"All of these news organisations around the world, all of these publishers were trying to
get a piece of the story. There was only one publisher that actually said: We want to help
the source, we want to make sure he's ok, we want to make sure that, no matter what happens,
he has somebody on his side, and that was WikiLeaks." – Edward Snowden
The WikiLeaks banking blockade, which we have been largely victorious against (VISA, MasterCard and PayPal have all folded, Bank of America continues), diverted tens of millions of dollars of development resources. Once the blockade was defeated we created four competing research projects to understand how to build and deploy our next-generation, public-facing submission systems, once it was clear to us that earlier models would not fully secure source protection with the progressions in state surveillance. Currently, we have one public-facing and several private-facing submission systems in operation, cryptographically, operationally and legally secured with national security sourcing in mind.
We were aware of various mass internet surveillance programs as a result of our SpyFiles series. You can see this in a number of statements we have made, pre-empting the PRISM disclosures and others, culminating in "A Call to Cryptographic Arms", which warned, a year before the Snowden NSA disclosures, that "left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible."
Other submission technologies inspired by WikiLeaks, such as the European-based GlobaLeaks and the US-based Secure Drop, while both excellent in many ways, are not suited to WikiLeaks' sourcing in its national security and large archive publishing specialities. The full-spectrum attack surface of WikiLeaks' submission system is significantly lower than other systems and is optimised for our secure deployment and development environment. Our encrypted chat system is integrated into this process because sources often need custom solutions.
For example, one of the problems with public-facing submission systems is bootstrapping. The fact that a source is looking at instructions that are telling them how to submit material could be used as evidence against them if there is an SSL key break. To prevent this, we deploy the full bootstrap instructions and keys on millions of WikiLeaks pages across our full server network. When the "Submit" button is pressed, there is literally zero network traffic as a result, because all these details are downloaded everytime anyone looks at nearly any page on WikiLeaks. We cover the source bootstrap process with our millions of page views by readers.
While the press has focused on WikiLeaks' technical protections for sources, publishing robustly is also a hard, if not harder, problem – for example, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger told the UK Parliament that, in relation to the Guardian and the Snowden files, "There's stuff in there about Iraq and Afghanistan and we're not even going to look at it." It turns out that protecting sources and uncensorable publishing are closely related problems not just in the technical domain, but also in organisational, legal and political domains as well. To date, more than 99 per cent of Snowden documents have been completely censored by the mainstream press involved. The same legal, political and intelligence processes that can compromise a publisher's will to publish can also compromise source protection processes or their developmental dependencies.
WikiLeaks will continue publishing, as it has since its foundation, full archives of suppressed documents in strategic global partnerships. The 2.0 public-facing submission system is an important new method in our arsenal for recovering subjugated history.
Julian Assange