Want to blackmail someone and the information is digital? According to NewScientist (21 February 2015), Dark Secrets (paywall) is the place to go:
Darkleaks could facilitate all kinds of disclosure, positive and negative, via an anonymous marketplace. The service is available to download online as a free software package and its source code has been published openly online via code-sharing website Github. Users can upload a file with a description that can be viewed by potential buyers browsing the marketplace. This is all done within the software itself.
Its developers say that individuals may wish to use the service to anonymously auction off “trade secrets”, “military intelligence” and “proof of tax evasion” among other, rather more unsavoury, things.
Darkleaks promises to make transactions for this sort of material anonymous. A blog post announcing the tool insists: “There is no identity, no central operator and no interaction between leaker and buyers.”
Commenters on SatoshisGhost’s Twitter feed suggest there may be some limitations to how well this will work:
An owner of trade secrets could try to fish on their spying competitors. She could actually leak her own trade secrets, force competitors to burn bitcoins for these, then never reveal the secret.
Over at Coin Desk, the system’s developer gives his long range goals:
Amir Taaki, the project’s systems developer, told CoinDesk he hopes to “[devalue] business models based around proprietary secrecy” by providing a financial, rather than moral, incentive for insiders to reveal information.
This ties in with my observation of a few years ago, submitted to (but not published by) Andrew Sullivan, proprietor of The Dish (no longer active), that we may encounter a time where virtually no information can be considered truly private – all of it available for purchase, if you know it exists.
