WikiLeaks' online presence was taken over in October, when riseup.net got an NSL to give access to the email accounts associated with the WL Twitter accounts and other WL properties. Around that time WL removed some insurance file torrent links from wikileaks.org, distributed new pre-commitment hashes, and stopped responding to PGP-encrypted email.
People who work for WikiLeaks are still probably involved, but they are no longer in control. Ever since late October, their behavior across all of their Twitter accounts has been markedly different.
> when riseup.net got an NSL to give access to the email accounts
This is simply not true. An NSL cannot be used to compel access to any communication content—and certainly not control of an account; they're limited solely to metadata (e.g. phone call records, IP addresses, billing metadata, etc.). I'm not a fan of NSLs, and strongly support repealing the section 505 expansion, but it behooves no one to lie about what an NSL is and what it can compel.
I was almost certain the things you're suggesting were true, however I also thought Julian assange was no longer alive, or not free/able to reach out, as did the people who came up with and spread the theories that something big went down. However this week Hannity flew to the UK and interviewed Julian Assange who is alive and well. Don't you think he might have hinted at the fact that such was the case during the interview or via an alternate channel? I'm fairly certain that the majority of the people who believed WikiLeaks was taken over or underwent a change of management/control no longer believe so since that interview, which was the first proof of life in months, and the first since the suspicious events occured.
If there was cryptographic verification, the same people doubting that video would suspect that his cryptographic keys had been compromised.
(Which, come to think of it, is a lot more likely than actors as disparate as Sean Hannity, John Pilger, the Swedish prosecutor, the Ecuadorean embassy and Pamela Anderson all being very happy to pretend to interact with a Fake Assange who keeps making very similar arguments to the inexplicably-disappeared Real Assange.)
Right, I'm only suggesting that no one might have ever become concerned that WikiLeaks lost control of their Twitter account had the same people who held that belief known Julian Assange was alive and well and not under duress. I also find it hard to believe that Julian Assange wouldn't inform everyone that such is the case. Judging by the amount of time JA spends talking about WikiLeaks' perfect track record and referencing their reliability when it comes to accuracy and trustworthiness, I would say it is one of, if not his most valuable asset; the foundation of his safety, leverage, and sustained relevance/coverage. I can't imagine he would neglect transparency there, as it would undermine his entire lifes work, discredit him, and make him irrelevant - undermining his safety, which is largely due to the public eye on him.
Edit: Typo/Grammer
>“We are thinking of making an online database with all 'verified' twitter accounts & their family/job/financial/housing relationships,” WikiLeaks tweeted Friday.
Not WikiLeaks, but "WikiLeaks Task Force" (@WLTaskForce). I'm not even sure it's widely known who exactly is behind that account, though it's interestingly a verified account itself.
UPD1 After some googling it seems the account is listed as official on wikileaks.org:
"Follow our official accounts @wikileaks, @wltaskforce, @communitywl and @wikileaksshop."
Thanks, didn't see this one! Apparently WaPo should update their article then, though replies to that tweet point out that @WLTaskForce is still mentioned in @wikileaks's profile. Quite a confusing story.
In theory :) But I didn't even know there could be effectively anonymous verified accounts like this one. I doubt this organization is officially registered in any sense, but it is verified by Twitter. Reading https://support.twitter.com/articles/20174631 it seems it is sufficient to have "A verified phone number, a confirmed email address, a bio, a profile photo, a header photo, a website" and also "If the account is a corporation or company account, the name reflects the real name of the corporation or company", "The profile and/or header photo reflects the person, the corporation’s branding, or the company’s branding". Looks like "copy of your official government-issued photo identification" is not needed in organization case.
Ok. I went and read some of the tweets this article is based on.
I think what Wikileaks wants to build is a social graph of influential and powerful people (big enough names to have a blue check mark) using their tweets. Then weight and couple that with information on family relations, job, living place and so on - available from other public sources (i.e. Wikipedia biographies, LinkedIn or official websites).
Sounds like an interesting idea.
But man; Wikileaks is sure getting a lot of negative press. I guess if you want to play the game of politics you better start weighting your words like a politician.
The @verified badge does not really signify a "big enough" name. Back when it was a manual process, unless you were a huge celebrity, you got on the list if you were a member of a media organization and if Twitter happened to contact your comms/social media person to submit a list of employees and Twitter names. People with just a hundred or so followers could be verified this way.
Now that you can apply to be verified, just about anyone can get the blue checkmark. You just have to provide proof of identity and fill out a form. I didn't get verified through the manual process even though I worked at a fairly prominent media org. But working in non-media, I got accepted within a couple days by filling out the form.
Usually, such a process is done by starting with lists of those who are actually powerful. These lists are plentiful, especially in democracies. Starting with the presumption that the world's influencers are all on Twitter is a strange view of how the world works.
You have to work with the data that is available. Lists of most influential or most powerful people are also based on data available and possibly some subjective assessment. Some times when I scroll thru them I get the feeling they are far from the truth. Not that I know exactly what the truth is.
Not really, I think people are more riled up about a perceived about-face regarding it's founding principles, and to seemingly target certain orgs rather than stick to what many feel it was founded to do which is impartially publicly disclose confidential government & NGO information which is in the public interest.
If you purport to be holier than thou, you'd better make damn sure you at least stick to your story.
I dunno, it seems like the it's the news narrative about wikileaks doing the about-face.
I'm not some defender of wikileaks or Assagne, I just don't think who they are is all that important.
When I first heard of wikileaks a decade ago on slashdot, Assange was a tosser with some unpopular opinions and perspective. He also believed in the utility of releasing the entirety of source material to the public instead of a regular news outlet that limits it to the topics they have the time and interest to investigate and write. The broad strokes have remained constant even if the details haven't.
Ever since then, the press has been trying to find meaning in the Wikileaks dog-and-pony show. A circus that they themselves were complicit in creating. They've been trying, and failing, to understand this guy since 2010. The muddled mass of hot takes but no real insight is what they've been dumping onto us in the meantime.
Looks like the tweet WaPo links to was deleted. So probably WLTF realized it's kinda very bad idea.
I think what they are trying to do is a standard journalistic thing of building influence network, but they managed to say it in a very creepy way and of course WaPo grabbed it and run with it.
I don't like it one bit, but they're taking the internet to its logical conclusion. At least they're only doing it for public figures it seems, for now. It is probably totally legal too.
This is what radical transparency looks like, by the way. It is consistent with and logically flows from Assange's long-stated philosophy. Basically, what the crowd on this website was defending when Wikileaks first came onto the public scene.
Here's what Twitter has to say about verified accounts:
>What types of accounts get verified?
An account may be verified if it is DETERMINED TO BE AN ACCOUNT OF PUBLIC INTEREST. Typically this includes accounts maintained by users in music, acting, fashion, government, politics, religion, journalism, media, sports, business, and other key interest areas.
The criteria for "verified" status have changed recently and I'm pretty sure it now includes a group much larger than the law's definition. There are quite a few JS developers with the tick mark, for example. And I doubt they'd count as celebrities.
And even for public figures, there are and/or should be (depending on jurisdiction) limits. Their family, for example, are people with their own rights, often don't fit the "public figure" definition, may be minors etc etc.
I also don't remember ever defending radical transparency, and I wouldn't even characterise Assange's actions as consistent with it. Or could I have an archive of his emails, please?
"At least they're only doing it for public figures it seems"
Public figures are those we elect and put in government service, at least that was the original intended definition. Seems we've drifted from that definition into a rather dystopian one, with Assange.
Personally I think judges and prosecutors do a better job when their principal concern is the law, and not the recent publication of information on the home addresses of members of their extended family who don't have a security detail. YMMV.
That is just sad. It was bad enough last night when they were using buzzwords like "proximity graph" to make their data mining sound...extra cool, I guess?
So instead of working with Chelsea Manning, they're doxxing Chelsea Manning?
Once upon a time Wikileaks was about holding governments to account. Apparently that was too hard because privacy violations appear to be the theme these days.
Yes... a world in which Sarah Palin is apologizing to Assange isn't one I understand very well.
How they respond to the Trump administration when it's in power will tell us a lot about what's happening at wikileaks.
But it seems like the world needs more diversity in Wikileaks-like services. I feel like they have done important work in the past, and it would be a shame for that to end.
Had to laugh at the opening paragraph of that thread:
> I think it is high time that we address the elephant in the room. I am not saying to stop what we are doing, but we need to band together and get wikileaks to prove themselves, or we need to take everything read with a grain of salt.
Surely we should be taking everything we read with a grain of salt?
Not sure if that's laughable or not. The fact a PGP sig still hasn't been used since the date of the alleged "takeover" is a very strong point against complaisance.
If Wikileaks is indeed connected to Putin, and they are intended to prosecute you for talking about it, don't you think Putin has more resources to find out where you live than Wikileaks? I mean, of this (hypothetical) tandem, I'd rather be afraid of the guy with trillions of dollars, nukes and one of the best intelligence services on the planet than of a guy that has to hide in Ecuadorian embassy.
Your wife's cousin is four steps removed from you. If you believe corruption works at that distance, you're not going to find anyone to trust. Especially if you factor in that people who want to find connections somehow always find them. ("She's an environmentalist -> she hates cars -> cars need gas -> made from oil -< iran has oil -> war interrupts export -> prices rise -> fewer cars").
I'm also skeptical of the power of money to motivate people to do anything like that. If it were happening on any scale, they're doing a pretty remarkable job of hiding it.
I absolutely agree with you, but also don't doubt that making "you're obviously lying on behalf of your corrupt paymasters because you're connected to X through Y and Z" accusations easier is the purpose of this proposed initiave.
The sooner the general public realizes how stupid it is to give these companies their private information the better. Maybe then the internet can move past this phase and become more sane.
Isn't privacy by obscurity just as broken as security by obscurity is? I mean, if it is possible to build such a list from publicly available data, the bad guys already should have one so why not make it public? Or are they planning on building the list from leaked data? The article doesn't talk about the origin of the data.
A large part of privacy is fundamentally about obscurity. If you have sex in a public park and someone tapes it, it can be put up on YouTube. If you have sex in your fenced backyard pool and someone holds their camera up over your fence to film it, you have a very good invasion of privacy lawsuit, even though your privacy had been "broken".
Similarly, the burden of legal proof for libel or defamation are different for public vs private figures. An obscure YouTube vidmaker has a substantially different burden of proof than does a popular Youtuber when it comes to certain scopes of libel/defamation.
Yes, there is a kind of privacy you can expect in your own home. But some right to privacy is preserved even if you go out the in public
The privacy being discussed in the context of this topic is online privacy. The point is that attempting to have online privacy through obscurity is increasingly ineffective. All traffic through the web is monitored, and I'd even suspect that some common methods of encryption will have been compromised (and even when they haven't been, some governments have made it clear that using VPNs and similar privacy protecting measures are close to an admission of guilt).
This is a fair argument. Actually, I don't think we're really arguing, in that I agree with you, particularly on the technical parts. My main complaint was that privacy is a quasi-legal and technical matter. Whereas security, at least in the context of the motto, "Security through obscurity is not security", is a near-binary, either-or claim -- which I agree with.
To elaborate, for many people, the concept of privacy is already compromised when they discover sites like pipl.com. Pipl.com already has data-mined information for every American with a SSN. If you have a credit history, like the kind you provide to a landlord when applying to rent -- Pipl has that too, that's why it can list where you have lived in the past, and who you lived with.
But that's a fairly old situation; private investigators have been using LexisNexis/Accurint to do those searchers for more than a decade. And fancy things like satellite photos of where you live? Reason Magazine did that back in 2004: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1870509
(the impressive feat, IMO, was not the photos, but the ability to custom publish 40,000 print covers, using the technology and infrastructure at that time)
But does that mean privacy has been compromised? Sure. Or, maybe. The ambiguity in possible answers is a huge contrast compared to the answers you'd get if you asked "Is Dual_EC_DRBG secure?".
But if you think that privacy is unambiguously compromised, given what I've described...here's what I mean. There's a difference between LexisNexis/Accurint/etc. (never mind ad companies, which is a whole different thing) having your normal next door neighbor's information. It's another thing if a highly-followed Twitter account tweets a link to Pastebin with all of that information.
Perhaps the original commenter didn't mean that, but that's what I think of when I think of the average person's privacy being compromised.
Or they're just a front for Russian intelligence, as has been suggested for years, as evidenced by the fact that Assange says there's no need to report on Russia because of the "free and open media" they have, as evidenced by his show on RT, as evidenced by their facilitating Snowden's defection, as evidenced by...
It seems like there are a few die-hards left who thought Assange and Manning were the greatest thing ever exposes the big bad USG, and are refusing to acknowledge the obvious: wikileaks exists so the FSB can run agitprop against its geopolitical foes.
Edit: I'd just like to point out the fact that all of these downvotes are flooding in at 3:00 am PST on a Friday night. Can anyone think of a timezone that might coincide with?
Making an inflammatory claim and calling it "obvious" guarantees the kind of thread we don't want on HN. That amounts to trolling. Please don't do it, and please don't stoke flamewars once they get going, either.
Accusations of astroturfing or shilling without evidence are not allowed on HN. Rushing to that as an explanation is, invariably, evidence of sloppy thinking—or maybe non-thinking, of the kind that political passion leads us all to. It should have been obvious that there are many countries where people were reading HN at that hour and that you'd given plenty of them plenty of reason to downvote. It's embarrassing to see a comment here insinuate that only Russian spies could possibly disagree, and just as embarrassing to see how many users upvote such an absurdity.
This community is deeply divided on divisive issues. People on all sides need to conduct themselves more civilly than this, so please don't do it again.
I'm kinda fascinated - why do you think they're fundamentally dishonest? I could maybe understand you thinking this about Assange/Greenwald (I personally don't) since they're essentially reporters - so we have to rely on them accurately reporting what they have been informed by sources, and being able to judge whether the source is credible, and to elect to report on anything regardless of whether it conflicts with their viewpoints etc.
But to apply the same criticism to Edward Snowden is a whole different thing altogether. He has produced reams of evidence on the practices of the US intelligence agencies, for him to be "fundamentally dishonest" would involve fabricating large chunks of that, and if I believed that then I wouldn't stop at "dishonest" I'd go with "crazy" or worse.
I didn't downvote you, but I think you're being downvoted because you're being a little vague. If Snowden is lying constantly (particularly as you say about the behaviours he exposed) I'd expect the criticism to be more specific than what you said.
Also the "they want to take down the United States" thing is pretty extreme and a bit "InfoWars" sounding, and if you listen to him and his justifications for what he did then it's pretty apparent that this is not something he stands for.
>hey want to take down the United States" thing is pretty extreme and a bit "InfoWars" sounding
USG, not US. There's a very specific sort of western libertarian/leftist that believes the US' foreign policy is evil, that the military-intelligence wing is a tool of evil, and that opposing it in any way possible is an unalloyed good. I put all three of them in that camp. You could add the likes of Chomsky to that mix. That doesn't mean they don't like their conception of what America is or could be, but they see America's actions in the world as evil and in need of opposing.
edit: Again I'm not the one downvoting you, disagreeing with someone is not a reason to downvote IMO
I was kinda hoping for something a bit more substantial - those aren't particularly convincing and smell slightly of hit-pieces attempting to smear Snowden while conveniently diverting from the main issue (that the US Government applies an insane level of surveillance on the US people).
First story is about an interview with Putin and why he didn't go in harder on him. The second is that his NSA boss denies he had the sweeping access he had (of course he did, the official line is still that these programs don't exist isn't it?). The WSJ one I couldn't read in its entirety but it opened by calling him a liar and a thief, so I'm not sure how impartial we can consider it to be. Both yahoo articles boil down to "we don't think he could earn and do what he said he did". None really discredit what he leaked, they all seem to be geared towards stoking the flames around this idea that he's an untrustworthy, shady liar who has questionable motivations.
I don't think we're going to see eye to eye on this, which is fine - neither of us are in a position to change anything around the situation. But your final line - "they see America's actions in the world as evil and in need of opposing" - man it's really hard to argue that this isn't true. Even if we just look at the Middle East, what the US and the UK have been up to over there for the last few decades is pretty appalling.
The WSJ one I couldn't read in its entirety but it opened by calling
him a liar and a thief, so I'm not sure how impartial we can consider
it to be.
"Impartial?" I'm not seeing "liar"/"thief" or any such innuendo in the opening. Here's the full article [0] -- which is an extract from an upcoming book. This pokes holes in Snowden's narrative, i.e. How Snowden Escaped Hong Kong Exclusive [1], and, if true, would fill a lot of glaring holes (i.e. How did Snowden get on an Aerofloat flight out of HK almost a week after the manhunt started?).
Also, a big concern raised is the breadth of information Snowden walked off with. Allegedly, it wasn't just privacy/surveillance info, but also national security and military secrets. From an audit of the 1.5 million docs Snowden walked off with, "most had nothing to do with domestic surveillance or whistle blowing." This raises eyebrows.
> i.e. How did Snowden get on an Aerofloat flight out of HK almost a week after the manhunt started?
Because Hong Kong let him go, as he wasn't officially wanted at the time:
> as the US had revoked his passport (and issued an arrest warrant) and notified Hong Kong of the revocation a day before the plane took off. However, as numerous news reports of the time reported, the US information [in the arrest warrant] was contradictory and incomplete, and thus Hong Kong did nothing to stop Snowden from leaving [0]. The Guardian [1] quotes a Hong Kong official as saying Snowden left "through a lawful and normal channel".
It was quite funny, IIRC: The US was increasing the pressure on HK and submitted an arrest/extradition request, but apparently they had left out his middle name and the passport number on the form.
So HK let him go, claiming they followed all laws and obligations from their treaties, basically saying "Oh, that Edward Snowden! Damn, if only we had known."
I'm not sure how it's possible to miss the liar/thief part - the opening sentence is "Of all the lies that Edward Snowden has told since his massive theft..."
However now you're getting somewhere - criticism that he's picked up docs related to military secrets does seem pretty valid. I'd hope that it was just that he picked up a broad range of docs in the hope that that some would contain information supporting the surveillance issue (kind of ironically mirroring the "dragnet" approach to surveillance) - but we can't be sure I suppose.
I'm sorry as I did a poor job qualifying my statement. As it stands now, my claim is incorrect. I apologize and thank you for your note.
I meant to say that saying Snowden is a thief (true) and that he has told lies (many of his claims are disputed) isn't being partial. I can see how the paywall would make the opening seem partial. I'd read the entire article so I was putting the opening in the context of the author's possibilities, e.g. Snowden didn't necessarily have collusion with Russia in mind.
>so I'm not sure how impartial we can consider it to be.
Surely the question isn't whether it's 'impartial' but whether it's accurate. If he is a liar and a thief then it's perfectly ok for the WSJ to call him one.
I'd be interested in an example of this if you have one, because I read all the source materials in this story and found his arguments compelling (after initially buying into the narrative)
I've only read the first two stories, but I'm struggling to see how they reflect badly on Greenwald. The context does not change the meaning in either context.
This is not the right place for this discussion, but in both cases the accusations in the pieces retweeted by Greenwald (Harris as 1. a bigoted "scientific racist", 2. a "genocidal fascist maniac") are not supported when Harris' quotes are seen in context.
Greenwald's condemnation of The Guardian's summary of Assange's interview seems accurate. But Greenwald's assessment of Harris, and his tweets in that matter, seem very biased.
I don't think its fair to bundle them together. What Assange is doing and acting is way differnt from Snowden, Greenwald. Or Poitras, Manning for that matter.
Each of these people should be looked at based on their own actions.
I recall about a week after the Snowden disclosures some people saying the Snowden leaks were deliberate and that NSA has kept up this tradition of false flag disclosures. If anything, the whole web is certainly more secure now, and Snowden is even quoted as saying: "I still work for the NSA" after the leaks. I don't buy the rhetoric that NSA is simply all about slurping up plaintext. They have a duty to secure the web too. It's a weird paradox that they both want more security and want all the plaintext they can salvage.
>He said: “In Russia, there are many vibrant publications, online blogs, and Kremlin critics such as [Alexey] Navalny are part of that spectrum. There are also newspapers like “Novaya Gazeta”, in which different parts of society in Moscow are permitted to critique each other and it is tolerated, generally, because it isn’t a big TV channel that might have a mass popular effect, its audience is educated people in Moscow. So my interpretation is that in Russia there are competitors to WikiLeaks.” In addition, he claimed “no WikiLeaks staff speak Russian, so for a strong culture which has its own language, you have to be seen as a local player.”
Greenwald is an occasionally decent writer with a penchant for over-exaggeration and finger pointing. I used to be an ardent fan of The Intercept, but more recently have noticed it becoming far angrier and politically charged. In addition, it seems far more willing to play fast and loose with the truth, lack citation, and generally falsify as much as it accuses. Leading to the current state of the comments section on there where anyone who would rather take a more nuanced pragmatic view of things is called a "shill" by some bleating anti-authoritarian sheep.
I beg your pardon?
Where exactly did I accuse anyone of distributing "Fake News"? I was merely lamenting the slide of a publication, of which I used to respect the views and content, from champion of fact, and keen-eyed investigative journalism to another angry editorialist internet rag. Which, seems to increasingly fail to let the truth get in the way of their click-thru rate. TI's shameful behaviour during the recent incredibly dirty (on both sides) US election wasn't to stand back and give careful considered analysis, but rather pick an enemy and jump into the fray both feet first.
Kinda saddened at the censorship above. I can't help but feel I (and everyone else) have a right to be called names, know the names I'm being called and try and understand why I'm being called them. I'm sure this was in good will, and in the best interests of the discourse on this forum, but damn it's infuriating!
Your comments did more than anyone else's in this thread (that I read) to destroy productive conversation. I understand how these things feel and that it's always, with high confidence, the other person who blew it—but civil conversation requires that we each catch ourselves in that bias.
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political arguments for a while now. That's not what this site is for, so please don't. (Edit: actually, that last bit was probably unfair on my part—it was probably just a case of election-seasonitis, which afflicted most commenters, rather than an abuse of the site. Sorry about that.)
Unfortunately, with that comment, you've undermined what might have been a decent original point. You now just come across as someone who like to call people dishonest for no good reason.
Having read that, the Guardian's summary and the original interview, I find the Guardian's summary to be, by far, the more honest description of the interview (albeit not a perfect one). Greenwald's different personal interpretation (which he seems to believe invalidates the Guardian's interpretation as a complete fabrication) is merely the belief that when reporting the news (even while linking to the full account!), one must not explain or put into context, but merely repeat what was said, even if doing so distorts the event by taking it out of context. That is a valid opinion, but one which is very much rejected by most good journalists. Reporting news that way simply puts a rubber stamp of approval on propaganda unless most readers are well informed in the background of the story, an assumption that journalists must not make.
Also, Assange said those things in the actual interview (which the Guardian linked to):
> In Russia, there are many vibrant publications, online blogs, and Kremlin critics such as [Alexey] Navalny are part of that spectrum. There are also newspapers like "Novaya Gazeta", in which different parts of society in Moscow are permitted to critique each other and it is tolerated, generally, because it isn't a big TV channel that might have a mass popular effect, its audience is educated people in Moscow.
So, given that the reality is that in Russia journalism is oppressed to levels that are rather extreme, that the media in the West is much more vibrant and critical of government than in Russia, and given that Assange obviously knows that, the Guardian's summary is not only valid, but pretty much the most reasonable one.
Does Assange imply that the state of independent media to be so much better in Russia than in the West that WL is needed elsewhere? Why does WL exist given the statement by Assange?
By now he's learned that a lot of people will support him no matter how little sense he makes, so he just engages in gaslighting full on, and then Glenn Greenwald tells the cheering inhabitants of bullshit mountain how it's newspapers like the Guardian that are really sources of fake news because they explain Assange's unhinged propaganda rather than just repeat it.
Errm, that is very much not the same as saying that Russia has free and open media in general. He's merely arguing that Wikileaks can't help because Wikileaks-equivalents aren't the kind of media Russia is clamping down on the first place.
> To “dox” a person is to release documents related to his or her personal life in a way that potentially endangers that person's safety.
No. It means to release publicly available documents (docs -> dox) about the subject of a journalistic investigation - usually by amateur journalists. When professional journalists do it, it's just called "journalism".
We need more accountability from public figures. Moral fibre is a rare element among the top 1%. If they can't regulate themselves, then someone else ought to do it.
We need an incentive for people to pay their fair share of taxes and to behave ethically - Protecting your public reputation is a good incentive.
The law is simply useless when it comes to ethical matters - Radical transparency might be a better solution.
Public figures currently have way too much control over their public image.
Just because someone has that blue checkmark next to their Twitter username (reminder: Twitter doesn't have public guidelines on who gets it and who doesn't) doesn't make that person a public figure.
I think this is an absolutely hilarious troll and I congratulate Wikileaks on it.
Why?
This already exists. It's not just for verified Twitter users either. You have used this "database" yourself. You and your family are already in it. Wikileaks will use this "database" to raise awareness of just how dangerous it is. It will rile everyone up and create a groundswell of action to thwart it. When the outrage reaches it's peak, the name of the "database" will be revealed:
It's called Google+Facebook+Twitter+LinkedIn+Reddit+Yahoo+Amazon+Apple+Youtube+Pinterest+Instagram
If the verified Twitter user means public figures, this would be OK to certain extent (leave underage children out). Persons who place themselves in the public light through politics or voluntarily participate in the public arena have a diminished privacy rights. Tracking what they do and their connections is essential part of journalism.
Somehow this comes out as slashing out from WikiLeaks. They seem to be really out of touch. Maybe because Assange is behind it.
People who work for WikiLeaks are still probably involved, but they are no longer in control. Ever since late October, their behavior across all of their Twitter accounts has been markedly different.