Latest News Update: The muscle behind technical Wikileaks – Afghanistan

– Afghanistan Wikileaks there is not much to look at.
The homepage of the website mainly consists of a logo and a hyperlink text giant simply says: “Send the documents.”
But there are a lot of technique and strategy muscle behind the website whistleblowing is known for leaking state secrets, even on Sunday, tens of thousands of documents on the alleged US-led war in Afghanistan.
That does not mean that Wikileaks is immune to attacks and technical challenges, however. The site is sometimes blocked, either by high traffic, as was the case Sunday and Monday, or lack of funds, which apparently was the case when the site briefly shut down in January.

On Monday, some site visitors encountered this error message: “Well, there was an error. Maybe it’s just an overload, please try again in a few minutes. ”
How it works
Wikileaks, which acts on donor funding has been quite secretive about its operation.
But essentially the idea behind the site is: People with access to classified documents in question or can send them to the site, either through Internet or by mail.
Then a group of volunteer editors for the site decides what information is authoritative, what information is important, and published accordingly.
In this way, the site is different from traditional wikis, like Wikipedia, which can be edited and modified by anyone at any time.
Only approved information ends up in the Wikileaks site, but anyone is free to present the documents he or she believes should be made public.
Wikileaks provides these complainants anonymity and, to some extent, legal protection.
Technical backbone
From Wikileaks is in the business of publishing information that governments and multinational corporations want to be kept secret, the site has some technical tips are intended to prevent failed or are hacked.
The site maintains the servers on different continents, and your confidential information is passed through countries – like Sweden, Iceland and Belgium – who have offered Wikileaks one degree of legal protection.
“We use this state of the art encryption to bounce stuff around the Internet to cover their tracks – goes through the legal jurisdictions such as Sweden and Belgium, to enact such legal protections,” editor of the controversial site, Julian Assange, told an interview on stage at the TED Global conference on July 20.
The fact that Wikileaks servers’ and volunteers are all over the world does, indeed, the world “is the first news organization without state,” Jay Rosen writes, a journalism professor at the University of New York.
Rosen says this is key to the site has to be protected.
“Wikileaks is organized so that if repression comes in a country, the servers can be turned into another” he writes. “This is to put it out of reach of any government or legal system.”
Assange reports, has spent his life developing the technical skills necessary for the establishment of that system.
“When I was a teenager in Melbourne, Australia, owned by a hacker group called International subversion,” writes the magazine Mother Jones.
Eventually pleaded guilty to multiple counts “of joining the government of Australia and commercial web sites to test their security breaches, but was released on bail for good behavior.”
Overloaded
Despite these efforts to distribute and encrypt, but the site is facing technical challenges.
It seems to be struggling against the recent popularity, both for the leaking of documents and Afghanistan because of an alleged video of war in Iraq that shows about a dozen civilians killed in 2007.
On Monday morning, Wikileaks published in your Twitter that he was “extremely overloaded.”
Gave the public an alternative site – called the “Afghan War Journal” – where people could read the alleged documents in Afghanistan even if the main website WikiLeaks.org had fallen.
On Monday, the homepage of the site was failing from time to time.
Assange said in recent interviews that the sudden popularity Wikileaks has contributed to some technical problems.
“Right now, we are experiencing some serious fundraising and engineering efforts, so our rate of publication in recent months has been minimized by [that] the re-engineering of our backup systems for great public interest that we’ve had “said in an interview on stage at the TED Global conference.
“That’s a problem. Like any crop org start, we are overwhelmed by a kind of our growth. That means we are receiving huge amounts of disclosures” siren warning of very high caliber, but do not have enough people to process effectively and the vet this information. ”
In a press conference following the release of the documents alleged Afghanistan, Assange said the site has 800 part-time volunteers and a flexible network of 70,000 “followers.”
The TED talk, also alluded to the fact that the more information the site receives, the more difficult to store and protect all of it.
Here is how the site explains the process for receiving and publishing information:
“We received information by mail – by regular mail – and, encrypted or not, a vet like a regular news organization, a particular format, that sometimes it is something that is very difficult to do when we’re talking about giant databases information, but disclosure to the public and then defend against the inevitable political and legal attacks.”