How the US government inadvertently created Wikileaks
I was in Germany for Chaos Congress 2009, a hacker conference, and after attending a series of talks I was headed back to my hotel when I spotted Julian Assange. This predated my working as a project manager at DARPA as a hacker-in-residence, if you will. It was also before Wikileaks released the video “Collateral Murder” and hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables, the Swedish rape allegations, and Julian ending up a virtual prisoner, holed up in Ecuador’s diplomatic mission in London.
Given that I hadn’t seen Julian in more than a decade, I greeted him, and we agreed to grab some dinner and catch up. After reminiscing about the old gang – he and I had been part of the same hacker “milieu,” as Julian would say – I asked why he had skipped out on the hacking scene to form Wikileaks.
Last I heard Julian had left to study mathematics and physics at the University of Melbourne. He was working on a “duress” based crypto-file system, also known as the “rubber hose” file system. The theory was that if your disk was encrypted and someone threatened to beat you with a rubber hose unless you decrypted it, you could fool him by decrypting a secondary innocuous file system without revealing the true content of your still cloaked files. The baddies would be convinced they had what they wanted and let you go while you would keep your secrets. (There’s a problem with this, of course. If the baddies think you have a rubber hose file system, even if you decrypt your drive they may think you’re holding out on them and continue to beat the crap out of you. But I digress.)
