WikiLeaks Finally Brings Back Its Submission System for Your Secrets
WHISTLEBLOWING - SURVEILLANCE, 11 May 2015
Andy Greenberg, Wired – TRANSCEND Media Service
It’s taken close to half a decade. But WikiLeaks is back in the business of accepting truly anonymous leaks.
On Friday [1 May 2015], the secret-spilling group announced that it has finally relaunched a beta version of its leak submission system, a file-upload site that runs on the anonymity software Tor to allow uploaders to share documents and tips while protecting their identity from any network eavesdropper, and even from WikiLeaks itself. The relaunch of that page—which in the past served as the core of WikiLeaks’ transparency mission—comes four and a half years after WikiLeaks’ last submission system went down amid infighting between WikiLeaks’ leaders and several of its disenchanted staffers.
“WikiLeaks publishes documents of political or historical importance that are censored or otherwise suppressed. We specialise in strategic global publishing and large archives,” reads the new page, along with the .onion url specific to Tor for a “secure site where you can anonymously upload your documents to WikiLeaks editors.”
“We thought, ‘This is ready, it should be opened,’” WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson told WIRED in an interview. “We’re hoping for a good flow of information through this gateway.”
In a statement posted to the WikiLeaks website, the group’s founder Julian Assange wrote that the new system is the result of “four competing research projects” launched by the group, and that it has several less-visible submission systems in addition to the public one it revealed Friday. “Currently, we have one public-facing and several private-facing submission systems in operation, cryptographically, operationally and legally secured with national security sourcing in mind,” Assange writes.
The long hiatus of WikiLeaks’ submission system began in October of 2010, as the site’s administrators wrestled with disgruntled staff members who had come to view Assange as too irresponsible to protect the group’s sources. Defectors from the group seized control of the leak platform, along with thousands of leaked documents. Control of that leak system was never returned to WikiLeaks, and the defectors eventually destroyed the decryption keys to the leaks they’d taken, rendering them useless.
WikiLeaks vowed in 2011 to relaunch its submission system, announcing that the leaks page would reappear on the one-year anniversary of its massive Cablegate release of State Department documents. But that date came and went with no new submission system. In the following years, Assange seemed to become preoccupied with WikiLeaks’ financial difficulties, including a lawsuit against PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and Bank of America for cutting off payments to the group, as well as his own legal struggles. Accusations of sex crimes in Sweden and fears of espionage charges in the United States have left him trapped for nearly three years in London’s Ecuadorean embassy, the country that has offered him asylum. The goal of getting Wikileaks back in the anonymous leak submission game got sidelined.
The group, and Assange in particular, has also become more focused on the modern surveillance challenges to any truly anonymous leaking system. That, too, has delayed WikiLeaks’ willingness to create a new target for intelligence agencies trying to intercept leaks. “If you ask if the submission from five years ago was insecure, well, it would be today,” says Hrafnsson. “We’ve had to rethink this and rework it, and put a lot of expertise into updating and upgrading it.”
Hrafnsson declined to comment on what new security measures WikiLeaks has put into place. He was willing to say that the submission system has already been online—though not linked from the main WikiLeaks site—for weeks as it’s been tested. “As always, we’ve wanted to to make sure we can deliver on the promise that people can give us information without being traced,” he says. Though the site remains in “beta,” Hrafnsson adds that “we wouldn’t have made it available unless we considered it to be as safe as it’s possible to be.”
Despite its years-long lack of a leak portal, WikiLeaks had continued to publish documents over the last few years, never revealing where they got them. In some cases they appear to have been directly shared with WikiLeaks by hackers, as was the case with the massive collections of emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor and the Syrian government. Or in other cases, the group has simply organized and republished already-public leaks, as with its searchable index of the emails stolen by hackers from Sony Pictures Entertainment.
But few of those leaks have been as significant as those it obtained while its submission system was still online, most notably the leaks from Chelsea Manning that included millions of classified files from the Iraq and Afghan wars as well as hundreds of thousands of secret State Department communiqués.
In the years since WikiLeaks ceased to offer its own Tor-based submission system, others have sought to fill the gap. Projects like GlobaLeaks and SecureDrop now offer open-source systems that have replicated and improved on WikiLeaks’ model of using Dark Web servers to enable anonymous uploads. SecureDrop in particular has been adopted by mainstream news sites such as the New Yorker, Gawker, Forbes, the Guardian, the Intercept and the Washington Post.
In his statement on the WikiLeaks site, Assange notes that those projects are “both excellent in many ways, [but] not suited to WikiLeaks’ sourcing in its national security and large archive publishing specialities,” he writes. “The full-spectrum attack surface of WikiLeaks’ submission system is significantly lower than other systems and is optimised for our secure deployment and development environment.”
One former WikiLeaks staffer contacted by WIRED argues that with several more mainstream outlets for leaks now available thanks to tools like SecureDrop, sources would be wiser to stay away from WikiLeaks’ new submission system. “As a leaker…You’d have to be fucking insane to trust Assange,” writes the former WikiLeaker, who asked for anonymity because his association with WikiLeaks has never been publicly revealed. He points to WikiLeaks’ past decisions to publish large troves of raw documents, rather than ones carefully filtered by journalists to avoid harming innocent people. “Why would you go for Anarchist Punks Weekly instead of, say, the Guardian or the Washington Post?”
But the same ex-staffer also admits that Assange probably knows more about protecting leakers than many journalists dealing with sensitive sources. “I do not believe that WL endangers sources,” he adds. “In fact, Assange is likely far better trained than most to handle sources well.”
Assange, for his part, argues in his statement that WikiLeaks is bolder than other media outlets that might censor a leaker’s materials. He points, for instance, to the relatively small number of Edward Snowden’s leaks journalists including Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras that have actually been published. “To date, more than 99 per cent of Snowden documents have been completely censored by the mainstream press involved,” he writes. “WikiLeaks will continue publishing, as it has since its foundation, full archives of suppressed documents in strategic global partnerships. The 2.0 public-facing submission system is an important new method in our arsenal for recovering subjugated history.”
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