aNewDomain.net — Anti-secrecy organization Wikileaks on Saturday posted nearly half a terabyte of encrypted files. These files are locked and unreadable for now. As of Monday, the so-called Wikileaks insurance files were still up — find them below.
Links to the files downloadable via torrent came from Wikileaks’ Facebook page and Twitter account. Wikileaks called the Wikileaks torrent files “WLInsurance files.” Scroll below for more details on why Wikileaks is asking followers and fans the world over to immediately download and mirror the still-encrypted data.
Wikileaks — the organization led by Julian Assange that is helping NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden — posted 400GB of encrypted files total.
It’s a Wikileaks insurance policy. On Facebook, Wikileaks posted:
Wikileaks releases encrypted versions of upcoming publication data (‘insurance’) from time to time to nullify attempts at prior restraint. Please mirror:
WikiLeaks insurance 20130815-A: 3.6Gbhttp://wlstorage.net/torrent/
wlinsurance-20130815-A.aes256.t orrent
B: 49Gb http://wlstorage.net/torrent/wlinsurance-20130815-B.aes256.t orrent
C: 349GB http://wlstorage.net/torrent/wlinsurance-20130815-C.aes256.t orrent “
Notice the above filenames show that the files are encrypted using 256-bit key encryption, the highest level permitted in the U.S. and approved for top-secret files. Scroll below to see those addresses.
As of Monday, the Facebook post was still up and the download links for the torrent Wikileaks files were working. Find them below.
What’s in the files? Explosive information, by any stretch, as authorities threaten crackdowns on Assange and Snowden. Assange is in political asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and Snowden is temporarily in asylum in a Russian airport.
Business Insider caught the Wikileaks post about an hour after the group posted the bit torrent file URLs on Facebook and Twitter on Saturday. Below is the Wikileaks post as BI captured it.
Image credit: Wikileaks/Facebook/Business Insider
We are awaiting comment from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, privacy advocates, Facebook and Twitter on how or whether the U.S. has moved to remove these posts, and if anybody would attempt to prosecute or intimidate world citizens who download the files from the servers listed above.
Here’s an excerpt from the excellent BI piece that captured the image above. From BI:
(Wikileaks) posted the same message about its ‘insurance’ files to Twitter.
You can download the files via torrent but since they are encrypted — and Wikileaks has not yet provided the key — you won’t be able to open them.
We can garner at least one thing of note from the file names alone: They probably have a very high level of encryption. The end of the files, ‘aes256,’ likely stands for Advanced EncryptionStandard-256 bits.
It’s a way of locking up your files that even the NSA has approved for use on top-secret data.
What’s in the files is anyone’s guess for now, but there’s already plenty of speculation.“
Developing.
Gina Smith is the New York Times best-selling author of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s memoir, ” iWOZ: How I Invented the Personal Computer and Had Fun Doing It”. (W.W. Norton, 2005/2007/2012). With John C. Dvorak and Jerry Pournelle, she is editorial director at aNewDomain.net. Email her at gina@aNewDomain.net, check out her Google + stream here or follow her @ginasmith888.
