Wikileaks is off-line again. (But try 88.80.13.160) The whistle-blower safe box had just posted fragments of communications hacked from Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account. GOP campaign reps denounced the act as “a shocking invasion of the governor’s privacy and a violation of the law” Come again? Eavesdropping is illegal?
Hackers working under the venerable pseudonym “Anonymous” posted email from the Alaska Governor which appeared to violate government safeguards about official communications. Emails regarding state business are supposed to go through government mail systems and be archived accordingly. Personal email accounts are not to be used to circumvent government oversight. The hackers invite the public to decide for themselves whether communications at the addresses sarah.palin@yahoo.com and gov.sarah@yahoo.com violated these restrictions.
Wikileaks is a repository of leaked information to which government or corporate whistle-blowers can post who want to bring evidence of wrong-doing to the public’s attention. Wired has an excellent profile of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. The site has been targeted by the courts and corporate hackers to prevent the disclosure of sensitive information. For example, Wikileaks leaked instruction manuals from the DoD’s secret prison system.
Why Wikileaks has become inaccessible this time is hopefully due simply to too much traffic. You can check Wikileak for access updates, if lame commentary. When Wikileaks published offshore banking records showing how US corporations are evading federal taxes, the Swiss bank Julius Baer prevailed upon a US court to revoke the wikileaks.org domain name.
Apparently the Secret Service has vowed to investigate who hacked into Sarah Palin’s account. This should be a revealing test of Wikileaks’ stealth measures. Wikileaks contributors use a FIREFOX pluggin called TOR to spread their online tracks over a distribution of participating TOR users. In addition communications are encrypted with PGP -Pretty Good Privacy. Unavoidably however, a not insignificant number of machines on the network are recognized to be intelligence agents.
(Scrubbing Bubbles said “We work hard so you don’t have to.”)