The Chaos Computer Club is one of the biggest and oldest hacker groups in the world.One of it's co-founders(1981) was Herwart"wau"Holland-Moritz.His friends set up the Wan Holland Foundation after his death and it became a crucial channel to receive worldwide WikiLeaks donations(U.S. has successfully hindered donations since cable leaks).Sweden eventually became the leakers' safe haven when WikiLeaks used The Pirate Bay file-sharing site.PRQ provided WikiLeaks with an external face and was their web-hosting company.PRQ offers its customers secrecy.Their systems prevent anyone from eavesdropping on chat pages or finding out who sent what to whom.
WikiLeaks' own laptops all have military-grade encryption which can't be read,even directly off the disk.They use Skype for in-house conversations which also uses encryption and was developed in Sweden so the U.S.National Security Agency can't peer in on their discussions.As it now stands,WikiLeaks claims to be uncensorable and untraceable.Documents can be leaked on a massive scale in a way which combines the protection and anonymity of cutting-edge cryptographic technologies.
Their main anonymity protection device is known as Tor(The Onion Router).WikiLeaks advertises that "we keep no records as to where you upload from,your time zone,browser or even as to when your submission was made".U.S. intelligence agencies see Tor as important to their covert spying work and have not been pleased to see it used to leak their own secrets.
Kenya gave WikiLeaks its first journalistic coup.It was a massive report about the alleged corruption of former President Daniel Arap Moi that had been commissioned from the private inquiry firm Kroll.The result was indeed sensational and Assange claimed that a 10% voting shift occurred in the next election.The following year,WikiLeaks ran a highly praised report on Kenya death squads.It was based on evidence obtained by the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights.Later that year,Assange received an award from the human rights organization Amnesty.WikiLeaks started to see a flow of genuinely leaked documents including some from UK military sources.
Assange hunted for a model that could bring in working revenue and gain political attention.One issue was that news organizations refused to invest in analysis of their first rate source material.He decided that WikiLeaks needed to restrict supply for a period to increase perceived value to the point that journalists will invest time to produce quality stories.During this time period,WikiLeaks exposed the Swiss bank Julius Baer for aiding outrageous tax dodgers with a branch in the Cayman Islands.The Guardian also leaked files to WikiLeaks concerning Barkley Bank detailing their tax-avoidance schemes.It functioned as an outline back-up,along with Dutch Greenpeace and Norwegian TV in posting in full a damming report on toxic waste dumped by oil traders Trafigura.Even with all of this activity,WikiLeaks(2009) was still struggling to make a name for itself and find the important revenue to continue working.
More from "WikiLeaks" next post.
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