It was about a week ago that Wikileaks came under fire from several human rights organizations for not taking the proper precautions to protect various Afghan informants. It should be noted that Reporters Without Borders, which had criticized Wikileaks in the past, clarified its position, and noted that it has never called for a “censorship” of the site, and that it “affirms [its] support for Wikileaks, its work and its founding principles.”
The Wikileaks news doesn’t stop there, no sir.
The Swedish Pirate Party, the fully recognized political party that bases its platform on “reform[ing] copyright law, get[ting] rid of the patent system, and ensur[ing] that citizens’ rights to privacy are respected,” has offered to host Wikileaks’ servers.
Said the party in a statement:
The contribution of WikiLeaks is tremendously important to the entire world. We desire to contribute to any effort that increases transparency and accountability of power in the world.
It gets better.
Emmanuel Goldstein, editor of 2600 magazine (and host of the excellent Off The Hook radio show on WBAI-FM in New York), told the BBC that Wikileaks’ release of encrypted material (in this particular case, insurance.aes256) represents a “a fascinating tactic and one which will challenge the legal system for years to come.”
The file, published alongside the Afghanistan War Diary, is encrypted using AES256, which may even be too tough a nut to crack for U.S. intelligence. Exactly what’s in the file is unknown—it’s encrypted, you see— and “all it takes is the revelation of a simple spoken phrase known by a select group of people and everyone who has this mystery file now has all of the secrets,” said Goldstein.
The saga continues.