Wikileaks的初衷

Chinese dissidents, with the help of powerful encryption software, say they will launch a site designed to let whistleblowers in authoritarian countries post sensitive documents on the Internet without being traced.

"Our primary interests are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the West who wish to reveal unethical behaviour in their own governments and corporations," says the site WikiLeaks (www.wikileaks.org).
An official for WikiLeaks in Washington, identifying himself as Julian Assange, told AFP on Wednesday that the group hoped to go online from March but had been "discovered" before its launch and was not fully prepared for the publicity it was now receiving.

WikiLeaks is "an international collaboration, primarily of mathematicians... of various backgrounds, some Chinese," said Assange, who said he was a cryptographer and member of the advisory board.

The Chinese were not people living in China but expatriates, he added.

The site says it has already received "over 1.1 million documents so far from dissident communities and anonymous sources."

Contributions will be posted on the site to provide information, transparency and debate. "WikiLeaks will provide a forum for the entire global community to examine any document for credibility, plausibility, veracity and falsifiability," according to the site.

It maintains its software will ensure that whistleblowers and journalists will not be thrown into jail for emailing sensitive documents.
Chinese journalist Shi Tao was sentenced to a 10-year jail term in 2005 after publicising an email from Chinese officials about the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Emails or documents posted to a website can be traced back to the source because they are made up of data packets -- and each data packet carries the address of the last Internet service provider through which it passed.

The British weekly New Scientist, in a report in next Saturday's issue, says that WikiLeaks will exploit "an anonymising protocol" called The Onion Router, or Tor.
Tor routes data through a network of servers that use cryptography to hide the path used by the data packets.

"In the past, determined cryptographers have breached Tor's security, and though each breach has led to improvements to Tor, there is always a risk others will be discovered," New Scientist cautions.

WikiLeaks' website says the organisation was founded by "Chinese dissidents, mathematicians and startup company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa."

"Our advisory board, which is still forming, includes representatives from expatriate Russian and Tibetan refugee communities, reporters, a former US intelligence analyst and cryptographers," it says.

There are no formal links to the successful online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, but "both share the same radically democratic philosophy that allowing anyone to be an author or editor leads to a vast and accurate collective intelligence and knowledge."