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## 2025-04-12

# Distributed Whistleblowing (Secret Leaks)

### DISCLAIMER
- This note is made fast and may change when I learn more.
- It has ideas on politics that I may take down later.

This text shows a way to share secret info across many people to cut down risk for each person. Right now, if one person leaks big secrets (like Snowden or WikiLeaks), that person takes a big risk. If we spread that risk, leaks might happen more often. Then secret groups spend more time and money to keep their secrets hidden.

I care about leaks in places that do research on strong AI, brain-machine links, human gene edits, or spy work. People want to see if these groups behave well or not.

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## Possible Problems

### 1) Low-Attention Setup
- A secret leaker gives files to someone (call them Bob) by a safe drop (like SecureDrop or a hidden handover of a hard disk). We hope many such Bobs exist.  
  - **Issue**: We lack good ways, rules, and rewards to pass hard disks across many hops.  
  - **Note**: Using offline (air-gapped) systems plus disk drops might be safer than Tor + Tails + PGP.

- Bob hides some details (redaction) and posts these files as a torrent link, maybe on Tor, then shares that link on boards like 4chan.  
  - **Issue**: We need clear steps to hide details so anyone can do it. Then many people can act as Bob.  
  - **Issue**: For low-stakes leaks, we might just post them (with hidden parts) on a site like 4chan or Rumble. But we must pick places that are not easy to shut down.

### 2) High-Attention Setup
- Many servers host a searchable copy of the leaked files right away.  
  - **Issue**: We need an open tool to crawl the net for leaked info and torrent links.  
  - Or we have a standard rule: we only crawl sites that say they have leaked files. They show a flag or some proof so we skip spam.  

- We also need open tools to pull out plain text and make “tags” (like embeddings) for each file.  
  - We store raw copies plus the text and its tags in a standard form (maybe WARC).  

- A big news group may post the leaked files and prove they are real.  

- For public talk, we have some social site.  
  - **Issue**: Writing a full “spread out” social site is hard.  
  - Maybe we copy and store posts from a normal site, so if it goes down, we can spin a new site with the data.

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## Possible Solutions (Short Summary)
1. Plan better ways to pass disks by hand, maybe in many steps.  
2. Have steps on how to hide sensitive parts (redaction).  
3. Build open web-crawling tools:  
   - Use flags and proofs, to know which sites to crawl.  
   - Pull and mirror leaked files and the talk about them.  
4. Make open tools to get plain text and small “tags” from files:  
   - Use a standard form to share both the text and its tags.  
5. Figure out which chat sites or video sites are least likely to be blocked:  
   - Post torrent links or the raw data.  
   - Follow each nation’s laws. Maybe use sites in a place that is not the same as where the leak came from.  
6. Nation-based torrents:  
   - Some files are legal in one place but not another. People might pass secrets from place A to place B, and vice versa.  
   - We must see how to legally share them and still move them across borders.

**Note**: We need help from people who have worked with real whistle-blowers to check these ideas. Also, we must think if we truly want to enable leaks for big groups (like AI labs or spy agencies).

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## Main Question: Does This Help Humanity?
- Groups with strong AI or gene edits might be trusted more if the public sees both their tech power and their true goals.  
- If the public sees a group’s goals, they can judge if it aligns with their values.  
- If they see the group’s tech, people might try to shut it down or shift it, if they think it is unsafe. But that may need global watch and big deals between govs if the tech is very strong (like bio-weapons or nano-weapons).  

Some in the “lesswrong” space, like Yudkowsky, worry that open-sourcing strong AI or bio-weapons is risky. Yet the plan here would leak both goals and tech. Is that good? This is the core question. We might need a separate note on watchful balance in the future.