[alxdistill]

Maybe this is a stupid question but how does one go about verifying the information wikileaks releases is accurate?

I assume the people who submit info are verified in some way, does wikileaks then pass on that verification info to the public or are we supposed to just trust that they are providing truthful information in an unbiased way?

[ww520]

Wikileaks has pretty good track record. I believe so far every single one of the leaks have turned out true, or no one has challenged their authenticity.

[1_2__3]

Which is it? Your phrasing implies those are the same thing. They're not.

[monochromatic]

They're not the same, but they're pretty well indistinguishable for anyone who isn't omniscient.

[chatmasta]

The CIA has a long standing "no comment" policy when asked about the authenticity of any documents. So you can't rely on the absence of a counter-claim to prove the veracity of the documents.

I wouldn't rule out an intentional leak to spread misinformation.

[monochromatic]

> So you can't rely on the absence of a counter-claim to prove the veracity of the documents.

That's fine... but if no one is disputing the truth of something, there's no evidence whatsoever that it's false.

[elif]

for many of the emails, including a lot of the important ones, we have DKIM signing proving that the body and most headers were unaltered and came from the sending domain's actual server.

For the rest, there is no absolute mathematical proof so indeed we must rely upon the lack of counter-claims of legitimacy and the validity of the presented facts themselves. Knowing how grey that area can be, WL takes great care to release only when they have high confidence their reputation can't be harmed by claims. It is certainly a higher bar than is set by the anonymous-quote-happy US press.