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Wikileaks denies Tor hacker eavesdropping gave site its start |
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Source: The Register UK - Posted by Alex
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Updated WikiLeaks has denied that eavesdropping on Chinese hackers played a key part in the early days of the whistle-blowing site.
Wired reports that early WikiLeaks documents were siphoned off from Chinese hackers' activities via a node on the Tor anonymiser network, as an extensive interview with WikiLeaks' founder Julian Paul Assange by the New Yorker explains in greater depth.
One of the WikiLeaks activists owned a server that was being used as a node for the Tor network. Millions of secret transmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that hackers from China were using the network to gather foreign governments’ information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction has ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site’s foundation, and Assange was able to say, “We have received over one million documents from thirteen countries.”
Only a very small number of the documents obtained were ever published. However, the first publication on WikiLeaks back in December 2006 was culled from just this Tor-harvested traffic, Wired reports. This tranche of documents referred to a “secret decision,” supposedly made by Somali rebel leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, to hire criminals as hit men in the assassination of government officials.
Read this full article at The Register UK
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