Anonymous Launches a WikiLeaks For Hackers 96
siliconbits writes "Despite countless WikiLeaks copycats popping up since the secret-spilling site first dumped its cache of State Department cables last year, the new generation of leaking sites has produced few WikiLeaks-sized scoops. So instead of waiting for insider whistleblowers, the hacker movement Anonymous hopes that a few outside intruders might start the leaks flowing."
Wikileaks is wikileaks for hackers (Score:3, Insightful)
Why can't hackers just send their leaks to wikileaks?
Re:Wikileaks is wikileaks for hackers (Score:1, Insightful)
Assange was a hacker and Bradley Manning was, arguably, one too. The Manning leak was also extremely illegal. So I'm not seeing any evidence that they care about how the data is acquired. From what you're saying, it sounds like the anonymous knock-off of wikileaks will just do a worse job guaranteeing that the leaks are legit. I imagine that it will end up about as accurate as encyclopedia drammatica.
Re:Wikileaks is wikileaks for hackers (Score:2, Insightful)
Why can't hackers just send their leaks to wikileaks?
Wikileaks doesn't publish all data they receive. They only publish high quality data that has been vetted first. I don't think people like Anonymous want to take orders from Julian Assange -:) He's over 30!, and most people over thirty years of age are not trust-worthy (take this with a nudge and a wink if you will, but I'm over 30 and I know what I speak of).
Also, with Wikileaks, you have to rely on people with morality and courage to leak documents (as oppose to having them deliberately stolen from outsiders). If the leaks are "hacked" or stolen, then nobody has to worry about sitting around and waiting for somebody to tell us the nasty things that government and industry are up to.
Very few people have the morality and courage that somebody like Bradly Manning has. And few people want to risk being in an American jail for the rest of their lives (or a Chinese jail for that matter) just because they wanted to help expose corruption.
Re:Wikileaks is wikileaks for hackers (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an important point. Part of what authenticates leaked information is the identity of the whistleblowers, their staus as insiders with privileged access to information, and their willingness to sacrifice in order to publish information. Much of this is lost with anonymous hacktivists. In paticular, when all that's known of the source of information is that it came from an anonymous source, it's harder to disprove the common defense that the leaked information was cooked up by a hostile rival.
Re:Wikileaks is wikileaks for hackers (Score:4, Insightful)
Whistleblowers are often protected from civil lawsuits, too, by whistleblower-protection laws. (Governments don't hate true whistleblowers! That's just a myth that the neo-anarchist movement has invented to justify their hatred of governments.)
They say they don't. You know, every whistleblower I've ever heard of had the system come after him.
We had a prison warden here in ZA -- a few years ago -- who let some prisoners take a camera and film the widespread corruption. (Buying a loaded gun from a guard, that sort of thing.) He was fired.
A little more recently, we had a teacher report fraudulent matric results (your final marks for high school). Got ignored, went to the media, government acts all outraged and launches investigations and all that stuff. Oh, the teacher just happened to get fired afterwards.
Then there's Manning in the USA. Leaking information about, you know, serious and violent crimes.
Please, feel free to provide some concrete examples of whistleblowers who were protected by the law. By the way -- I'm not an anarchist.