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INSIDE_WIKILEAKS
July 24, 2011
"Inside Wikileaks"
"My Time with Julian Asange at the World's Most Dangerous Website"
Daniel Domscheit-Berg
aka Daniel Schmidt, aka D. This is a "written with" book,
"with Tina Klopp" translated from the German.
It should not be a surprise to
find that it has occasional
stilted, awkward phrasing.
This is a tell all-story, which (predictably) has the dirt
on Julian Asange, that being that he was impossible to work
with, and his paranoia and delusions of grandeur eventually
drove away most of the original core team on wikileaks, who
are now working on an alternate project: "openleaks".
I have little opinion about
the portrait of Julian
Asange painted here... it's
certainly believable, but
no doubt one-sided, and in Sometimes projects succeed because
any case it may very well of the craziness of the founders...
be besides the point.
And we techie-types don't have
much respect for spokesmen and
poster-boys playing the
stand-up-and-bullshit-the-media
game, but someone really does Poul Anderson,
have to do this kind of thing. "The Man Who
Counts"
FEARLESS
What I was after in this book was some sense
of the organizational structure of how
wikileaks handles information: how do they
vet the information they recieve, how much
effort do they spend on editing and/or
curating, how do they decide when to release
information, how do they collaborate with the
journalists they partner with, etc.
I got a little of this from
the book, though only a little.
What I did learn about the wikileaks system
is that they didn't really have one. At the
start-- even after they were famous-- it was
tiny, a few guys running a bluff, convincing
everyone that they had an invulnerable
distributed network of machines and
thousands of volunteers carefully working
over every detail.
They didn't really have a policy about
prioritizing which leaks to process
and where to send them-- or if they did
have one, they felt free to change it
on the fly.
Neither did they have any really
good system to handle redaction. It They often felt the need to
was all pretty crude-- at any given anonymize the material
time there was only a handful of further, and did their best
people who could be really trusted to show some responsible
to do the job. restraint about, for
example, blowing the names
Flakes were a bigger problem of undercover agents.
than infiltrators, though I
don't doubt that fear of A common smear is
infilitration caused it's that they didn't
own problems. care about anything
like that.
They increasingly cut deals with
major media figures, offering
exclusive access in return for
assistance in vetting and If D's account is any guide,
redacting the material. the WL people weren't often
very careful about controlling
what these journalist partners
got access to.
On at least one occasion,
the Wikileaks people edited
and published some material
themselves, the video Wikileaks was not above some
"Collateral Murder", in strategic maneuvering about
which US forces are shown timing their releases:
to display a cavalier lack
of respect for civilian "What is public, and what is
life. private? We were trying to stir
up controversy about this very
question. And it was better for
the debate to center on Sarah
Palin's e-mail account than on
the data of private consumers.
We were convinced that we were
strengthing the project by
pushing the limits of what was
acceptable, and getting our way
in the end." --p.50,
"Dealing with the Media",
GLASNOST
Daniel Domscheit-Berg strikes me as
a technical guy looking for technical TECHIES_FALLACY
fixes to social problems.
OPENLEAKS A constant theme of mine
is that these one-brained
approaches are too limited.
If only people would realize
that they need a well-rounded
person like myself in charge
of everything.
(I think I would
make a fine Crazy
Founder, don't you?)
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