Tangled Web

The story sounded almost too good to be true. Valery Gergiev, a conductor known as a strong supporter of the Putin regime, interrupted a performance at London's Covent Garden to speak out in favor of the feminist performance artists Pussy Riot:

"The thing is, yesterday Moscow saw another day of hearings in the fabricated case of Pussy Riot.... I apologize for such a vulgar comparison, but the Russian state is acting like a dominant male in a group of monkeys, compelled to show off his sex organs to make the others fear him." The text of Gergiev’s speech went viral.

But in fact, Gergiev never made the speech -- it came instead from a Russian spoof website called Fognews.com. Gergiev later denied he made the comments, but the damage was already done.

Ever since a wag scrawled an untruth about someone in a Roman latrine, there has been satire, but the Internet has greatly increased its potential reach and efficacy. With content platforms and social media democratizing publishing and distribution, the entrance barrier for fakery is lower than ever before. And because there is more of it swimming around than ever before and because the way we consume content has radically evolved, we are increasingly more susceptible to encountering and believing fakes.

The rise of fake news is inextricably linked with the popularity, spread, and click dynamics of social media. In an earlier Internet ecosystem of homepages and bookmarks, we would enter websites through the front door. You go to "The Onion" and you know that you're getting satire. But with much of today’s content consumption done through the side door of social media, or search engines sending us directly to article pages, more and more fake news is evading our satire radars. With the proliferation of news sites and blogs and the diversification and globalization of our consumption habits (most people in the United States weren’t reading Indian news sites 10 years ago), clicking on websites that are unfamiliar to us is a daily occurrence.

A U.S. senatorial candidate, Todd Akin, who had been in the news for remarks he made about rape, was the source of one such hoax, with a widely shared article that claimed he believed ingesting breast milk could cure homosexuality. I received the link from a friend (a savvy consumer of U.S. political news) and for a moment believed it. It was on a site called "The Daily Currant," which I hadn't heard of.

Being in the dark about the source (I just imagined it was one of the many U.S. political blogs I hadn't heard of), my subconscious assessment of its credibility had more to do with the person who shared it than from the publication it originated from. Zig-zagging around the web, guided by recommendations from friends and followers, do we even notice the source any more, let alone the names of authors? Link-shortening services such as bit.ly add an additional layer of opacity, as the site is often not recognizable from its URL.

Our access to a wider array of global news sites and increased sharing across borders has also helped spread fake news. Satire, unfortunately, doesn't always translate. A popular Serbian spoof site, Njuz.net, made headlines with a story, “Shark-el-Sheikh,” about a drunk Serb who killed a shark when he dived into the Red Sea. The story was widely picked up by the Western press. In 2009, a popular Chinese website, Huanqiu.com, ran a story about how U.S. President Barack Obama was sending Kim Jong Il an iPhone and a MacBook Air. The original source, however, was a satirical column from "The Guardian."

Perhaps too it is our own Filter Bubbles -- the idea popularized by Eli Pariser that social media has trapped us in an echo chamber that leads to more homogenous and conservative consumption -- that have made us more gullible. While we might have more exposure to a greater number of news sources than ever before, perhaps the sharers -- the super-curators in our lives -- are as homogenous as they ever have been. No matter that the Facebook viral of U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney standing next to his children spelling out "Money" on their T-shirts is a fake (it was a retouched photo and they weren't his kids) if the sentiment is one that dovetails with your political persuasions and belief system. Just hit like and then share.

The caveats we add when sharing -- "Not sure if it’s real or not, but pretty funny" or "unbelievable!" -- are perhaps an indication that half the time we don’t actually care whether it’s true or not. There are probably many people out there who believe that Akin thinks breast milk can cure homosexuality. Appetites for denials are paltry when the story is such a good one. Poynter's Craig Silverman calls it The Law Of Incorrect Tweets: "Initial, inaccurate information will be retweeted more than any subsequent correction."

For digital activists -- or indeed for anyone who can advance their agendas by disseminating fake news -- our collective gullibility is a boon. In July, environmental campaigners Greenpeace and the professional hoaxers, the Yes Men, set up an Arctic Ready website, which spoofed the official Shell site and was focused on Shell's plans for drilling in the Arctic. But that wasn't all. Greenpeace then set up a Twitter account, ShellisPrepared, which was supposedly the company's social-media team reacting to a series of embarrassing ads generated by the fake site. Many Twitter users were hoaxed into thinking this was really Shell's bumbling social-media team, who, with no consideration for the Streisand effect, were telling people not to share the ads. Much Twitter snark ensued.

WikiLeaks got in on the act by disseminating a column purporting to be by former "New York Times" Executive Editor Bill Keller. The column, well-written and eminently plausible, did the rounds, taking in a number of journalists, including some at "The New York Times." The hoax was well planned, with a page mirroring "The New York Times" site and a realistic-enough-looking domain. A fake Twitter account for Keller was also set up and even a fake PayPal blog responding to his column.

In October 2011, hacktivists in the Balkans created a fake Nobel Prize website that awarded the prize for literature to Serbia’s leading nationalist writer, Dobrica Cosic. By the time the real winner, a Swedish poet, had been announced, the wires were on the story and Cosic had been congratulated. The hacktivists responsible said that they had carried out the hoax to "bring to the attention of the Serbian public the dangerous influence of the writer Dobrica Cosic."

There is also a seamier side to the fakery. As a hoax, it was a crude one, but then it didn't need to be particularly sophisticated. Created on March 11, the website's URL suggested it belonged to Azerbajan's main opposition party, Musavat. With a color scheme and design fairly similar to the original, the fake website was full of other content that would have been at home on an opposition site. The site, which had only been live for a few days, was created to host a video purporting to show an investigative journalist, who works for RFE/RL, having sex. After electoral protests in Belarus in December 2010, pro-government forces set up mirrors of independent websites to funnel crowds to the wrong locations.

Censoring governments and sensitive corporations are likely to clamp down more in the future on fake news. In less-than-democratic regimes, there will be arrests, trumped-up charges, and bogus lawsuits. Established democracies, too, won’t be immune from taking harsher measures. Greenpeace's campaign against Shell, for example, generated much discussion about the line between satire and lying and misleading. Writing about the Shell Arctic hoax, Anita Ramasastry, a professor at the University of Washington School of Law, says:


Under U.S. law, whether such parodies are protected speech is a matter of legal debate -- and, as is often the case with technological innovation, the law lags behind. "To be protected by the fair use exception to copyright law, satire or parody should be obvious -- maybe not immediately obvious, but at least fairly quickly obvious," writes Ramasastry.

Globally, the amount of satire and fake news is likely to grow. Using off-the-shelf scripts, kids will be able to knock up sophisticated fake websites in their bedrooms with a few mouse clicks. There will be more meme generators and tools for digital manipulation will become more accessible for unskilled users. As the web expands, it will be more and more common to read news on websites we have never heard of.

But while the entrance barrier to spoofing will be lowered, our satire radars are likely to become more attuned. What was interesting about the WikiLeaks/Bill Keller hoax was how quickly people collaborated to uncover it and do the forensics of how it spread. Just as new technologies will make hoaxing easier, it may well be easier to recognize fakes using textual analysis tools and image verification software. No doubt, too, with an abundance of hoaxes, our standards for sharing and retweeting information will evolve so that the next time we get a story that sounds too good to be true, we might just think twice before sharing.

It is hard sometimes to divide the story of Julian Assange from that of WikiLeaks. But once upon a time, before Bradley Manning, the rape allegations, the house arrest, the TV show on RT, and then the Ecuador gambit, WikiLeaks, as an organization and as an idea, was brimming with promise. For many, the age of the anonymous digital whistle-blower was the dawn of a bright new era of radical transparency.

WikiLeaks was just the beginning. Whatever you might think of Assange, it was the game-changer and it spawned a multitude of clones. Expectations about the potential of digital whistle-blowing were sky high. A bevy of decentralized organizations, many of them stateless and thus hard to act against in a technical or legal capacity, would spring up. These organizations were of the Internet and thus able to bypass and route around the efforts of censoring governments and corporations.

And sure enough, a slew of WikiLeaks clones followed, many of them in more specialized markets: BalkanLeaks, Enviroleaks, MagyarLeaks. Mainstream media outlets -- who had sometimes turned their noses up at Assange's methods -- tried their hands at building their own dropboxes for anonymous leakers.

Journalists expected bounties (how hard can it be, right?), some activists expected regimes to fall, and openness advocates looked to a brave new world where the power of the leak (or at least the threat of a leak) would keep governments and corporations in check.

But it never quite happened like that. Many of the digital-whistle-blowing projects, the WikiLeaks clones, are either dead or dormant and efforts to create secure and anonymous dropboxes have floundered.

The possibly exaggerated claims of radical transparency were taken on in a paper by Alasdair Roberts, an academic at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. He wrote that "Advocates of WikiLeaks have overstated the scale and significance of the leaks. They also overlook many ways in which the simple logic of radical transparency -- leak, publish, and wait for the inevitable outrage -- can be defeated in practice."

There was always plenty of techno-determinism and Internet-centrism in the WikiLeaks-era notions of radical transparency: just engineer a secure solution and they will leak.

But actually those technological solutions to ensure a leaker couldn’t be traced were much harder than perhaps anticipated, especially under the watchful and scrutinous eyes of ever-vigilant privacy and security researchers.

A former WikiLeaker, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, test-launched OpenLeaks in 2011 and asked 3,000 hackers to test its systems, but over 18 months later there is still no active submission system. "The Wall Street Journal's" SafeHouse, its WikiLeaks-style submissions site, was widely criticized by security researchers for its holes.

Public Intelligence, a site that relies on some leaked documents, has disabled its submissions system "following a recent intrusion into our server." They add, "Submissions will resume when we are confident that the information can be handled in a secure manner." Looking down a list of whistle-blowing sites in the Leak Directory, many of the sites are dormant or defunct.

"A truly anonymous electronic dropbox is a very hard problem in computer science terms, particularly if you wanted to make it open-source code,” says Suelette Dreyfus, an academic and expert in digital whistle-blowing.

It's also expensive. “My back of the envelope estimate based on discussions with technical experts in the area is that it would take close to $1 million to do it properly, and probably at least 6-12 months -- with no absolute guarantee it would work," Dreyfus says.

"That's to make a highly portable, free open-source software version of a drop box, publicly available and easy to use for any NGO or news organization," she says. "You'd need a project manager who understands journalism, leaks, the NGO world, and technical people. And you'd need a really trusted team of programming experts, who are likely to be scattered around the globe. It's a hard, hard task.”

One of those organizations striving to make an open-source secure dropbox is GlobaLeaks. Their project aims to make a suite of software available to organizations who want to set up and maintain a whistle-blowing platform. According to Fabio Pietrosanti, one of GlobaLeaks' developers, the goal is to lower the entrance barrier to people wanting to set up whistle-blowing platforms.

"Our goal is to allow anyone with political motivation willing to start a whistle-blowing initiative not to be dependent on a technician's skills to set up a safe drop box," Pietrosanti says.

"We need to reach a point where setting up a whistle-blowing initiative will require only determination and management skills by using easy-to-use GlobaLeaks software, doing publishing through [the] Tor2web network, leveraging public visibility through social networks, Facebook, Twitter, and cloud tools (hosted blogs)," Pietrosanti says.

But for other whistle-blowing practitioners, the idea of a secure and anonymous drop box is a chimera, a techno-solve-all that would do for transparency what tablets were supposed to do for magazines' business models.

John Young, who runs the Cryptome website, which hosts leaked documents, says that the open-source drop boxes out there are "evanescent, variable, deceptive, self-serving, and none are risk-free."

While the digitization of data has made it much easier to copy, share, and publish, it has also made it easier for people to snoop on what we are sharing. Aaron Caplan, an associate professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, wrote:

With these risks in mind, many of those working in the digital whistle-blowing community are increasingly aware that offering fail-safe anonymity and protection is misleading. Whistle-blowing practitioners have realized they have a responsibility to educate potential leakers in the art of anonymity, rather than promising that they will do it for them.

Claudio Agosti, a developer with the GlobaLeaks project, says: "We, as information and privacy experts, have analyzed the requirements from the security point of view, therefore what we're aiming for is not just software, but a wider project also involving advocacy in personal security for dealing with sensitive documents."

That could mean just advising potential leakers to use the Tor anonymizing software or putting together guides that will help whistle-blowers stay safe.

"We advise sources to protect themselves, that we cannot do that nor can any other outlet," says Cryptome's Young. "Promised protection and security is always fraudulent, either by design or by ignorance. This is not limited to disclosures but covers all forms of security from national to personal."

Security is only one of the challenges that digital whistle-blowing sites face. There is the potential political pressure from governments or litigious corporations. Another is the legal risks of hosting such information or being cut loose by service providers, just as WikiLeaks was when Amazon and PayPal withdrew their services. Opponents could easily try to get a site shut down, for example by flooding it with child pornography.

With sometimes mammoth data dumps, dividing the wheat from the chaff is a laborious task that often requires teams of people who know what they are looking for (much as "The Guardian" used its beat reporters to drill down into the leaked cables). Analysis, verification, and packaging takes time and expertise and can be costly for organizations on shoestring budgets who often have little experience in navigating the myriad logistical, legal, and technical minefields.

“Most of them are run on the smell of an oily rag. They are largely volunteer sites that struggle to cover expenses and don't pay a salary. Many won't accept government money in order to remain independent," Dreyfus says. With media organizations facing budget cuts and with NGO funding at rock bottom it's possible that -- after the enthusiasm surrounding WikiLeaks has died down -- whistle-blowing platforms will increasingly be seen as indulgences.

But despite the many stalled or dormant whistle-blowing projects, Dreyfus, who worked with Julian Assange on "Underground," a seminal book on hacking culture, is sanguine about the future of online whistle-blowing sites.

“The sites have actually succeeded a good deal more than I expected on the whole. The fact that so many sprang up and so many are still standing (if moving slowly) -- and many are still active -- is a testimony to success, not failure, on this front,” she says.

There is much focus on large generic leak sites, such as WikiLeaks, but the success stories are often found in sites serving more niche communities. “This means that even if they are breaking good stories, you may not hear about it," Dreyfus says, "because they target a specific and sometimes quite narrow community."

For example, she says that Balkanleaks.org broke a story about a government prosecutor accused of money laundering, "but if you don't read Russian or Bulgarian, chances are you haven't read it."

"Similarly Enviroleaks published a piece on a controversial dam in Brazil," Dreyfus says. "Again, if you're not up on environmental issues or on Brazilian news you may not have seen this."

A decentralized, sometimes chaotic future is likely what's in store for digital-whistle-blowing initiatives. As Cryptome’s Young says, "multiplicity diffuses targetability." The prominence and centrality of WikiLeaks might well be the exception to the rule. Another model for the future might be the hacktivist collective Anonymous, with its loose ties and culture that (at least in public) shuns leadership. Last year, Anonymous leaked e-mails from Stratfor, a global security firm, after hacking into the company's servers.

In December 2012, Anonymous activists are launching TYLER, which it describes as "WikiLeaks on steroids." In a promotional video, the activists said that "TYLER is a massively distributed and decentralized Wikipedia-style P2P cipherspace structure impregnable to censorship. TYLER will improve where WikiLeaks could not."

There is certainly no lack of desire among the public for secrets to be spilled. In Australia, Griffith University and the University of Melbourne are running an international survey about attitudes toward whistle-blowing. The first stage of the survey, which Dreyfus is involved with, found that support for whistle-blowing in Australia is strong, with 87 percent of Australians believing that whistle-blowers should be able to go to the media. Whistle-blowers and leakers, with all their subterfuge, tend to generate headlines, but as GlobaLeaks’ Pietrosanti points out, whistle-blowing is just one part -- a radical part, perhaps -- of a larger transparency movement comprising initiatives such as OpenData and OpenGov.

Just as the entertainment industry has been engaged in an often futile game of whack-a-mole with torrent sites and peer-to-peer networks, secretive governments and corporations will likely experience the same struggle against a raft of whistle-blowers in different guises who, unlike WikiLeaks, will gain their strength from decentralization and relative obscurity.