WikiLeaks strikes again -- U.S. diplomacy stripped naked

The idea is great, indeed - no matter if bluff or not. If it really is AES-256 encrypted data then it would take quite some effort to look inside without knowing the key.
To open up DES takes a $10000 machine built by the University of Kiel :lol: and less than a day of brute-force key testing at about 300 billion keys a second.

https://pic.armedcats.net/n/na/narf/2010/12/06/v4sx35_front_small.jpg

To do the same with AES256 would take incredible amounts of computing power and incredible amounts of time.
 
Julian Assange on number one in Time's person of the year :)

So he joins the ranks of Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, Churchill, Clinton, Bush, Putin, Obama and many others... but at that he is the first australian.
 
Pah. Even I was person of the year.

timetube.PNG


:p
 
Julian Assange on number one in Time's person of the year :)
And he's a good choice as well. He's set the agenda like no other (except the people who run nations, and we expect that from them, don't we?), and he's changed how we look at journalism. Damned good choice. Like his politics or not, it doesn't enter into it. No matter what you think of Wikileaks, there's no denying this is enormously exciting for anyone interested in history, especially the small bits that make up big pieces of history. We have learned something, and we're living history. Experiencing it.

The idea is great, indeed - no matter if bluff or not. If it really is AES-256 encrypted data then it would take quite some effort to look inside without knowing the key.
To open up DES takes a $10000 machine built by the University of Kiel :lol: and less than a day of brute-force key testing at about 300 billion keys a second.

https://pic.armedcats.net/n/na/narf/2010/12/06/v4sx35_front_small.jpg

To do the same with AES256 would take incredible amounts of computing power and incredible amounts of time.
It's at this point the US government say "say hello to my little friend!" and points at the NSA. Some other nations probably have the tech to do it as well, like Israel (and perhaps Russia, they've always been the masters of code breaking, and it's a good point to spend money to improve the nations defense on a budget, intelligence simply makes sense).

So he joins the ranks of Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, Churchill, Clinton, Bush, Putin, Obama and many others... but at that he is the first australian.
They've been a blessed bunch of different and sometimes quite disgusting people.
 
They've been a blessed bunch of different and sometimes quite disgusting people.

I know ;) Receiving this award shows the power or importance of that person, whether that is good or bad.
 
It's at this point the US government say "say hello to my little friend!" and points at the NSA. Some other nations probably have the tech to do it as well, like Israel (and perhaps Russia, they've always been the masters of code breaking, and it's a good point to spend money to improve the nations defense on a budget, intelligence simply makes sense).

:no:

Bruteforcing at a billion times the speed of the box pictured (which is insanely fast, the box is 150000 times faster than a P4 2GHz at cracking DES) you would still be churning away for 5*10^43 years, or about 3700000000000000000000000000000000 times the age of the universe. That would be 300000000000000000000 keys tested every second, for literally eternity.
The only way to read the content is knowing the key or knowing a significant flaw in the algorithm.
 
Thing is, we don't know what the NSA has in their cellars. I'm sure the supercomputers they employ take up more space than the first computers, so there's probably hundreds, if not thousands, of the most powerful computers money can buy.

While I'm sure the Russians have spent money on code breaking, I'm even surer that the US spent a bucketload in the aftermath of 9/11. The US depends heavily on signal intelligence, and it's not good intercepting bin Laden's e-mail, you have to know what he writes as well.
 
Well yeah, that's why I've given them a billion of these boxes, or 150 trillion P4 2GHz of key testing power... and still there is no hope in hell to crack it in a reasonable time. To brute force AES256 in the age of the universe you would need 3.7*10^42 Copacobana boxes.
If you had that many boxes, it would fill 2.6*10^20 balls the size of Earth, or 20 trillion Suns. To power them, you need 600W each (that is really little power), or 2.2*10^36 1GW reactors. I know there is not that much electricity available on earth. To get that amount of energy you would have to employ about 1.7*10^19 suns and harness every bit of energy they put out.
And even then you would still need 13 billion years to finish the calculations :boohoo:

I believe the NSA has got a lot of computing power, and I'm sure it is more compact than what my colleagues came up with. However, it is not that good.
 
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Unless the key is ABC123, which by the way, is the password to the FBI mainframe.
 
Or the CIA just tapped all conversations with attorneys.

(seems like the easier solution)
 
No, that was Bob Dylan.

Bob Dylan's real name is Robert Zimmerman. He might be very popular with people who collect vinyl records of people with funny names today if he'd kept it.
 
Or the CIA just tapped all conversations with attorneys.

(seems like the easier solution)

The easiest solution would be simply to release the key to the CIA (or which ever organisation is also implicated in the contents) as soon as the insurance file is well seeded. That way they know what will be released to the world in the event of an "accident" happening to Assange.
 
Well why not release the private information from other countries? Don't you think people have the right to know about the shady crap that goes on in China? or in various African countries?
Even these US cables have had a great deal of information on other countries in them. Lots of stuff on Saudi Arabia and Iran's interference in Iraq. On Saudi (and UK ... and European ...) funding of terrorist organizations. Supposedly there's more to come on Russian corruption. Sure these are cables between US foreign service agents and the State Dept, or Dept directives, but they're potentially damning evidence.

A free people must know what their government is doing.
And a government needs a degree of privacy to function. A little privacy to "think". Assange understands this, that's why he releases this kind of information. He claims that transparency is an end to itself but his desired end is crippling the way governments "think". The man sees conspiracies everywhere.

In the face of this, governments aren't just going to say, "Well, he's right! Let's make all information public!" No, they're going to clamp down on the internal dissemination of information. That's the only real danger I see from this.

The rozzers are going to lift him tomorrow and three months later or less, depending on appeals, stick him on a SAS flight to Gothenburg.
We'll see. His lawyer has told the police that Assange will talk to them at an undetermined time/place. That is (iirc) the same story they were giving when he snuck out of Sweden in the first place.
 
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Thing is, we don't know what the NSA has in their cellars. I'm sure the supercomputers they employ take up more space than the first computers, so there's probably hundreds, if not thousands, of the most powerful computers money can buy.

While I'm sure the Russians have spent money on code breaking, I'm even surer that the US spent a bucketload in the aftermath of 9/11. The US depends heavily on signal intelligence, and it's not good intercepting bin Laden's e-mail, you have to know what he writes as well.

I doubt the NSA has anything that special. Yes they fab their own chips, but I bet they are churning out the same Intel and/or IBM cpus you can buy commercially.
 
Well why not release the private information from other countries? Don't you think people have the right to know about the shady crap that goes on in China? or in various African countries?

Wikileaks can only release what it is given. If you want them to give the people what they have the "right to know", go and put your amazing hacking skills to some use and get those files for us, thanks.

either way, if my computer hacking skills were up to snuff I'd shut all the WL servers down with the most epic virus ever.

Congratulations, you just lowered your status and all arguments to the level of Plain and the likes. Threats against the site, the employees, etc are not counter-arguments in any way, it's just lazy, pathetic and prving that people are running out of excuses to lambast Wikileaks for what they are doing.

Oh and you would most likely be tried and conviceted of a crime if you did this. You would then be at a lower status than that of Assange and Wikileaks itself. Well done!!! :clap:

I believe they (wikileaks and associated journalists) already remove really dangerous stuff.

Yup, from what I can recall names were censored in the release earlier this year (no citation sorry). And as said (and cited by myself before), Wikileaks even offered to let the Pentagondo the censoring itself. Which, if the Pentagon wanted to put the security of its citizens over its pride/image/whatever, might have wanted to do. Basically say "Look, we can't legally stop them from doing this, so we are going to put our citizens safety first and make sure nobody is hurt by this".

The idea is great, indeed - no matter if bluff or not. If it really is AES-256 encrypted data then it would take quite some effort to look inside without knowing the key.
To open up DES takes a $10000 machine built by the University of Kiel :lol: and less than a day of brute-force key testing at about 300 billion keys a second.

https://pic.armedcats.net/n/na/narf/2010/12/06/v4sx35_front_small.jpg

To do the same with AES256 would take incredible amounts of computing power and incredible amounts of time.

I'd stil bet that a lot of countries would have some people assigned to trying to break it anyway, in the hope they get lucky :lol:

Or the CIA just tapped all conversations with attorneys.

(seems like the easier solution)

To do this legally, they would have to have sufficient evidence that the lawyers had commtted a crime/were highly likely to.

Then again, this is the CIA we're talking about, so the rules probably don't apply as per usual. And I sincerely doubt that the lawyers would discuss the password- I wouldn't be surprised if Assange told them verbally and they just don't discuss it, write it down, etc. These people aren't stupid.


We'll see. His lawyer has told the police that Assange will talk to them at an undetermined time/place. That is (iirc) the same story they were giving when he snuck out of Sweden in the first place.

(Again, no citation). Didn't his lawyers ask for times for Assange to go and give an interview on this whole thing and the Swedish prosecutors refuse?

Anyway, here's a good one- Assange's lawyers are considering suing Gillard (PM of Aus) for slander. That one could be interesting....
 
Is there any direct or physical evidence of this? No. However, it doesn't take much foresight to see how it could be dangerous. Think about it this way, would you make private information about yourself public to the world? Including medical records, bank account records, tax records, etc. Would you be worried that someone would use these against you? Why do you think identity fraud is so high?

I think it's a bit naive to think that there isn't someone out in this world using these documents to do something negative for personal merit.

They posted government banking data? Wow I needs me a Bugatti. (ie Real bad analogy)



See what is the point of releasing information like this?

http://www.google.com/hostednews/af...ocId=CNG.8549d9b93537814e90de0a33a00a6b06.3b1



Is that not information that could be dangerous if it got into the wrong hands?

What about gas pipelines? smallpox vaccine plants? weapon caches? satellite comm sites? Trans-atlantic comm cables?


Most of the info is publicly available from other sources.

well, how much of this not only tells the location but also tells you whats stored there? does it not also give details of these locations? thats the issue here. we all know where Cheyenne Mountain is, we just dont know whats inside. also, we have hords of areas where we store important agricultural stuff in secret incase the shit hits the fan one day, we dont need that info released

We have a pretty good idea of what is inside Cheyenne Mountain.
 
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