Wikispooks:Anonymous Submissions

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Revision as of 12:14, 12 May 2010 by Peter (talk | contribs)
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General

The WikiSpooks Anonymous upload facility is provided to allow Whistle-Blowers to put sensitive information into the public domain with considerably reduced risk of their identity being revealed to either the Authorities or the public.

Secure anonymous upload form

Anonymous uploads are handled outside the MediaWiki platform that runs this site. This is because a feature of MediaWiki is that it logs EVERY normal edit and upload, assigning it to either a user ID (in the case of registered users) or the originating IP address (in the case of anonymous users - when edits and uploads are allowed). the WikiSpooks secure anonymous upload form is not part of MediaWiki and your file will only be imported into the software by an Administrator after vetting and anonymising etc.

What WikiSpooks does with an anonymous submission

1. Subject it to preliminary vetting for WikiSpooks suitability.

2. If judged suitable

  • reformat the submission to remove any possibility of it being traceable back to the originator.
  • forward it to at least three other sites that actively solicit "whistlebower" information.
  • publish the document to WikiSpooks with a skeleton explanatory page. This page can be viewed by anybody and edited by registered users

3. If judged unsuitable on preliminary vetting

  • seek the consensus view of WikiSpooks administrators.
    • If majority administrator view is "suitable" proceed with steps outlined at 2.
    • If majority administrator view is "unsuitable", remove the submission from WikiSpooks servers.

email submissions

Where the submission is by email (with or without an attachment), WikiSpooks may engage in brief email correspondence regarding submission provenance etc. At the discretion of WikiSpooks administrators, such correspondence may qualify for WikiSpooks publication. It is strongly advised that email exchanges be PGP encrypted.

Final judgements on what is and is not suitable for publication on this site rests with WikiSpooks administrators.

Tips on maintaining anonymity

There is no way to guarantee that any form of internet-based communication will remain anonymous. The internet surveillance activities of SIS's, their Agencies and contractors are simply too comprehensive to allow anyone using a single ISP and home computer to remain anonymous for long if their internet activities are of the remotest possible interest to Authority. However, there are a number of simple steps you can take to increase the likelihood of a successful anonymous document submission to WikiSpooks:

  1. Use an anonymous proxy service such as Tor for your submission.
  2. Use PGP encryption for your emails .
  3. If you have more than one document file, bundle them into a single compressed Zip file .
  4. Upload your file to a single recipient only - then wait a week or two to see what happens.

If you upload multiple files or to multiple recipients, the prospects of successfull interception/diversion/copying by Authorities during transmission are correspondingly multiplied. If you upload to WikiSpooks, our first action after reformatting it to remove information that could tie it to a particular machine operating system and/or user, is to forward it to at least 3 other sites dedicated to shining light in dark places, so that multiple submissions should be unnecessary.

Remember that evidence of your having stored the document and sent it to WikiSpooks may remain on your computer and be accessible using forensic examination tools. An effective way of frustrating such forensics is to use a LiveCD operating system to boot your computer before sending the document and to store the document using a system such as Truecrypt which facilitates a "hidden encrypted volume" whose existence is plausibly deniable because it cannot be forensically proven to exist at all.

WikiSpooks PGP public encryption key

Click here for the WikiSpooks PGP public encryption key and brief information about how to use it to encrypt your email exchanges with WikiSpooks.