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An Embattled Group of Hackers Picks Up the WikiLeaks Mantle (arstechnica.com) 74

Posted by BeauHD from the now-where-were-we dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For the past year, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has sat in a London jail awaiting extradition to the US. This week, the US Justice Department piled on yet more hacking conspiracy allegations against him, all related to his decade-plus at the helm of an organization that exposed reams of government and corporate secrets to the public. But in Assange's absence, another group has picked up where WikiLeaks left off -- and is also picking new fights.

For roughly the past year and a half, a small group of activists known as Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets, has quietly but steadily released a stream of hacked and leaked documents, from Russian oligarchs' emails to the stolen communications of Chilean military leaders to shell company databases. Late last week, the group unleashed its most high-profile leak yet: BlueLeaks, a 269-gigabyte collection of more than a million police files provided to DDoSecrets by a source aligned with the hacktivist group Anonymous, spanning emails, audio files, and interagency memos largely pulled from law enforcement "fusion centers," which serve as intelligence-sharing hubs. According to DDoSecrets, it represents the largest-ever release of hacked US police data. It may put DDoSecrets on the map as the heir to WikiLeaks' mission -- or at least the one it adhered to in its earlier, more idealistic years -- and the inheritor of its never-ending battles against critics and censors. "Our role is to archive and publish leaked and hacked data of potential public interest," writes the group's cofounder, Emma Best, a longtime transparency activist, in a text message interview with WIRED. "We want to inspire people to come forward, and release accurate information regardless of its source."
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An Embattled Group of Hackers Picks Up the WikiLeaks Mantle More

An Embattled Group of Hackers Picks Up the WikiLeaks Mantle

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  • Interesting Fact (Score:4, Informative)

    by divide overflow ( 599608 ) on Monday June 29, 2020 @11:43PM (#60245476)
    A PDF copy of John Bolton's new book "The Room Where It Happened" was briefly posted on a web server hosted by the DDoSecrets group and the link posted to Twitter. It has since been taken off that server and the Twitter user account terminated.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It had the desired effect though, the book is widely available on P2P networks.

    • This whole leak is just propaganda to legitimize wide sweeping police upgrades. US domestic police files are a big step down from war leaks, diplomats and top politicians. Wikileaks is unlikely to be replaced in what it did.

  • No middle ground (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FeelGood314 ( 2516288 ) on Monday June 29, 2020 @11:51PM (#60245502)
    Wikileaks tried to crowd source the vetting of their leaks before releasing them to the public. This served as a way of protecting people who might have been endangered by the mass dumping of a leak and likely severed other useful purposes for society. The shutting down of wikileaks won't stop the leaks, it will however stop the vetting process. In some ways I think this is actually favourable to people who's crimes are revealed by the leaks because now they can claim the leaks are evil. The leaks were never evil, wikileaks revealed a lot of evil and the vetting prevented collateral damage. There just appears to be a large number of people in one particular country that don't give a damn about collateral damage.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Xenographic ( 557057 )

      Well, that was always the thing, wasn't it? Wikileaks was fine as long as Collateral Murder was being posted, but then people started going after it for not having the leaks they wanted on their ideological opponents because, you know, it's not a hacking group. Of course that last part will be tested... they've dumped Manning into solitary for months now to try to get something on Assange, who was charged.

      As for this set of leaks, they managed to doxx a lot of police and crime victims, but they hit the wr

      • they've dumped Manning into solitary for months now to try to get something on Assange, who was charged.

        Wtf are you smoking. Manning isn't even in jail, let alone in solitary.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Dr. Tom ( 23206 )
          In jail for a year, released in march 2020

        • Are you really this ignorant?

          https://edition.cnn.com/2019/0... [cnn.com]

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Pascoea ( 968200 )
            You realize that article was published in March of 2019, right? According to this [nytimes.com] (Sorry if it's paywalled, sometimes NYT is sometimes it isn't) she was released in March of 2020.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Pascoea ( 968200 )
          I mean, technically you are correct: She's not currently in prison. But she was held in contempt for a year, released in March of this year, over the Assange issue. Who knows if it was solitary confinement or not, but I'm guessing either way it wasn't comfortable.

          • I wouldn't be surprised if he was isolated while there; sweet little things like "her" don't do well in genpop. Plus he was suicidal, so another reason to keep him separated and under observation. That's different than solitary though.

        • My bad, I didn't hear about the release. But yeah, Manning spent a year in prison for contempt for refusing to testify against Assange and I understood that much of it was while in solitary confinement.

  • Fuck with a first world country's secrets and you get legal troubles for the rest of your life.
    Fuck with a third world country's secrets and you get a prick of polonium for the rest of your life.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by flink ( 18449 )

      Russia, the state that likes to use polonium for assassinations, is a second world country. Being aligned with the Russia née USSR is literally the defining characteristic of a second world country.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        Likes to use? How many polonium assassinations have there been in the last two decades? One, and since Putin and the Russian secret services aren't stupid it seems exceedingly unlikely they would use something so obvious. No, he's not a nice guy, but no one has ever legitimately accused him of stupidity and that's what the Litvinenko poisoning would have been. Seems much more like political/security theater than anything else to me.

        • ...How many polonium assassinations have there been in the last two decades? One...

          One was all that was needed. Putin got his point across.

      • Russia, the state that likes to use polonium for assassinations, is a second world country. Being aligned with the Russia née USSR is literally the defining characteristic of a second world country.

        Actually, CCCP née Russia, but I digress. You're right. I was just taking a jab at them.

  • Mantle? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Xylantiel ( 177496 )
    What mantle is that? Being manipulated by the intelligence services of the least scrupulous nations? Rogue hackers out to expose the world sounds great in a movie, but they're just another potential asset to a real intelligence service.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Pretty sure the Snowden and Manning leaks completely fucked the security services of every country that had any influence or control over them.

      • "Security services" are now known as "covert mass population surveillance?"

        Hard to keep up with the new lingo you kids use.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          That's what the NSA, GCHQ et. al call themselves. Security Services. It's not even a joke.

  • It's a shame (Score:1, Interesting)

    by JoeyDot ( 5981942 )
    I don't believe these are a legitimate stand in for wikileaks. They're probably controlled by the opposition. All they seem to do is to work for the democrats. What have they don't so far? Hit nothing but democrats. Assange was fighting AGAINST the western establishment and that includes against the democrats. This outfit can't even come up with a decent name. It's just cringe. Wow, democrats with all their budget can pay hackers who would have thought it.
  • I'm not going to ignore helpful information, but who gave these guys the right to decide who does or doesn't get to enjoy some privacy? Do they get to retain their privacy? If they're so interested in transparency that they don't mind denying people the ability to have secrets, then I'm sure they don't mind telling everyone who they are, right? If they don't want anyone else to have any privacy, then how about they put webcams in their bathrooms?

    Put your figurative money where your mouth is.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pascoea ( 968200 )

      but who gave these guys the right to decide who does or doesn't get to enjoy some privacy?

      They did. It's their website. They sourced the information. They get to decide what to do with it. Same reason Twitter gets to decide who can play in their sandbox: It's their sandbox.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      "You have no privacy. Get over it." - Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, 1998

      I've seen nothing in the subsequent 22 years to prove him wrong.

  • For every thing we see leaked, there is probably ten times that pilfered and silently tucked away, or used for personal gain, one way or the other. Publicly leaking is unprofitable and risky. Now we have data brokers on the web, adding value to carelessly exposed data, and getting some coin on the embarrassment or outright illegality factor. There is probably 1000 times that known in tight circles, that the press just will not publish. Look at the tax records dug up by concerned journlists, and note that t

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      Over 200,000 shell companies were exposed by the Panama Papers, and how many prosecutions resulted? A couple dozen, a little under a billion dollars in fines worldwide were assessed (South Africa alone estimated it was losing tens of billions a year to tax evasion through Monsak Fonseca), and then it all quietly evaporated. The more things change the more they stay the same.

  • Oh (Score:4, Funny)

    by Dunbal ( 464142 ) * on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @10:03AM (#60246510)
    So now we've gone from exposing major nations who are covering up their violation of international law, to just basically anybody's dirty laundry. Well done. How far you have come...

  • Nice touch of editorialization there (Score:3)

    by Rujiel ( 1632063 ) on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @02:31PM (#60247450)
    "or at least the one it adhered to in its earlier, more idealistic years" Why does this kind of couched language only occur here for a whistleblower org, but never for any of the agencies or individuals that wikileaks revealed to be fraudulent? Outlets like the guardian, wapo, nytimes, etc. ran all sorts of pro-russiagate garbage that wound up being entirely falsen and they never receive this kind of note. Wikileaks on the other hand has never published anything false.
  • they deleted the twitter account like two weeks ago, maybe three ... did i fall through a hole in space again ?

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