Wikileaks' Profile Sparks Debate over (Mis?)Using Tor

The anonymizing network Tor featured into a recent New Yorker profile of Julian Assange, the founder of the online leak clearinghouse Wikileaks.

One of the many interesting questions that have sprouted since Wikileaks gained notice for its "Collateral Murder" video has to do with how the online leak clearinghouse acquired its first stash of sensitive government information. It has to do with an online traffic routing project called Tor, and it has sparked a debate in the hacker/activist community about the propriety of seeking truth and justice while tapping into a network designed to help people in sensitive situations communicate freely. Here's a look at the state of that debate.

A New Yorker profile of Wikileaks' mysterious founder Julian Assange started the debate. In that piece, writer Raffi Khatchadourian reported that Wikileaks was at its launch seeded with a trove of documents scraped from Tor. "Assange needed to show potential contributors that it was viable, " wrote Khatchadourian. One early Wikileaks collaborator also happened to run a server that functioned as a node on the Tor network. "The activist noticed that hackers from China were using the network to gather foreign governments’ information, and began to record this traffic." Some measure of those documents, according to this reporting, ended up on Wikileaks as its first batch of documents.

Wikileaks' take on this has been somewhat contradictory. After the Khatchadourian ran, a note on the Wikileaks Twitter account seemed to support the New Yorker's version of the Tor story. "Some WikiLeaks documents were siphoned off of Chinese hackers' activities," with a link to the New Yorker story. Later came a dissenting update. "Wired's Tor claims are untrue," a reference to some reporting done by the magazine on the topic. "The Alweys document did not come from tor. We do not monitor tor, etc." (It's not clear to me at the moment what ' the Alweys document' might refer to.)

Here some description of what the heck Tor is is in order. The service describes itself as "a system enabling its users to communicate anonymously on the Internet." Volunteers, like the reported Wikileaks collaborator, serve as "nodes' , maintaining the architecture that allows Tor to work. With the caveat that your humble author's technical know-how is being stretched here, but here's what seems to be an accurate summary: Tor is a way of helping people who'd rather their identies and locations not be known on the Internet to protect those pieces of information. Tor is not an impervious tunnel for information, a "secret Internet" that cannot be breached. Rather, it's a way of masking the path that Internet traffic is traveling, and in that way, give users a consider measure of personal anonymity.

Or, as a Tor in-house poster put it, "Any plaintext communication over the Internet is open to intercept. This is true if the transport mechanism is email, http, tor, or carrier pigeons. Tor does not magically encrypt the Internet from end to end."

Wired.com's Kim Zetter, whose publication has been aggressively tracking the story of Wikileaks and Assange from all angles, picks up the story today, and highlights the angle that in pulling information from the Tor network, the Wikileaks collaborator might have taken information that Tor's users intended to keep quiet. "Only a small portion of those intercepted documents were ever posted on WikiLeaks," writes Zetter, "but the new report is the first indication that some of the data and documents on WikiLeaks did not come from sources who intended for the documents to be seen or posted."

Mother Jones' David Gilson written that if Wikileaks did indeed pull documents from Tor that were being transmitted by Chinese hackers, that action is potentially concerning. "If it's accurate," writes Gilson, "this anecdote raises some serious ethical and technical questions about how WikiLeaks operates." Mother Jones had earlier run a fairly negative profile of Assange that contained lines like, "the self-centeredness and shadowy details of Assange's tale -- and his insistence that he must be taken at his word—are typical."

(It's worth saying at this point that it's to be expected that anyone who publishes sensitive government information is almost invariably going to see all sorts of criticism and even attacks come their way. Not for nothing is Gilson's piece illustrated with a though bubble above Assange's head featuring, among other things, prescription drugs. But that's not to say that the specific questions here aren't valid. At the very least, they're new an interesting ones.)

Ryan Sholin, Director of News Innovation at Publish2 has worried that if Wikileaks did do what the New Yorker stated about extracting materials from Tor might constitute a violation of the spirit of Tor. "Reading the New Yorker’s piece on WikiLeaks," wrote Sholin, "it’s hard to decide whether I’m reading about freedom fighters, skilled propagandists, or as is often the case, both." He went on, "Without looking too deeply, although I have serious reservations about their editorial decisions from time to time, I believe in what WikiLeaks is trying to do, and I have since they first arrived on the scene. But I’m profoundly worried to read about Tor server traffic mined for data."

"Is it OK to hack Tor in the name of the public good?," asked Sholin.

In comments on Sholin's post, the Berkman Center's Ethan Zuckerman hammered home the point that Tor's viability as an anonymizing network, useful to activists and organizers around the work, isn't threatened by what might have happened in the Wikileaks case. "Don’t blame Tor," argued Zuckerman, "it does what it says on the wrapper. It’s just that no one reads or understands the wrapper." But Zuckerman seems more concerned with the idea that someone who had taken on the responsibility of being part of the Tor information chain would use that role as an opportunity to, in effect, read the letter they'd been asked to pass along. "Are there ethical concerns about someone who’d run an exit node to spy on users? Yes, there are."