Paranoia: real and hypothetical

[nancylebov]

Real:

Apple deletes WikiLeaks ap.

Wikileaks App was an unofficial paid-for download that gave people access to the free Wikileaks Twitter feed and documents held on its website.

It was taken down after three days and 4,000 downloads.

Wikileaks apps are still available for other phones, such as those running Google Android.

All of the material offered by the Wikileaks iPhone app can be accessed for free via the phone's browser and other non-Wikileaks apps.

Hypothetical:
How do you know that all the WikiLeaks material is authentic? Is there any way to be sure that no WikiLeaker improved them a bit?

In addition to people with agendas, I think that mass of cables would offer an irresistible temptation to practical jokers.

Comments

[twistedchick]

Check the evidence chain -- who had it before whom before it was posted. And then look at the file formats. From what I have seen, they are not formats that allow improvements.

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

There's already been one story about some group in Pakistan distributing a fake diplomatic cable, to prove some propaganda point of their own, falsely attributing it to Wikileaks.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

That kind of thing is easy to track compared to the cables being tampered with/improved before they were released.

And, of course, people are apt to drop frames. Did you catch that a lie in the cables about Moore's "Sicko" being banned in Cuba was passed around as true? The correction (the movie was never banned) has been chasing the lie, but I assume it won't catch up completely.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

The project seems to be designed to check material before releasing it, so its releases are more likely to be legitimate than are claimed leaks through other sources.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

How do they check the material?