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Monday, January 17, 2011

WikiLeaks - The Complete Overview

Hi!!!! friends after a long gap i was back. How are you all? Hope everyone of you will be rocking always. If then keep-up like that.If not then try to be happy every moment.

                    Real meaning of life is to live every moment with much happy and interesting. Friends let we make one attempt to find our destiny. Try to find happy and enjoyment in every work we does. We should not commit to the work we do but we have to stake interest on it. Keep happy always and no one in the world will be happy like you.

Okay, if we come back to the post,
I got a good response for my earlier posts on "Chris Gardner" & "WikiLeaks".
So this time i strike back again with the topic which is becoming nightmare to U.S Govt i.e., "WikiLeaks". In earlier post i spoke on the basic points about "WikiLeaks", but this time i am going to discuss about two main topics. They are 
1. How WikiLeaks get their information? and
2. Is it really needed to depend upon?



Before we talk about the above questions, let us we know some facts about WikiLeaks.
Here are some facts about WikiLeaks: 
  •       WikiLeaks says it is a non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, journalists and the general public. Launched in 2006, it promotes the leaking of information to fight government and corporate corruption. 
  •       In October, WikiLeaks released 400,000 secret U.S. files on the Iraq war. The documents involved sensitive subjects including abuse of Iraqi prisoners in U.S. custody, Iraqi rights violations and civilian deaths.
  •       In July, it released tens of thousands of secret U.S. military documents about the war in Afghanistan, offering them first to The New York Times, Britain's Guardian newspaper and Germany's Der Spiegel.
  •       The Pentagon said the Afghan war documents leak -- one of the largest in U.S. military history -- had put U.S. troops and Afghan informers at risk.
  •       Under the heading "Afghan War Diary," the 91,000 documents collected from across the U.S. military in Afghanistan cover the war from 2004 to 2010, WikiLeaks said in a summary.
  •       Assange(head of WikiLeaks) is an Australian who spends much of his time in Sweden. Earlier this year, he was accused of molestation by two women there, a charge being investigated by the Swedish prosecutor's office. A complaint about attempted rape led to an arrest warrant, but that was quickly dropped. Assange has denied all charges.
  •       Sweden's media laws are among the world's most protective for journalists. In addition, Sweden's Pirate Party, which advocates reform of copyright law, has agreed to host WikiLeaks' servers, giving it additional legal protection.
  •       WikiLeaks has no connection to the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
These are the few facts about WikiLeaks.............

If we think about first question then it is quiet typical to answer, but we got many and many assumptions. So let us have a look ..........

How WikiLeaks Works on their leaks?

 WikiLeaks has been firing up popular imagination by suggesting that the impending leaks will have serious consequences on the world. Its strategy is to get and post on the Internet secret documents flying out of the wraps of governments and businesses.

In getting hold of damaging details about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the organization has been apparently assisted by a rogue U.S. Army Private, who downloaded secret cables in their thousands and handed them over to Assange's fledgling organization.

Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, who was arrested last spring, had described the cables as documenting years of secret foreign policy and “almost-criminal political back dealings.”

 “Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,” he had boasted in an online chat with a former hacker and associate. 

Some experts have tried to explain how Manning was able to gain access to the secret cables in their thousands. It has been pointed out that the U.S. military had recently introduced an information-sharing initiative called Net-Centric Diplomacy which allowed insiders to gain access to classified information.

Under the new initiative, a subset of State Department documents are published through a Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRNet, which is supposed to be Pentagon’s Secret-level global network. The information available on this network is accessible to authorized American military service personnel. Although more than three million U.S. government personnel and soldiers have access to this network, "top secret" documents are not included in the system.

Manning, who is believed to have downloaded a cache of documents and passed them on to WikiLeaks, gloated before he was nabbed: “Everywhere there’s a U.S. post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed."

“It’s open diplomacy. World-wide anarchy in CSV format. It’s Climategate with a global scope, and breathtaking depth. It’s beautiful, and horrifying,” he said.

                  This was the case which was happened a few days ago. Like this there are many professional personnel leaked for WikiLeaks.

The main cause why it gets files is anyone can submit to WikiLeaks anonymously, but a team of reviewers – volunteers from the mainstream press, journalists and Wikileaks staff – decides what is published.

 “We use advanced cryptographic techniques and legal techniques to protect sources,” Mr. Assange told the BBC in February.

The site says that it accepts “classified, censored or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic or ethical significance” but does not take “rumour, opinion or other kinds of first hand reporting or material that is already publicly available”.

“We specialise in allowing whistle-blowers and journalists who have been censored to get material out to the public,” said Mr Assange.

It is operated by an organisation known as the Sunshine Press and claims to be “funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public”.

Even they use a different technology to protect the details of whistleblowers.
Wikileaks works on a model that allows whistleblowers to submit leaked documents through internet or postal mail, ensuring that the sender's identity is concealed and trails cleared. Volunteers then sift through the documents, repackage the documents and publish them on the web. It attempts to provide anonymity and legal protection to whistle-blowers.

To accomplish this Wikileaks maintains multiple servers across various countries like Sweden, Iceland and Belgium - which provide Wikileaks a token of legal immunity. Also as once it posts sensitive documents on the site the threat of crackdown becomes imminent it switches servers from one country to another keeping it beyond legal periphery. 
The network used by Wikileaks is similar to a technology called The Onion Router or Tor. Tor is open-source software and its website states that it is currently used by a branch of U.S. Navy for gathering intelligence.

Tor offers a service called "hidden services" that enables users to host services like web-publishing, instant messaging and chat rooms, while keeping the identity of the participants anonymous.

So i hope this may be helpful to know how they get information.........
 Now we can see about the 2nd question i.e., Is it really important?Under this we consider that
How helpful wikileaks is?
Is it really good to depend on it?

These are complicated things to speak but let me try once. There are many perceptions in the world.

Before going deep into the topic, first let us have some clearance. Let us assume if you are the person there in the leaked document, i mean if a document is leaked which is about you then how do u feel?
We usually send mails, posts etc. Think what might happen if every e-mail or text you ever sent suddenly found its way on the internet., oops!

It maybe highly confidential, maybe a going wrong thing, but leaking every matter is not good for every individual and not for the political stability of the country too. Every head of the country or higher officials of the country have to hide many matters. They could not be highly open like WikiLeaks.They have to run some confidential issues. I don't even say that WikiLeaks shouldn't work because corruption is the basic social evil in the society, it is working against it to kill corruption cobra.....

Every human being has both positive and negative angles. No one is exceptional. But exposing negative side of the person more is no ways good. But when it comes to matter of state government, no government has ability to concentrate in every sector of the state or country. If they have decided to develop certain areas of sectors then they obviously have to ignore other groups or sectors if not ignoring atleast they have to show less concentration. If wikileaks have to work on leaking documents then it is quite better to leak the files of corruption on the new reforms of the government. Even though they are working on it, but it have to concentrate more on it.

Government should also be optimistic. They should consider as what happening in their kingdom without their involvement. Government should challenge Wikileaks and work in the way to remove corruption. Then in the coldwar between Govt and Wikileaks, government tries to reduce the leaks gradually. If it personally comes to me then i say that India needs one Wikileaks. Then i am sure that it can get more documents than they got from America, Afghan etc. Then political nightmares(political leaders) tries to stop ''Politricks'' and bribery. Bribery not only by daemons(political leaders) but it should also be kicked out from the every individuals mind. There is a need of one monarch like that. Truth is like fire. No one can easily accept the truth but when ever it was leaked then there will be no other options for them to come out of it. So it is good to be true always. It is not only to the governments but truthfulness required to every individual.So friends let we also learn to be truthful and don't give chance of figuring us. This may not be the correct situation to say all these but it is the correct topic we have to concentrate.

Back to the topic, Perusing the trove of sensitive documents is like viewing our world neighbors’ — and our own — dirty linen. Foreign leaders are as embarrassed as our own.

Friends here we have to consider one thing i.e., depending on it completely. Once we started believing every document then we will trust them greatly. At this case if they start deviating the correct then people starts to believe wrong. So people should also learn to take things logically. Logical thinking about what is correct and what is not should be there..........

So friends till i tries to say something about WikiLeaks but now let me try to give some overview about Julian Assange........



Julian Assange:

A software developer and Internet activist. He is the founder, spokesperson, and editor in chief of WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website and conduit for worldwide news leaks, with the stated purpose of creating open governments. Assange has worked as a computer programmer and was a hacker during his youth.He has lived in several countries, and has made public appearances in many parts of the world to speak about freedom of the press, censorship, and investigative journalism.

Assange founded the WikiLeaks website in 2006 and serves on its advisory board. He has published material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya, toxic waste dumping in Côte d'Ivoire, Church of Scientology manuals, Guantanamo Bay procedures, and banks such as Kaupthing and Julius Baer.

For his work with WikiLeaks Assange has received glowing praise and accolades, along with public condemnation and calls for his execution. He received a number of awards and nominations, including the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award for publishing material about extrajudicial killings in Kenya and Readers' Choice for Time magazine's 2010 Person of the Year.

Assange is currently wanted for questioning in Sweden regarding alleged sexual offences, and was arrested in London, England on 7 December 2010. He is currently on bail and under house arrest in England pending an extradition hearing.Assange has denied the allegations and claimed that they are politically motivated.
He was born on born 3 July 1971  in Townsville, Queensland, and spent much of his youth living on Magnetic Island.
When he was one year old, his mother Christine married theatre director Brett Assange, who gave him his surname. Brett and Christine Assange ran a touring theatre company. His stepfather, Julian's first "real dad", described Julian as "a very sharp kid" with "a keen sense of right and wrong". "He always stood up for the underdog... he was always very angry about people ganging up on other people."
In 1979, his mother remarried; her new husband was a musician who belonged to a New Age group called Santiniketan Park Association that was led by Anne Hamilton-Byrne. The couple had a son, but broke up in 1982 and engaged in a custody struggle for Assange's half-brother. His mother then took both children into hiding for the next five years. Assange moved several dozen times during his childhood, attending many schools, sometimes being home-schooled.
In 1987, after turning 16, Assange began hacking under the name "Mendax" (derived from a phrase of Horace: "splendide mendax", or "nobly untruthful"). He and two other hackers joined to form a group which they named the International Subversives. Assange wrote down the early rules of the subculture: "Don’t damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information".

In response to the hacking, the Australian Federal Police raided his Melbourne home in 1991. He was reported to have accessed computers belonging to an Australian university, the Canadian telecommunications company Nortel, the USAF 7th Command Group in the Pentagon and other organisations, via modem. In 1992, he pleaded guilty to 24 charges of hacking and was released on bond for good conduct after being fined AU$2100. The prosecutor said "there is just no evidence that there was anything other than sort of intelligent inquisitiveness and the pleasure of being able to—what's the expression—surf through these various computers". The judge warned that if Assange had not had such a disrupted childhood he would have gone to jail for up to 10 years.
Assange later commented, "It's a bit annoying, actually. Because I co-wrote a book about [being a hacker], there are documentaries about that, people talk about that a lot. They can cut and paste. But that was 20 years ago. It's very annoying to see modern day articles calling me a computer hacker. I'm not ashamed of it, I'm quite proud of it. But I understand the reason they suggest I'm a computer hacker now. There's a very specific reason."
In 1989, Assange started living with his girlfriend and they had a son, Daniel. After they split up, they engaged in a lengthy custody struggle, and did not agree on a custody arrangement until 1999.
In 1993, Assange was involved in starting one of the first public internet service providers in Australia, Suburbia Public Access Network. Starting in 1994, he lived in Melbourne as a programmer and a developer of free software.In 1995, he wrote Strobe, the first free and open source port scanner. He contributed several patches to the PostgreSQL project in 1996. He helped to write the book Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier (1997), which credits him as a researcher and reports his history with International Subversives. Starting around 1997, he co-invented the Rubberhose deniable encryption system, a cryptographic concept made into a software package for Linux designed to provide plausible deniability against rubber-hose cryptanalysis; he originally intended the system to be used "as a tool for human rights workers who needed to protect sensitive data in the field." Other free software that he has authored or co-authored includes the Usenet caching software NNTP Cache and Surfraw, a command-line interface for web-based search engines. In 1999, he registered the domain leaks.org; "But", he says, "then I didn't do anything with it."
From 2003 to 2006, Assange studied physics and mathematics at the University of Melbourne. He has also studied philosophy and neuroscience.He never graduated and received the minimum passing grades in most of his math courses. On his personal web page, he described having represented his university at the Australian National Physics Competition around 2005.
Later he started WikiLeaks in 2006. then after we know the story..........
So this what i liked to post friends. This post gave me much satisfaction. I tried to use my efforts even though i have less efforts. 
Thanks for visiting my blog friends. If you like then please follow it friends. I need your encouragement. Have a nice time friends. Keep smiling always. 

Love All Hate None..........

have a great time ahead. 


                                          


                                                                                 ----by your lovable friend
                                                                                                               Koundinya...

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