I still am confused by the WikiLeaks budget request -- $200k minimum exclusive of salaries per year just to keep the lights on? $600k with a couple salaries?
JYA did this with cryptome for YEARS as a hobby.
back
4 comments
Even though I agree that the figures are strangely high, I wouldn't actually hold it against them if they just said they want to keep some for themselves. If they're really followed by spooks, detained and threatened - I guess they could use some reward for all of that. It's not something you sign up for with the minimal wage. (when they went public about those incidents, I assumed they're at least a bit worried about "disappearing")
But yeah - showing what is the money spent for would be a good idea.
Perhaps someone will leak their budget document.. if only there was a suitable place to leak it to.
http://www.wikileak.org did publish a Wikileaks partial financial donors list. It also ended up on wikileaks.org. See https://p10.secure.hostingprod.com/@spyblog.org.uk/ssl/wikil...
No, keeping money for themselves is a massive conflict of interest. If they were doing that I don't think I could really trust what they had to say any more.
Journalists are paid too, can't you trust them either?
No. Not blindly anyway.
But they are being openly paid by X media organisation with Y leanings. It's possible to adjust for bias etc.
For a start no one knows who funds Wikileaks.
No, it's very clear who funds Wikileaks. Individual donors do. They make it clear that they do not accept money from governments or corporations. They are, in general, very open about their finances, and the information is not difficult to find.
I apologise because I struggled to find anything but the leak from a little while ago. I couldn't find a comprehensive list of donors.
No Governments and corporates is obviously a good policy. But that does not mean individuals with an agenda are not involved. What if it came to light that, to pick a random ott example, senior Chinese officials were personally donating?
All I'm pointing out is that it is unclear where their complete funding comes from; making it difficult to filter for any bias. If they take no personal payment that becomes a little easier, for me anyway, to sync.
that is just not true
which part? Im happy to be proven wrong but you need to give me a bit more of a clue :)
And why do you think Wikileaks can be trusted?
Well normally I would say that I don't like that line of thinking, how much they deserve to keep, but this is a nonprofit. Isn't it?
I wouldn't be surprised if people don't want to pay them high salaries voluntarily.
Nonprofit it doesn't mean that the people working there cannot get paid (in some cases) a lot of money.
Often it does.
I pointed this out on Reddit and am getting accused of being a spook.
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/bj7x5/wikileaks_...
I posted something similar there yesterday which wasn't too ill received:
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/biz27/all_the_re...
they incur some pretty massive legal fees, afaik. i saw a thing where they justified the numbers, at some point, but i can't find it. will edit once i find.
Not true.
"We don’t have to pay for our lawyer’s time. Hundred of thousands or millions dollars’ worth of lawyer time are being donated. But we still have to pay things like photocopying and court filing. And so far we have never lost a case, there were no penalties or compensations to pay." - http://stefanmey.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/leak-o-nomy-the-ec...
A solid fraction of 200k, massive legal fees, and things like photocopying and court filing can be the same thing. Court costs add up fast. If they where paying for everything then you would expect 10's of million / per year in legal fees.
I personally lost all respect for how WikiLeaks does business after I offered several servers and was told that they didn't even want me maintaining login access to them. So I offered my development skills to help improve their setup and never heard back. I especially dislike the holding of their information hostage until they reach their donation limit. If it's server/capacity, just let it be slow, go down to only a couple of servers.
The only real value they provide is the anonymization of submissions -- there are technical ways to do this, but most people with information won't know about those technologies beforehand.
Authenticating the information could be done with a cryptographic signature, possibly by an unknown signer. Operate on the "last 100 0-days signed by this key when initially published were good, #101 is probably good too" basis, to build a brand.
The problem of maintaining a nice repository for the information is much much simpler, once it's already online. Google could do this for most data (just include a special string in the file), and for stuff google won't touch, there are plenty of people who would pass it around informally.