Re: <nettime> Blocking a website: Worse than torture?

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

>why none from China?

Indeed. Assange wrote in 2006 that for an unnamed initiative an
off-shore, secure reservoir was needed for a large amount of funds. He
pointed to the website named thing2thing.com.

Thing2thing.com is currently a Chinese website, or appears to be,
since it is easy to configure a spoof.

Or it could be the domain name lapsed and was claimed by another.

An early promise of Wikileaks was that it would publish material from
the PRC, and that Chinese dissidents were among the WL founders; some
are still listed as advisors on the WL website.

More recently Assange was quoted in The New Yorker that the initial
batch of a TOR siphon, some 1 million files, contained large amounts
of Chinese spying data. The data was pointed to by Chinese dissidents
who were watching and siphoning TOR for just that booty. For whom it
was being snatched by the dissidents is unknown.

Of the 1 million files allegedly siphoned from TOR by Assange and
associates few seemed to have been released to the public and
identified as such.

What happened to the million is not known, nor why Assange revealed
the theft. Sold on the black market, to businesses, to governments,
ransomed by the PRC, stashed for future use, lied about, found to be
mostly trash, discovered were salted with trojans and viruses, or more
interestingly deployed as TOR bait and entrap, a use TOR has become
famous for.

Certainly using TOR for data dumps to be siphoned by the unwary
as amazing discoveries is a technique used by several Internet
dissimulators of disinformation, as well as by teams testing and
searching for evidence of infosec and opsec vulnerabilities.

TOR one among multitudes of operations working the front and back
and covert channels of the Internet. Hiding among the ordinary and
transgressing SSL and HTTPS and most secure of protection an SOP of
SAPs and commercial spies, among the latter bountiful once public
interest hackers and comsec wizards -- like the Wikileakers.

1000 to 1 odds that the Manning operation targeted Wikileaks,
that Wikileaks knew this and devised a countermeasure, which
led to counter-countermeasures, on up to blood on the hands and
insurance.aes256 dog whistles. Media-warfare no question about that,
presaging increasing demands for cyberwarfare funding to the mutual
benefit of all parties of all nations.

2000 cypherpunks presaged this outcome beginning in 1992, among them
Julian Assange who came aboard for several years of instruction
in 1995. A few others on this list were also there siphoning data
like Julian and me, but wisely now laying low to avoid the looming
conspiracy dragnet.

Wondrous that MSM and blogwashers are so avid for infosec gulling.
Perhaps not, they see instead a resurgence of their own Ellsbergian
glory days when Wikileaks-like flamboyance about exaggerated threats
and noble public service had legends without borders.







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