C4SS Begins Mirroring Wikileaks

| spanglerpensieve

The Center for a Stateless Society is now hosting a mirror site of Wikileaks — an international whistle-blower site which reactionary elements in the US government have been attempting to suppress over the last week. The mirror site is available at this web address:

http://wikileaks.c4ss.org/

Censorship has always been wrong and irresponsible. Now it’s another thing: Impossible.

I feel Hillary Clinton’s pain. Wikileaks’ release of 250,000 diplomatic cables previously hidden behind a state secrets wall has been tremendously embarrassing to her, not to mention implicating her in an international identity theft scheme that looks a lot like Watergate and the Zimmerman Telegram rolled into one.

But embarrassment or not, state officials have no right to hide their misdeeds from the people who foot the bill, in money and blood, for government actions. Nor, now, do they have the power to do so.

The toothpaste is out of the tube and we intend to keep it out of the tube. This information will remain publicly available to anyone who cares to look it over.

We have put this mirror site together using custom software developed by C4SS web administrator Mike Gogulski. We are making that software publicy available because we want as many people who can also mirror the site to do so.

As Mike put it:

“This is an opportunity for those who support freedom of information to take action. We particularly hope to see people and organizations with greater resources than we dispose of — the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for example, or US Representatative Ron Paul’s IT staff — making use of those resources, and of the tool we’re offering, to settle this
issue once and for all.”

The software, a bash script, is available for download below in a compressed archive. Instructions for installation, configuration and use are in comments in the code. Technical support for civil liberties/libertarian/anarchist organizations is available from admin@c4ss.org.

REQUIREMENTS:

  • Bash shell
  • Perl
  • A subdomain to host the files
  • HTTrack (mandatory)
  • lftp (optional, if copying to remote via FTP)
  • Ability to create a cron job

DOWNLOAD: mirror-wikileaks.bash.tar.gz

12 thoughts on “C4SS Begins Mirroring Wikileaks”

  1. I've thrown a little more into the tip jar for that!

    I have hosting space, but it's in the US and I'm unsure if I'd be putting my very good, small business, hosting provider at any risk. Any thoughts?

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  2. Just FYI, the purpose of this script is to provide an alternate mechanism to mirror Wikileaks content than the one Wikileaks itself provides. Potential mirror hosts might not be comfortable with Wikileaks staff ever touching their system, may be publishing from a shared web hosting account where they can't create a specific password and security sandbox for Wikileaks to use, etc. The script can be used either to pull Wikileaks content directly onto the system it runs on, or to pull it to a different system which then uploads it to the mirror website.

    I can provide interested parties with support in two ways:

    – Help you use my script, and customize it as necessary to meet your needs.
    – Set up the capability to push my own daily snapshots of Wikileaks to your site on a schedule you choose (of course, this requires you share a password with *me*, so folks objecting for that reason aren't really helped).

    All free of charge, of course.

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    2. Not sure if it is a limitation of HTTrack or what, but files that already exist (but that have been updated) are not downloaded (for instance the mirrors.html is not auto updated by the cron job (or manually). I have to go, delete the file from the local repo, then run the update to get the freshest copy of that file.

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