Follow the Bitcoin: Wikileaks
Cryptography and radical transparency in a world of globalized politics
We expect 2017 to be a strange year in tech and politics. We have entered a political epoch marked by cyberattacks and a heavily weaponized press. This year will see the setting of benchmarks for the future of the Internet’s power and money.
In this sense, Bitcoin’s potential as an alternative circuit for power enables us to follow closely events and conflicts between Nation-States and other powerful actors that will shape (and be shaped by) the future of this technology.
To illustrate this, we are beginning to analyze the history of Bitcoin transactions involving Wikileak’s official address. Considering Wikileaks was one of the most influential actors during the 2016 US 🇺🇸 presidential election, we looked for clues that might help us understand how the organization operated through events settled on the blockchain.
This matters to us because it tells us about the future of political finance: the root of both political power and corruption. Political parties have become obscure and ancient machinery designed to protect the political status quo by fabricating either ideology or personalities. Organizations like Wikileaks have undoubtedly usurped the traditional messaging of parties, operating as a cyber guerrilla. Instead of having a bunch of barbudos overtaking an island, it hit directly at the heart of the system.
Beginnings
When it started, Wikileaks was a platform for any employee to leak documents that would expose corruption at their workplace. Shaking revelations like the ones made by Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden made Wikileaks a global actor in the planetary scene of politics, propaganda and paranoia. The most recent Wikileaks release show a contradictory pattern: on one side, there are data dumps with no curation, containing gossip and private documents that have nothing to do with accountability and even endanger many activists and civilians; on the other side, Wikileaks claims to have information that they have not released for strategic reasons.
“In a sea of so many whistles blowing so loud, we cannot hear a single one.”
“In a sea of so many whistles blowing so loud, we cannot hear a single one,” wrote sociologist Zeynep Tufekci for the New York Times, saying that the recent data dumps are causing more harm than good: endangering regular people, harming privacy, overloading the public with useless information, feeding conspiracy theories and burying critical information and political debates in the noise. The most irresponsible journalism.
Now years after Wikileaks originally became famous (or infamous) due to its role as a platform for exposing the machinations of the powerful, many activists are adopting more cautious positions toward the organization, pointing out that Wikileaks is no longer “agnostic to their content” and raising the historic question: who is watching the watchmen?
Since Wikileaks’ controversial involvement with the last US 🇺🇸 election — including the release of the Democratic National Committee’s and John Podesta’s emails at strategic moments — many people have wondered what agenda is the organization pushing and who is benefiting from it.
When rumors pointed towards Russia 🇷🇺, Wikileaks responded in a rather bizarre way via their Twitter account, making only ambiguous remarks about their involvement in the situation. The staff forged an aura of mystery that has further obscured their reputation as journalists and caused a large base of Reddit users to speculate about whether the organization and Julian Assange have been compromised.
Wikileaks’ technique has been to take advantage of every confusing moment to demonstrate a power that is hard to quantify; something they did exquisitely in October 2016 when a leading DNS provider suffered a DDoS attack that took down the internet in the US 🇺🇸:
Wikileaks and Bitcoin
Bitcoin and Wikileaks first crossed paths in 2010, when Visa, Mastercard and Bank of America cut off donations to the organization, while Paypal and PostFinance froze their funds. When Wikileaks considered asking for donations in Bitcoin, a debate surged at the very core of the Bitcoin development community involving even Bitcoin’s anonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto (before he mysteriously disappeared of the scene):
The legend has it that Assange understood Nakamoto’s concern and decided to wait until Bitcoin was ready for the kind of attention that Wikileaks would attract to the young cryptocurrency. Wikileaks started taking Bitcoin donations a few months later, in June 2011.
Funds raised through Bitcoin in 2011, if they had been left untouched, would now have seen a 9000% increase in value. By 2014, the majority of Wikileaks public funding was through Bitcoin:
2016 US presidential election
Donald Trump’s November triumph in the 2016 elections took place immediately after Wikileaks released secret emails from John Podesta that fatally harmed Hillary Clinton’s campaign — something democrats claimed was a Russian 🇷🇺 operation.
Immediately after this, the government of Ecuador 🇪🇨 issued a statement announcing: “Ecuador respects the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states. It does not interfere in external electoral processes, nor does it favor any particular candidate (…) Accordingly, Ecuador 🇪🇨 has exercised its sovereign right to temporarily restrict access to some of its private communications network within its Embassy in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧.”. And so they cut off Internet access for Julian Assange, to whom the country has been providing asylum since August 2012.
Our research
Our interest in Wikileaks’ use of Bitcoin is not arbitrary. Julian Assange, founder of the organization, has proved to have an advantage over a vast majority of the players in global politics; he understands Bitcoin as a technology and knows how to use it beyond money transactions. He has said:
“Bitcoin is an extremely important innovation, but not in the way most people think. Bitcoin’s real innovation is a globally verifiable proof [of] publishing at a certain time. The whole system is built on that concept and many other systems can also be built on it. The blockchain nails down history, breaking Orwell’s dictum of ‘He who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future.’” — Julian Assange
Assange went on to deny the rumors of his death, providing proof by reading the current block number #447506 of the Bitcoin Blockchain and its hash. This is not irrefutable proof, but showed Assange’s understanding of how to use the immutability of the Blockchain to provide authoritative answers without third parties.
We have found in Wikileaks’ transaction history a large number of strange micropayments that involve insignificant amounts of money (a handful of Satoshis, fractions of cents) of which Reddit users have speculated could contain text or other embedded data; or transactions to the same wallet made within a matter of hours in a fragmented way instead of being made all at once. All of this is interesting but tells us little. It does however prove above anything else that Bitcoin is a magnificent expression of what Karckhoff thought to be a principal property of good cryptography: even if every part of the system — except the key — is public, the secret is kept private.
Wikileaks’ official address is 1HB5XMLmzFVj8ALj6mfBsbifRoD4miY36v—this is the one linked in their site for donations and tagged as their address by blockchain.info, a service known to be the most popular Bitcoin wallet in use. However, Bitcoin Who’s Who calculates Wikileaks’ importance in the network considering a second address: 1MaXZE92yjuy4NYjTspmdWHMRT3jQUcTf4.
Adding up the number of transactions involving these two addresses, we can see that Wikileaks is the organization with most transactions in the history of Bitcoin: something close to 50,000, which puts them #5 in the ranking of Top 50 Bitcoin Donation Addresses.
Sources
But not all transactions we find in this history are generous donations or regular transactions. In July 2015, Wikileaks wallet was the target of what in Bitcoin lingo is called a “flood attack” or “dust attack”. Simply put, if dust is an insignificant amount of Bitcoin (something like 0.00001), a dust attack consists in a thousands of extremely tiny and irrelevant amounts of Bitcoin sent by the attacker towards one address to spoil the network. The amount of dust for this huge attack was worth 30 BTC (or U$D 8,000 at the time). What made Wikileaks the target? We can only speculate. The remarkable thing about this attack is it was surprisingly timely, as stress tests were being conducted in the middle of a heated debate the Bitcoin community was having about the block size and stability of the network.
Blockchain.info also provides the estimated IP of the first node that broadcasted a transaction to the blockchain which allows us to map the geographical sources of the transactions that include this information and estimate the influence that either Russia 🇷🇺 or China 🇨🇳 had in the organization through Bitcoin donations. It’s worth noting that combined, former Soviet territories like Georgia 🇬🇪, Ukraine 🇺🇦 and Lithuania 🇱🇹 rank in the Top 20 countries and account for a total of 14% of the transactions we’ve been able to identify with an IP address. Another path that can be explored regarding geographical identification is to query every bitcoin address on Google (🇺🇸), Yandex (🇷🇺) and Baidu (🇨🇳) and verify if these have been effectively used by organizations in those countries.
Regarding organizations, Blockchain.info also enables the possibility to include tags in the transactions. These do not offer any kind of guarantee that are necessarily tied to an organization and can often be used simply to state a message (in this case often motivated by political reasons).
Transactions tagged with “Mt. Gox” are prior to the downfall of this organization, one of the first exchanges that operated the currency that eventually got hacked and filed for bankruptcy in Japan 🇯🇵. The ones mentioning “NSAGov” are clearly a pun from the donor. Among the interesting tags we’ve been able to identify, we found:
- “The Seasteading Institute”, a libertarian organization known to be backed by Silicon Valley’s only Donald Trump supporter and well known contrarian: Peter Thiel.
- “Free Software Foundation”, the most well known free software advocacy organization founded by legendary programmer Richard Stallman.
- “Free Ross Ulbricht” (a. k. a. Dread Pirate Roberts), allegedly the founder of Silk Road, an anonymous marketplace found on the deep web only accessible with TOR browser that sold any kind of substance using bitcoin. Ulbricht was arrested by the FBI in 2013 and is now serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Many argue he’s the scapegoat of a larger organization.
Data & how to contribute
We are just getting started on working through the data and understanding how to explore such a complex ledger, which is a great way to understand how Bitcoin works at its most fundamental level, its data structure and what kind of balance between transparency and privacy it constitutes.
This is essentially what the whole Wikileaks & Bitcoin affair is about, if we approach it as a case in which the perks of anonymity and demands of accountability meet with great power and high stakes. We ask what is specifically political in the design and use big players make of Bitcoin, and what is specifically new in the way this technology intertwines with questions of privacy, anonymity and sanctuary, responsibilities and rights. There’s a lot we can learn from studying these unprecedented events, unfolding as the technologies that make them possible keep on evolving.
These are the assets you can use to extend this research:
- Data dump with all transactions to Wikileaks in JSON format (303 MB).
- Simplified data dump with all transactions to Wikileaks in CSV format.
- List of IP addresses found on Wikileaks Bitcoin transactions.
- Python code used to crunch the data (special thanks @fernandezpablo):
About Democracy Earth Foundation.
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