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4 June 2012

Friends of WikiLeaks


To: wl-press[at]lists.riseup.net
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2012 16:57:57 -0700 (PDT)
From: Wikileaks Press Office <press-office[at]wikileaks.org>
Subject: [WIKILEAKS] Friends of WikiLeaks

You have been invited to join Friends of WikiLeaks https://wlfriends.org/

MANIFESTO

We, Friends of Wikileaks, support WikiLeaks, its people, its principles and its goals.

We are committed to these broad ideals:

1. The right to communicate, including the right to speak, and the right to listen, the freedom of thought, the right to communicate privately, and the right to communicate anonymously.

2. The inviolability of history.

3. Privacy for the weak.

4. Transparency for the powerful.

5. The pursuit of truth, as the primary prerequisite for a more just civilization.

Friends of WikiLeaks aim to do the following:

1. To defend WikiLeaks against attacks by,

- becoming informed and informing each other,

- promoting public awareness in the wider population,

- counteracting misinformation, online and offline,

- helping to raise funds,

- addressing new and unforeseeable threats to WikiLeaks' continued functioning.

2. To vindicate the sources of WikiLeaks, whoever they may be, by,

- defending through speech the good name of anyone alleged to have risked life and comfort to inform the public,

- keeping WikiLeaks strong so that it is able to defend its sources,

- ensuring through advocacy that the information they sought to bring to the world does not fall on deaf ears.

3. To defend the alleged sources of WikiLeaks, by,

- organizing legal defense funding and support groups for them,

- defending the motives of whistleblowers,

- exercising care not to prejudice their rights by assuming legal culpability for the actions they are accused of.

4. To aid organizations and individuals who share the principles and goals of WikiLeaks.

How is FoWL different?

FoWL gives you new friends to instantly build a mass global movement. Unlike traditional social networks, FoWL is hardened against surveillance and attack. The primary spaces for online activism are watched by private and state intelligence agencies. FoWL is built to counter this.

By design your details are encrypted, and hidden from everyone except your immediate contacts. Even we can't access them.

Connected by FoWL, friends of WikiLeaks will communicate how ever they like, including using secure person-to-person methods. As the network grows away from the site infrastructure, it becomes autonomous and decentralized, opaque to observers and impossible to compromise.

Why FoWL?

Our attackers are wealthy and powerful organizations and governments. Their attacks - legal, financial and reputational - are sophisticated, and well resourced. For example:

In late 2010, an informal consortium of banking institutions including VISA, Mastercard, Bank of America, Paypal and Western Union, moved to illegally blockade donations sent to WikiLeaks from its supporters. This blockade is ongoing. [More... http://wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html]

In 2011, a private security firm, HBGary Federal, contracted with US government agencies to marginalize WikiLeaks by spying on supporters and attacking the reputation of supportive journalists, such as Glenn Greenwald. http://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/palantir/singleton/

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