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Marketplace Scratch Pad

Making the Internet "leakier"

Scott Jagow Oct 9, 2009

There’s a website called Wikileaks.org, which has published 1.2 million sensitive documents. Wikileaks has a plan to make it easier for whistleblowers and other insiders to hand over the goods for the world to see.

IDG News Service says Wikileaks will enable newspapers, human rights organizations, criminal investigators and others to embed an “upload a disclosure to me via Wikileaks” form onto their Web sites:

The upload system will give potential whistleblowers around the world the ability to leak sensitive documents to an organization or journalist they trust over a secure connection, while giving the receiver legal protection they might not otherwise enjoy.

“We will take the burden of protecting the source and the legal risks associated with publishing the document,” said Julien Assange, an advisory board member at Wikileaks…

Wikileaks also plans to make its material easier to search through. I thought this was interesting:

“At the moment, for example, we are sitting on 5GB from Bank of America, one of the executive’s hard drives,” he said. “Now how do we present that? It’s a difficult problem. We could just dump it all into one giant Zip file, but we know for a fact that has limited impact. To have impact, it needs to be easy for people to dive in and search it and get something out of it.”

I wonder what they have…

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