

Save Wikileaks -- donate now or lost it forever - azeemazhar2
http://www.wikileaks.org

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tsally
Currently a poor CS student but I still donated 25 dollars. Wikileaks is one
of only a handful of media organizations actually making a difference in the
world; it needs to be supported.

~~~
anigbrowl
I too think they're worth a few bucks. I found multiple releases of
significant public interest there last year.

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bdr
Why would their costs be so high? They should post a breakdown of where the
money's going.

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petewarden
I posted their call for volunteers several weeks ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1023663>

They never even replied to my email offering help, or to anyone else as far as
I can tell. I'm still a supporter of their mission, but the organization seems
pretty flakey.

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mscarborough
I remember your post, and thought this might have been a dupe; however, it
sounds the same, with the same lack of details. Did anyone receive responses
to their offers of technical help?

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lallysingh
I emailed them the day they started asking, never got a response either.

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keefe
We should scrape this and provide archives in P2P so that the information
isn't lost and hopefully they will do a similar spray of unreleased docs if
they go down. I'll have a look for existing documents tomorrow.

~~~
keefe
<http://cryptome.org/> There's some of the data here and a mirror
<http://mirror.wikileaks.info> , I would hate to see this data die

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kqr2
The last internet archive snapshot was in April 30, 2008 but it gives a good
feel for the kind of info that was there.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20080430123942/http://wikileaks.o...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080430123942/http://wikileaks.org/)

Some of their major scoops include:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20080207141628/wikileaks.org/wiki...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080207141628/wikileaks.org/wiki/Wikileaks:Submissions)

~~~
madars
By the way, there is a working mirror at <http://mirror.wikileaks.info/> ,
last updated 21 December, 2009.

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coderdude
>>We have raised just over $130,000 for this year but can not meaningfully
continue operations until costs are covered. These amount to just under
$200,000 PA. If staff are paid, our yearly budget is $600,000.

So does that mean the staff costs $400,000? If so, it's basically like they're
saying "hey can you also pay for the 4 of us to live pretty for the year too?"

Edit: To be clear, I don't know how many people are in said staff.

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andrewparker
Given all the upvotes on this post, I'm guessing I'm in the minority. But, I'm
not a fan of wikileaks' ethics. Whistler blowers are important, and I have a
lot of respect for their bravery, but wikileaks feels like a metalayer on top
of whistle blowing that feels slightly gamey and a little celebratory.

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radu_floricica
Don't you think whistle blowing needs a meta-layer? Say I'm some guy in some
room and on my desktop sits a very nasty excel about illegal or unethical
party payments. What do I do? I can send them to a newspaper, which may not
publish them (for a long list of reasons). I may send them to several
newspapers, in which case there is a better chance that they will be
published. But then I have a pretty big chance of being found - several emails
to several people, at least some not prepared to deal with confidential
information. The more sensitive my documents are, the more risky it is.

Whistle blowing is often a very grey business. My actions may be somewhat but
obviously illegal, and the bag guys may not be very but not so obviously so.
It can backfire.

This is why the meta-layer is important. I just send one email, and I'm pretty
secure that my actions are confidential. Worst case scenario is they decide
not to publish it, in which case i'm not really worse of. If I want, I can try
again with a classic news outlet.

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azeemazhar2
hey sorry for getting so silent. but the best is the enemy of the good. Lots
of issues about just how great wikileaks is for all this--but until there is
something better then let's give them some support.

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Uchikoma
There have been some warnings that should WikiLeaks be sued in the US, all
backers (PayPal trackable) could also be sued.

It was proposed that WikiLeaks should provide an untraceable payment method.

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mhansen
[citation needed]

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Uchikoma
Sorry, would like to, but can't find it anymore, was in 2 discussions recently
about the self imposed Wikileak blackout. Wish I could supply a citation,
sorry.

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CamperBob
What happened with PayPal's freezing their account?

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madars
It apparently got unfrozen due to, ahem, popular request -
<http://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/8192453527> .

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CamperBob
Hmm, that's utterly unprecedented. I wonder what Wikileaks has on PayPal.

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moeffju
It's not unprecedented at all. People know people. You just call up some mid-
level or senior PayPal rep, if you know one - and I know plenty of people who
do. If there's a media shitstorm brewing, PayPal will also be responsive -
it's business 101. PayPal have no interest in blocking Wikileaks, they're just
caught up in their own bureaucracy and fraud protection measures.

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rrival
I can confirm that this is the case. They're actually very reasonable if
you're important/controversial/popular enough to get ahold of a rep.

