Someone Is Enrolling All of WikiLeak’s Infamous Afghan War Logs in Bitcoin

What started with a mysterious inscription October 7 may end up becoming the last global protest in support of journalist and activist Julian Assange.

As revealed by bitcoin magazine, an unknown “Spartacus Project” has been formed in an attempt to immortalize in bitcoin the classified information that the US government has long alleged Julian Assange illegally provided to journalists in the infamous Afghan War Diary.

Following registration, an anonymous individual contacted bitcoin Magazine claiming responsibility for the project, which aims to register the tens of thousands of Afghanistan war records published by Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks in July 2010 on the blockchain. of bitcoin.

These records created a great stir in the American media at the time of their publication and provoked strong reactions from the country’s government. In particular, the content of the logs not only differed from what had been presented in the mainstream media, but also offered disturbing information about what really happened in Afghanistan. The records at times raised questions about the conduct of some U.S. military operations.

The publication of the war records, which was coordinated with The Guardian, The New York Times and others, sparked a stimulus within the government. The first indictment brought against Assange centered on an alleged conspiracy between him and Chelsea Manning to access an account on a computer at his military base. According to the charges, the “primary purpose of the conspiracy was to facilitate Manning’s acquisition and transmission of classified information.”

However, as reported According to The Intercept, it later became clear that the alleged hack not only didn’t happen, it couldn’t have happened either. New testimony, reported by investigative news site Shadowproof, also showed that Manning already had authorized access and the ability to exfiltrate all of the documents he was accused of leaking, without receiving any technical help from WikiLeaks.

Indeed, the indictment describes the types of activities that many news organizations and journalists engage in every day, including obtaining and publishing true information in the public interest, communicating between an editor and a source, and using encryption tools.

It appears that this backdrop is the context through which Project Spartacus attempts to gain a foothold in the bitcoin ecosystem. The project leverages the Ordinals protocol, a meta-protocol for bitcoin that allows anyone to add arbitrary data to the original cryptocurrency’s blockchain. Given the properties of bitcoin and its decentralized network of nodes, once data is added to its blockchain, it can never be deleted or modified.

These properties seem great for the use case of combating information censorship. In this light, it appears that Project Spartacus seeks to take a stance in favor of freedom of information and knowledge, making it impossible for anyone to alter the data that Assange risked her life to make public. The journalist is currently facing possible extradition to the United States, despite being an Australian citizen and having not committed alleged crimes on American soil. The outcome of the extradition process remains uncertain and concerns continue to grow about his future and whether he will ever regain his freedom.

Project Spartacus website provides a public interface through which anyone can “enroll” (ordinal slang for adding data to bitcoin) to a war registry. There appear to be no fees associated with this action other than network fees, a necessary component for any transaction sent to the bitcoin network. The page also features a “donate” button, which opens a panel through which users can optionally send bitcoins to Assange’s cause. The donations are said to go to support the following organizations: Freedom of the Press Foundation, The Information Rights Project and Reporters Without Borders.

A huge rectangular button appears on the main page that says “Publish War Log.” Clicking activates the war record registration process. The user has the option to choose how many records to enroll, with a maximum of 300 war records per transaction. The user can then select the transaction fee, based on which the total payment amount is calculated. By pressing “continue”, the user is presumably redirected to make the payment.

bitcoin: More than money?

Commonly viewed as a monetary network, bitcoin can also serve as a decentralized and unstoppable publishing technology thanks to the Ordinals protocol. Created last year by bitcoin developer Casey Rodarmor, Ordinals aims to make it easier for anyone to add data to bitcoin, whether it be text, image, video, HTML or Markdown.

The development saw a parabolic rise in activity within a few months. The number of signups added to bitcoin in the first 200 days after Ordinals launched was greater than the number of ethereum NFTs created in the same 200-day period after non-fungible tokens went live on eth.

This surge in popularity caused a huge increase in fees on the bitcoin blockchain, leading some users to complain about the perceived “uselessness” of adding arbitrary data to what should arguably be a monetary network. Since bitcoin is governed by rules, not rulers, and Ordinals transactions comply with the rules of the protocol, activity was able to continue and thrive for months, leading to a host of applications and new developments built on top of the original cryptocurrency.

Project Spartacus twists Ordinals’ popular use case of making NFTs on the mother chain to seemingly focus on the full purpose of data on a decentralized chain of information, which is managed by tens of thousands of nodes across hundreds of jurisdictions. different all over the world.

In this sense, Ordinals may well be the definitive editorial tool that many around the world have been looking for to fight censorship and information manipulation.