[ISN] Wikileaks Was Launched With Documents Intercepted From Tor

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/wikileaks-documents/

By Kim Zetter
Threat Level
Wired.com
June 1, 2010

Wikileaks, the controversial whistleblowing site that exposes secrets of 
governments and corporations, bootstrapped itself with a cache of 
documents obtained through an internet eavesdropping operation by one of 
its activists, according to a new profile of the organization's founder.

The activist siphoned more than a million documents as they traveled 
across the internet through Tor, also known as "The Onion Router," a 
sophisticated privacy tool that lets users navigate and send documents 
through the internet anonymously.

The siphoned documents, supposedly stolen by Chinese hackers or spies 
who were using the Tor network to transmit the data, were the basis for 
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange's assertion in 2006 that his 
organization had already "received over one million documents from 13 
countries" before his site was launched, according to the article in The 
New Yorker.

Only a small portion of those intercepted documents were ever posted on 
Wikileaks, but the new report indicates that some of the data and 
documents on WikiLeaks did not come from sources who intended for the 
documents to be seen or posted. It also explains an enduring mystery of 
Wikileaks' launch: how the organization was able to amass a collection 
of secret documents before its website was open for business.

Tor is a sophisticated privacy tool endorsed by the Electronic Frontier 
Foundation and other civil liberties groups as a method for 
whistleblowers and human rights workers to communicate with journalists, 
among other uses. In its search for government and corporate secrets 
traveling through the Tor network, it's conceivable that WikiLeaks may 
have also vacuumed up sensitive information from human rights workers 
who did not want their data seen by outsiders.

[...]


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