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Hacking WikiLeaks’ Whistle: how attack based transparency ruins leaks

11 Aug, 2016 | by: Luke Heemsbergen

Using the internet to publish leaked data made the news again in the last few weeks through global media coverage of WikiLeaks’ recently published “Erdoğan emails”, belonging to Turkey’s ruling party, and the Democratic National Conference email archive. Both stories were framed as revealing hidden truths and promoting transparency through the ever-radical distributed publishing capacity of the internet.

However, these revelations stand out because they were not leaks; there were no whistleblowers. Instead, we see two occasions where WikiLeaks used material that was purloined by hackers outside of the target organisations, who then offered the data to WikiLeaks for publication. By accepting, WikiLeaks got hacked at its own game. The DNC and AKP disclosures provide some ‘scientific journalism’ for Assange of how and why hacking-to-leak falls short. More…

AKP, DNC, FSB, GRU, transparency, Wikileaks