WikiLeaks is apparently a bullet-proof site for hosting controversial documents, whether formerly-secret manuals belonging to the Church of Scientology or cellphone videos of bloodied Tibetans.
"Have documents the world needs to see? We protect you and get your disclosure out to the world," announces the site.
Problem is, are the documents accurate? As the site proudly proclaims, "We aim for maximum political impact," which means verification is secondary. The protestor wants the touch run extinguished, because of he thinks it stands for; the athlete wants to continue running with it, lit, because of she thinks it stands for. Both reasons are political.
The site hopes that the accuracy of documents will be sorted out by the public:
To some degree, there is a trade-off between censorship and guaranteeing authenticity. Wikileaks could run a site almost guaranteeing authenticity, but then we would censor out a lot of information that might be very likely to be true -- and very much in the public interest to reveal. The world audience is intelligent enough to make up its own mind.
So far, CAD vendors have escaped WikiLeaks. Of all the names I ran through its search engine, I found just one minor reference: Autodesk's Civil 3D software as part of a military kit.
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