27 January 2011

OpenLeaks Security

To: ddb[at]openleaks.org
Date: 21 December 2010
From: John Young <jya[at]pipeline.com>
Subject: OpenLeaks Site Review

Daniel and Gang,

Excellent website for content and design, congratulations. Thanks for allowing a look.

I will be interested in how you test yourself for reliability of technical security and source confidentiality. And then villainous tests by evildoers. And how you publicly report these tests as they unfold. Wikileaks's rash claim of no breaches is difficult to believe by security experts, indeed is considered to be a cover-up that deceives the public.

You have amply covered that topic in your statements. Then comes the experience to test by fire what was overlooked or unexpected.

I assume you have top notch technical security skills or support from those who have them. In that case, you are prepared for a breach of security and confidentiality which is inevitable. When that occurs, publicize it as a gesture of hard-earned openness.

I assume you are prepared to be suspected, ridiculed, smeared, betrayed by "insiders," homes and offices burgled, servers tampered with, ISPs tricked into shutting you down, personal lives lied about, made the butt of comedy, accused of technical incompetence, in cahoots with evildoers, the usual compliments indicating you are moving in the right direction. Beware of praise for it is the most manipulative, self-praise a fatal flaw.

I will assume that you will never forget to anonymize participants from each other.

Let me know how best to support your absolutely hopeless endeavor as it travels from enthusiasm to embarassment to disaster to calamity to catastrophe to harm maximization to recrimination to crocodile tears of apology to taking a well-paid job with what used to be the enemy. This is not about WL.

You will understand that the opening praise is a nasty trick. To test your gullibility. And toughen your skin for far worse.

Worst regards,

John

_________

27 January 2011

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-jarvis/the-disruptors-arrive-at-_b_814713.html

"Daniel Domscheit-Berg, former spokesman for WikiLeaks and founder of the competitive OpenSecrets [sic], came to a dinner about transparency at which I was a panelist, alongside the Guardian's Timothy Garton-Ash, Human Rights Watch's Ken Roth, and Harvard's David Kennedy, led by the New York Times' Arthur Sulzberger."

With the NY Times's ostentatious hostility to Wikileaks it may be that OpenLeaks will be the Times's drop box along with a slew of other titans of journalism wanting the lucrative disclosures but not the risk of hanging out with unmanageable miscreants like Assange.

Domscheit-Berg at one time was listed as panelist on one of the manifold opportunistic Personal Democracy Forums (PDF) on Wikileaks held in New York City on January 24, 2011, but did not show. (PDF, a mini-me TED pretender -- see its over-exposed clowns list -- is quite slickly buzz-rich named "personal democracy," and global to boot, as if funded by an indolent millionaire like Huffington, et al ) No doubt that shallow, repetitive blather sideshow was preempted by a chance to kiss-up to the Times's owner and other news magnates yearning for a way to cash in on high-value branded anonymous leaks, Ellsbergian glory days redux.

Who paid for docile Daniel's Davos stand-in for Assange -- at a vile, over-rated forum par excellence, at a cost estimated by the NY Times to be the hundreds of thousands of dollars to an indolent magnate or guests thereof? Oh, really, the news expense-tipped the tipster for tips?

The venality race is on: commercially-funded New York University journalism and law schools, the go-to places for Wikileaks facetime and funds-mongering, has set up Localeaks for sending news tips to 1400 outlets. A bottom-feeding supplement to PDF. Journalism and law still idiotically hope to define Wikileaks in their own terms, abysmally ignorant of the technology undergirding it and its aim to undermine their hegemons. All for free in the public interest, it is said, with a wink and a plea for donations. Hmm, OpenLeaks talks that talk, behaving like smart guys to fleece the insanely vainglorious as deftly as Wikileaks. But wisely avoiding saying anything about sharing the booty with sources most put at risk by impossibly secure drop boxes outside the ineptly secured gates of the mansionettes.

Every new MSM leak site should have to put up a $1M bond outside their control to bail its anonymous contributors when the inept copycats disclose them to save its reputation.