WikiLeaks Readies New Whistle-Blowing Platform - quinnsprome

WikiLeaks end week released a contemplate of the brisk global business deal in surveillance products, which founder Julian Assange claimed exposes a liberal risk of exposure to peoples' privacy, piece also continuing process a revamped submissions platform.

Assange said the study, which encompasses 160 companies in 25 countries, was undertaken as part of an obligation to sources for the whistle-blowing website, which has not accepted online submissions for more than a year following certificate concerns.

Included with the study are 287 documents that Assange said illustrate "the reality of the external mass surveillance industry." WikiLeaks called the release "The Spy Files," and said it shows how Western sandwich countries are selling advanced tools that are used by repressive countries. More files will be released future this week and more sooner in the year. (See also "Surveillance Catalog is Creepy Register.")

The terrorist attacks of September 2001 in the U.S. birth tried to be a license for Continent countries, the U.S., Australia, South Africa and others to produce "spying systems that affect all of U.S.," Assange said.

"Who here has an iPhone?" Assange asked attendees of the news conference in London. "Who here has a Blackberry? Who here uses Gmail? Well you are totally screwed. The reality is intelligence contractors are selling right now to countries across the world mass surveillance systems for wholly of those products."

WikiLeaks said the information was compiled with facilitate from other media and journalism-related organizations, including ARD in Germany, The Government agency of Investigatory Journalism in the U.K., The Hindu in India, L'Espresso in Italy, OWNI in France and The Washington Spot in the U.S.

The files free past WikiLeaks contain brochures, catalogs, manuals, presentations and other documents linked with developers of covert surveillance products. One document, from the company NetQuest, was a introduction given at ISS Humankind Americas, a conference that took come in in Washington, D.C., in October. The conference was aimed at law of nature enforcement and intelligence analysts responsible for "lawful interception, electronic investigations and network intelligence assembly."

The Wall Street Journal recently published documents from the same conference, and Assange said that the "to a great extent redacted" material that the Journal discharged was only related to that league. The "consuming" amount of material posted Thursday was inexperient, Assange contended.

Assange said WikiLeaks is still developing a next-generation submissions scheme. He repeated WikiLeaks' headache with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) communications protocol, which enables computers to switch encrypted information.

Assange said SSL is no more safe and alleged that intelligence agencies have compromised Credential Authorities (CAs). CAs issue member certificates used for SSL. Hundreds of second-year CAs hindquarters issue SSL certificates linked spinal column to a root CA.

Respective second CAs have reported breaches in which hackers generated digital certificates for star websites including Google, which would give the hackers the power to intercept communications.

Assange would non say when WikiLeaks will again have an online submissions system. The establishment has industrial an "offline component," he said.

"At the moment, we take things in a number of ways," Assange said.

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Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/472477/wikileaks_launches_new_whistleblowing_platform.html

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