midst of these attacks, hackers attacked WikiLeaks’ DNS host, to the point where service for over half a million websites (including WikiLeaks) was being affected. WikiLeaks moved their data to servers in France, but that server has since been taken offline now as well. Currently, the WikiLeaks website is being hosted in an old nuclear bunker, one hundred feet underground. And while the data is now physically safe, there’s still a battle as to how to get to it — WikiLeaks.org no longer works. WikiLeaks.fr now forwards to WikiLeaks.ch, which will get you to the site.

The attacks against WikiLeaks and specifically Julian Assange haven’t been limited to cyberspace. For starters, InterPol has issued a warrant for the arrest of Mr. Assange for (get ready for it) “having consensual sex with a woman without using a condom in Sweden.” At least InterPol is being civil about it. Washington Times columnist Jeffrey T. Kuhner put it a bit more bluntly: “News reports say the WikiLeaks founder is hiding out in England. If that’s true, we should treat Mr. Assange the same way as other high-value terrorist targets: Kill him.”

Pissing off individuals or even corporations is one thing; pissing off entire governments (plural) is something else. It seems unlikely that Assange will be able to hide forever — or for all that long, really. Assange is said to be hiding out in England at the moment, but with the US, Australia, and Sweden actively looking for him, he’s going to have to lie low for perhaps years — or, you know, get one of those Hollywood masks.

Oh, and one other thing. WikiLeaks has, available for download, something called an “insurance file”. It’s encrypted with AES 256-bit encryption. It’s also 1.4 gigs in size, which is a lot of … something — documents, presumedly. No one publicly has the password needed to decrypt the file, but you can rest assured that should something happen to WikiLeaks and/or Julian Assange, that (A) that password will be released and (B) all hell will break loose.