WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious ‘Insurance’ File
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Summary

July 30, 2010: Shortly after releasing more than 77,000 thousand secret documents on the Afghanistan War - and facing strong criticism from the government of the United States for it - the secret-spilling site WikiLeaks has posted a heavily-encrypted file titled "insurance" to both its own website and a torrent size. The file is 1.5 GB large and thus dwarfs everything else at their site.

There is speculation that this file contains additional secrets which would be released in case something happens to the founder of the site. This might include files that the informant who sent the Afghanistan Files said he had included, including a video of a battle where allegedly more than a 100 civilians were killed, most of them children.

In the meantime, a spokesman for the Taliban has said that they will be using the original documents to hunt down informants who have assisted the ISAF forces and Assange has also managed to publicise the names and addresses of the entire Iraqi Jewish population, making it highly likely that they will be killed or forced to leave.

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Game and Story Use

  • The passcode for that file would pretty much the perfect MacGuffin.
    • Imagine the following scenario: The CIA wants to secretly "dispose" of everyone who knows (or even might know) the passcode, Al Qaeda wants to hunt them down to torture the code out of them (or alternatively kidnap their family members to blackmail them)… and the PCs are caught in the middle. Perhaps they are hired to protect the individual in question, or perhaps the factions believe (correctly or not) that one of the PCs knows the passcode - which would make them hunted…
  • Here is another worry: What if possible war crimes are only the least of the secrets hidden in this file? What if releasing this file would shatter the Masquerade (i.e., it proves that vampires, werewolves, fairies, wizards etc. live among us) - or it contains proof of the existence of the Cthulhu Mythos (or a scan of the Necronomicon)? Suddenly, all sorts of supernatural organizations become very interested in those passcodes as well…
  • What happens if the "insurance" file gets broken and decrypted? Perhaps it's released to the world without even WikiLeaks meaning to let it go. Perhaps just certain governments, or even organized crime gets their hands on it. Instead of being a McGuffin, this could be the catalyst explaining why the world looks so different Twenty Minutes Into The Future.
  • Alternatively the "Insurance" file may just be 1.5GB of cruft, hoisted onto the site in the hope that US.gov has enough guilty secrets that they will imagine the blackmail potential into it. But unless the file is pad-cyphered (which will make it hellishly difficult to dump into the public domain), I wouldn't trust it to be safe from being cracked by a government level agency within a few weeks.
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