Did You Know?

Those that can move around on the Internet with ease can discover most anything they wish. In ‘real life’ they often become the go-to person; “Can you find out for me… ?”

Consider it done.

Like taking pee out of a pool, the best, and worst, part of the Internet is that once an item arrives on the Internet it often never leaves.

The Powers-That-Be have tried. They failed.

That’s what we’re talking about here in this article. The websites that may disclose information to the rest of the world that the Powers-That-Be may rather you not know. Some sites have fought many a legal battle to stay alive. At times a site was taken down with little notice, to only be mirrored via peoples and their servers from all over the world, while the original website was collapsing. Teamwork among those who have never met in the ‘real world’ but have a common goal.

Here are a few of the aforementioned websites, in no particular order. Maybe you’ve heard of them. If not I’ll be providing links to enable you to visit. At the time of this writing each of these sites is currently active, and believed to be legal.

• Wikileaks

  is developing an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. They aim for maximum political impact, with an interface identical to Wikipedia. The belief that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies, Wikileaks provides simple and straightforward means for anonymous and untraceable leaking of documents where no technical knowledge is required and Whistleblowers can post documents anonymously. A sample of leaked files can be located here.

  On Friday February 15, 2008, the Wikileaks.org press was shutdown. 

  IT IS HEREBY ORDERED:

  “Dynadot shall immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name and prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court.”

  The order was written by Cayman Island’s Bank Julius Baer lawyers and was accepted by California (United States) district court Judge White, a Bush appointee and former prosecutor, without amendment, or representations by Wikileaks or amicus. The case is over several Wikileaks articles, public commentary and documents dating prior to 2003. The documents allegedly reveal secret Julius Baer trust structures used for asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion.

  All it took was an S.O.S. “call” placed on Reddit.com informing Wikileaks was on it’s way down, and mirrors of the Wikileaks site began sprouting up all over the world.

  Did Dynadot comply with the court order? Absolutely it did. The Wikileaks.org Domain Name was not at all accessible. The IP address for Wikileaks however, was very much alive and accessible. Devil is in the details my friend, Devil is in the details. Knowing how to use the Internet.

• The Pirate Bay

  aka TPB, is a website that bills itself as “the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker” and also serves as an index for .torrent files that it tracks. This baby is huge. ThePirateBay.org ranked 130 as of March 16, 2008 in the Alexa ranking list, and ranked 258 as of February 1, 2008 by Quantcast. BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) communications protocol; a method of distributing large amounts of data widely without the original distributor incurring the entire costs of hardware, hosting, and bandwidth resources. When data is distributed using the BitTorrent protocol, each recipient supplies pieces of the data to newer recipients, reducing the cost and burden on any given individual source, providing redundancy against system problems, and reducing dependence on the original distributor. Only torrent files are saved at The Pirate Bay server. That means no copyrighted and/or illegal material are stored by The Pirate Bay. To share a file or group of files, a peer first creates a small file called a “torrent”. This file contains metadata about the files to be shared and about the ‘tracker’, the computer that coordinates the file distribution. Peers that want to download the file first obtain a torrent file for it, and connect to the specified tracker, which tells them from which other peers to download the pieces of the file.

  The colored bars beneath all of the clients represent individual pieces of the file. After the initial pieces transfer from the seed, the pieces are individually transferred from client to client. The original seeder only needs to send out one copy of the file for all the clients to receive a copy.

   

  

  The legal battles that The Pirate Bay has fought, and won, have been so numerous they’ve created a sub page for them. The end result of the numerous threats has been greater name recognition for The Pirate Bay, and a great deal of increased traffic to the site.

• CorpWatch

  investigates and exposes corporate violations of human rights, environmental crimes, fraud and corruption around the world. CorpWatch blew the whistle on working conditions in Nike’s operations in Vietnam, ultimately leading to greater oversight of their factories and changes in their corporate practices. In 1998, CorpWatch started investigating the Enron Corporation, three years before the company’s collapse. In 1999, CorpWatch broke the story of the United Nations growing entanglement with corporations. In the spring of 2002 and 2003, CorpWatch began to track companies like Bechtel, Dyncorp, and Halliburton that were profiting out of the war on terrorism. Following that, CorpWatch led two investigative journalistic teams to Iraq to investigate the corporate reconstruction there. Some of the footage CorpWatch obtained in Iraq was used in Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9-11. If you’re seeking data on corporations for an activist campaign, investigative article, lawsuit, socially conscious investment, or a school paper, CorpWatch is a site to take a peek at. CorpWatch helps you to research a corporation via the Internet; locating information about a corporation’s business strategy and operations, financial status, and environmental and social record. Be sure to check out their sections Industry Research and Corporations and Politics. If you’re ready to start digging for dirt, then head straight to the Hands-On Corporate Research Guide.

• Crocodyl’s

  aim is to stimulate collaborative research among NGOs, journalists, activists, whistleblowers and academics from both the global South and North in order to develop publicly-available profiles of the world’s most powerful corporations. The result is an evolving compendium of critical research, posted to the public domain as an aid to anyone working to hold corporations increasingly accountable.

• Entrez cross

   is a life sciences search engine on the .gov domain.

• Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)

  Mainstream media are increasingly cozy with the economic and political powers they should be watchdogging. Mergers in the news industry have accelerated, further limiting the spectrum of viewpoints that have access to mass media. With U.S. media outlets overwhelmingly owned by for-profit conglomerates and supported by corporate advertisers, independent journalism is compromised. FAIR believes that structural reform is needed to break up the dominant media conglomerates, establish independent public broadcasting, and promote strong, non-profit alternative sources of information.

• WikiScanner

  placed investigative powers in the hands of regular people in August 2007, thanks to Virgil Griffith. Just because a Wikipedia edit is unsigned doesn’t make it untraceable. When anonymous editors visit Wikipedia, they leave a public record of their computer’s I.P. address. Virgil Griffith was able to match those addresses with information about I.P. owners on various registries and assemble a searchable database of millions of edits linked to thousands of organizations.

  

  Someone at DuPont appears to have deleted the health risks of polytetrafluoroethylene, a chemical used to make Teflon, and someone at Diebold seemingly deleted paragraphs regarding security industry concerns about their voting machines as well as the news that Diebold’s C.E.O. had raised money for President Bush. Here is a link on WikiScanner for you where you can see an IP from State Farm Insurance deletes all references to Katrina lawsuits and the related evidence. WikiScanner is just plain fun, assuming that is, that you’re not on the You’re-Busted! end of this remarkable tool!

Campaign Disclosure Web Sites:

Open Secrets

Follow The Money

Congressional Quarterly: CQ MoneyLine

Campaign Finance Information Center

Federal Elections Commission

Do you have a favorite site that provides juicy bits? Do share!

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~ by dissfunktional on April 17, 2008.