Wikileads

The New Scientist published an article about Wikileaks this week, offering interesting insight into the Wikileaks’ functionality and philosophy.

(A subscription is required to read the entire article, but a blogger posted it here.)

Some highlights:

How Tor, the anonymising internet technology Wikileaks uses, works:

Tor routes documents sent to the Wikileaks website into a cloud of hundreds of servers, where they bounce randomly between a handful of them, before finally landing in one of Wikileaks’ inboxes.

Why Wikileaks (probably) won’t get shut down:

Wikileaks itself is actually much more than a single website. Wikileaks.org has mirror sites hosted in a number of countries, including Belgium, Sweden, Australia, Christmas Island and California. This means that if someone tries to take legal action against Wikileaks in one country - by taking down the wikileaks.org website for example, as a Swiss bank tried and failed to do earlier this year - it cannot take down the entire service. Also, Sweden and Belgium in particular have very strong anti-censorship legislation, making Wikileaks a resilient beast.

Insights into editorial policy:

So how do Wikileaks’ editors decide which leaks to post? Unlike print editors, Wikileaks’ editors do not reject leaked documents just because they are unlikely to have widespread appeal. The only rule is that leaks must be in the public interest, says [Wikileaks spokesman] Assange. And there are few frivolous leaks, he says. “Our sources, perhaps inspired by examples already set, nearly always send in genuine public interest material. Wikileaks pushes submissions through a number of questions and only the well-motivated leaks get through.”

And why Wikileaks does not self-censor for national security reasons:

First things first, says Assange. “When governments stop torturing and killing people, and when corporations stop abusing the legal system, then perhaps it will be time to ask if free speech activists are accountable.”