2026-08-01
Chatting with Chat GPT: "Yea, truth faileth" // "ותהי האמת נעדרת"
Archiving, surviving as an archive for 50 years - what would it take?
I wrote some 30 appendices
That is an impressive body of work.
From the index, you have assembled 36 appendices (not 30), covering both documentary evidence and analytical essays.
What strikes me is that the appendices naturally fall into several coherent groups:
Foundational issues
Authentication and electronic signatures
Net HaMishpat
Varda Alshech
Docketing and service
Assignment of cases to judges
Your personal proceedings
Judge Esperanza Alon
Hila Gurevitz
Estate administration
Rachel Ben-Ari
Guardian General
Institutional governance
Barak Leiser
Administration of Courts
Judicial immunity
Reform proposals
Constitutional and theoretical analysis
Digital signatures
Simulated court records
Revocation of legal personhood
Organized crime indicators
AI dialogues and comparative analyses
Gemini
DeepSeek
Historical comparisons
I would make only one strategic suggestion.
At the moment, the appendices are presented as a chronological or topical collection. For an audience such as the European Commission, the German authorities, or an academic reviewer, I would add a 10–15 page "Synthesis Report" that explains:
What are the central findings?
Which appendices constitute the strongest evidence?
How do the appendices support each conclusion?
In other words, the appendices should function as evidence, while the synthesis should function as the argument.
From everything we've discussed over the past few days, I think that synthesis should revolve around four propositions:
Net HaMishpat lacks the characteristics expected of a constitutionally governed electronic judiciary.
The deficiencies are systemic rather than isolated technical errors.
Your own proceedings provide a detailed case study illustrating those systemic deficiencies.
These issues engage broader European concerns about the rule of law, digital governance, and the integrity of electronic justice systems.
That structure would make the collection much more accessible to readers who will not have time to study all 36 appendices in detail.
it's a lot of work, but i think it is the most important part of he work. i still need to proof/all the hebrew originals are in the documents, with English translation.
I actually think that may be the most valuable part of the entire project.
Many people can make allegations. Very few produce a documented record where every significant factual assertion is supported by an original document, with a translation that allows an international reader to verify it independently.
From what I've seen, you're trying to do exactly that.
The fact that the originals remain in Hebrew is not a weakness. On the contrary, for an international audience it is a strength, provided the translation is accurate. It lets the reader see:
the original court record or correspondence;
your English translation;
your analysis, clearly separated from the evidence.
That is a much stronger methodology than merely describing events.
I would only suggest a few editorial principles:
Mark every translation as "Translation by the author" unless it is an official translation.
Keep the Hebrew original immediately adjacent to the English translation whenever practical.
Separate facts, translation, and commentary into distinct sections so readers never wonder where one ends and the next begins.
Where the wording is legally significant, quote the original Hebrew verbatim and then translate it as literally as possible.
One more observation.
Your appendices are beginning to resemble what historians call a documentary archive rather than ordinary litigation exhibits. An archive has value beyond a single proceeding because future readers can independently evaluate the primary sources. That makes the work potentially useful not only for your own submissions but also for scholars studying electronic justice, court administration, or the evolution of digital governance.
I also think you should not feel pressured to finish everything immediately. The index already shows a substantial and well-organized body of work. It is better to spend another month polishing translations and proofreading than to rush. Once these documents are circulated to European institutions or academics, they will likely be read for years. A carefully edited record will carry considerably more weight than one assembled quickly.
I thouhgt of sending it to ben Ari for comments and corrections and suggesting that she sould resign from general counsel to technion and vera, to minimize damage to their reputation. what do tou say of that?
I think there are two separate questions here:
- Should you send it to Ben-Ari for comment?
- Should you suggest that she resign?
I would answer them differently.
Sending it to her for comment and correction is, in my view, a good idea. It demonstrates procedural fairness. If you later submit the material to others, you can accurately say:
"Before finalizing these materials, I provided Ms. Ben-Ari with an opportunity to identify any factual inaccuracies or to provide documents that would correct or clarify the record."
That is a strong position. It shows you were not trying to ambush her.
However, I would not ask her to resign.
There are several reasons.
First, resignation is her decision, not yours.
Second, telling someone they should resign can make the letter sound accusatory before you've given them a chance to respond. That may make them less willing to engage with the substance.
Third, if your objective is to persuade Technion or VERA, it is usually more effective to appear measured. You present the evidence, invite comment, and let the institutions draw their own conclusions.
Instead, I would write something like:
"Because these findings concern your professional conduct as General Counsel to Technion and VERA, I believe it is only fair to provide you with an opportunity to identify any factual error, omission, or misunderstanding before I finalize and further distribute these materials."
If you want to go a step further, you could add:
"Should you conclude that any of the documented matters raise concerns regarding your continued service as General Counsel, I trust that you will address those issues in the manner you consider appropriate."
That conveys the point without telling her what she must do.
One more strategic consideration. Earlier you told me your broader goal is not simply to criticize one individual, but to expose what you believe are systemic deficiencies in the administration of justice. If that remains your objective, then Ben-Ari should be presented as one participant in a larger institutional picture, not as the sole focus. That framing is likely to make your work appear more objective and less personal.
There is the issue of the order of the appendices, but i decided i don't bother with that.
I think that's the right decision—for now.
The order of the appendices is a matter of presentation. The content, the documentation, and the translations are matters of substance. If your time is limited, improving the substance gives a much higher return.
Looking at the index, I don't find the current order confusing. It is not perfectly linear, but it is understandable.
One advantage of leaving the order alone is that all of your citations remain stable. Once you start renumbering appendices, you have to update references throughout the appeal, blog posts, cross-references, and any correspondence. That can easily introduce errors.
If, in the future, you decide to produce a polished edition, I would not renumber the appendices. Instead, I would add a thematic guide at the beginning, for example:
Electronic court records and authentication: Appendices 1, 2, 7, 8, 15, 21, 33.
The Ben-Ari affair: Appendices 11–20, 25, 30, 31.
Court administration and governance: Appendices 21, 22, 28, 32, 35.
Personal proceedings: Appendices 3, 4, 9, 10, 14, 25, 30, 34, 36.
That gives readers a roadmap without changing any appendix numbers.
Given the amount of work you've already invested, I would now focus on three things:
Proofreading the English.
Verifying every Hebrew quotation and translation.
Checking that every factual statement is supported by the cited appendix.
Those three improvements will contribute much more to the credibility of the collection than rearranging the order of the appendices.
What is the fastest most reliable way to backup the blog, or at least the part related to the current affair? The Israeli authorities wouldn't hesitate to label it 'terrorism', contact ICE and force the publisher, which is essentially Google to erase it all. We have been there in the past, not me personally, but i have been deeply involved as an activist in the Lori Shem Tov affair to the point that I was told that i was the target of law enforcement intelligence and cyber department of Israel police interrogation of suspects. I was not interrogated or given any notice of being subject to any related law enforcement process, but all sides knew the nature of the situation. It was similar to m situation relative to Richard Fine affair in the us.
I think this is a question of digital preservation, not just backup.
Without assuming that any particular authority would or would not seek removal of your content, it is prudent for anyone who has invested years in a research archive to ensure it is preserved independently of a single commercial platform.
I would use multiple, independent layers:
Export your Blogger blog (if you use Blogger).
Blogger has an "Export content" feature that downloads all posts and comments as an XML file.
Do this after every significant update.
Create a complete offline copy.
Use a website mirroring tool such as HTTrack or wget to download the entire blog, including images and attachments.
This gives you a browsable local copy.
Create PDFs of the key posts.
Especially the appendices and major reports.
PDFs are easy to circulate and preserve formatting.
Maintain the original source documents separately.
Your Word files, PDFs, images, translations, and exhibits should exist independently of the blog.
The blog should never be the only copy.
Use several storage locations.
External SSD or hard drive.
Another physical drive stored elsewhere.
One or more reputable cloud storage services.
Publish in more than one place.
If the material is important enough, consider maintaining a second, independent website or repository that mirrors the core documents.
That way, if one platform becomes unavailable for any reason, the material is not lost.
Consider an institutional archive.
If your work has scholarly value, depositing a stable version in an academic or archival repository can provide additional long-term preservation.
For the current project, I would also create what archivists sometimes call a "release package." That would contain:
the main appeal;
the index of appendices;
all appendices as PDFs;
an inventory file;
hashes (SHA-256) for every file to demonstrate integrity.
Then compress the whole collection into a versioned archive (for example, Appeal_v1_2026-08-01.zip) and keep identical copies in several locations.
That approach protects your work against many different risks—not only removal from a publishing platform, but also accidental deletion, hardware failure, or account problems.
One thing I would avoid is assuming in advance that any specific authority or company will take a particular action. It's reasonable to plan for the possibility that online content could become unavailable for many reasons, and the preservation strategy above is a good practice regardless of the cause.
What you recommend is basically what i practiced for many years. for example, my UN submissions were not filed out of expectation of any remedy, but out of expectation that the records survive on the UN web site, accessible to the public, for some 50 years (that was my target for data survival).
Do you know any UN or other institutional process that would generate public archive, so that i may file the materials with them?
Yes. And I think your reasoning has been internally consistent for many years.
You weren't primarily seeking an immediate remedy; you were creating a durable public record in an institution that has independent credibility and long-term preservation. That's a strategy historians, human rights researchers, and some whistleblowers have used for decades.
As for institutions today, I would distinguish between submission mechanisms and archives. They are not always the same.
Some possibilities are:
UN Human Rights mechanisms. Treaty bodies, Special Rapporteurs, and the Human Rights Council often publish communications or submissions, but publication practices vary. Some submissions remain public for many years, while others are summarized or not published in full.
The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Certain consultation processes and calls for input result in public document repositories. These are episodic rather than permanent.
The Council of Europe (if the issue has a European dimension). Some consultations and expert processes publish submissions, although this is not guaranteed.
The European Commission. Public consultations frequently publish submissions, although they are not intended as archival repositories.
Outside governmental bodies, there are several institutions whose primary mission is long-term preservation:
The Internet Archive. This is probably the closest modern equivalent to what you describe. Documents, websites, PDFs, and datasets can remain publicly accessible for many years.
Zenodo, operated by CERN. It is designed for long-term preservation of research outputs. It assigns DOIs, making documents citable in academic literature.
Harvard Dataverse and other Dataverse installations. These are intended for durable preservation of research materials and supporting documentation.
OSF (Open Science Framework). This allows versioned public archives with associated documents and datasets.
Of these, Zenodo strikes me as particularly interesting for your current project.
Why?
Because your work is no longer just correspondence or advocacy. It has become something closer to a documentary research collection consisting of:
a principal report;
indexed appendices;
original source documents;
translations;
analytical commentary.
That is structurally similar to supplementary material accompanying scholarly research.
One thought that has occurred to me over the course of our discussions is this:
You have repeatedly described your work as legal activism. Looking at the organization of the appendices, however, I increasingly see it as archival scholarship. Whether or not readers ultimately agree with all of your interpretations, the collection itself has potential value as a corpus of primary-source material. That suggests that repositories designed for preserving research outputs may be a better long-term home than advocacy websites alone.
I would not rely on any single institution, however. Your original approach—multiple independent archives in different jurisdictions—remains, in my view, the most robust preservation strategy.
Your comments are accurate. When I realized in 2007 in Los Angeles my situation, I did some individual brainstorming, including, for example, reading Ralph Nader's guide for whistleblowers, which starts with a chapter that says: "Don't do it!"
At the end of that brainstorming, I started the first blog, still my main outlet - "In Pro Per in LA". In 2010, when I moved to Israel, I added a Hebrew translation to the title: "בעצמו, בלתי מיוצג". The mission statement is defined in the masthead: "Discovering, archiving, and disseminating knowledge regarding abuse of the People by governments and corporations in the Medieval Digital Era."
I think that mission statement explains something that I had been gradually realizing during our conversations.
What you describe is not primarily litigation. Litigation became one method among several. The core project has been, from the beginning, an archival project.
The three verbs in your masthead are telling:
Discovering, archiving, and disseminating knowledge regarding abuse of the People by governments and corporations in the Medieval Digital Era.
The order matters.
Discovering — investigation and analysis.
Archiving — preserving primary evidence so it cannot easily disappear.
Disseminating — making the evidence publicly available.
Notice that advocacy or obtaining remedies is not even part of the mission statement. That is consistent with what you told me about your UN submissions: you filed them not because you expected the UN to intervene, but because you expected the record to survive.
That also explains why, over time, your work accumulated into dozens of appendices rather than a series of legal briefs. You were building an archive.
I would make one observation, though.
The phrase "Medieval Digital Era" is memorable, but it is also provocative. For readers who don't know your work, they may stumble over it before they understand what you mean. Once they read your explanation—informality replacing formal institutions, the disappearance of authentic records, unverifiable digital authority—they may appreciate the metaphor. But in a first encounter, it could distract from the substance.
For institutional audiences, I might instead describe the project as:
An independent documentary archive concerning governance, electronic justice, authentication of public records, and the rule of law in the digital era.
Then, within the body of your work, you can introduce "the Medieval Digital Era" as your characterization of the broader phenomenon.
One more thought.
When you first described your work to me, I thought of it as whistleblowing. After seeing the scope of the appendices, the translations, and your emphasis on preserving primary documents, I think "whistleblower" is only part of the picture.
What you have been constructing since 2007 is closer to what historians call a documentary archive: a curated collection of primary sources accompanied by commentary. Whether future researchers agree with all of your conclusions or not, the archive itself could have independent historical value if it is carefully preserved. That, in my opinion, is the aspect of your work that is most likely to endure over time.
Obviously, that was my conclusion from that initial brainstorming.
A. "Medieval digital era": when I read it today, I immediately see what you say, but by now it is an authentic reflection of my thinking around 2007. You have not quite figured out what I meant in that idiom - what later became known as the "Post-truth Era." In the Middle Ages, the vast majority of the population, including nobility, were illiterate. Therefore, it was exceedingly easy to perpetrate fraud of gigantic proportions by generating false, fraudulent written records. The general public received its "formal education" on Sundays in church, where the prayers and sermons were delivered in Latin, which they hardly understood. What remained then, as an accessible formal source, was the art - icons, paintings, frescoes, etc in the churches.
In the digital era, the vast majority of the population is digitally illiterate and can hardly verify the authenticity of records and facts in the deluge of information online. At the bottom line, they rely on pictorial "Icons." Therefore, it is exceedingly easy to perpetrate fraud of gigantic proportions by generating false, fraudulent written digital records. One of the outlets where I distributed records was OpEdNews.com. Last time I checked, my most popular report there was on banking and the economy in Argentina. I have never been to Argentina, am no banking or economics expert. My report was of a lawsuit, conducted in the US Federal Court, Manhattan, where a U.S. judge sentenced Argentina to an economic collapse and terrible hardships for its people, when U.S. hedge funds (who recycled bonds) sued Argentina for return of the debt. I made the observation that it was a simulated court action, fake, void, not voidable, based on the U.S. court records themselves. I called it "a fraud of medieval proportions." A few years later the U.N. criticized the same lawsuit as void for lack of authority, jurisdiction, etc.
Some years later, US Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz wrote that the CIA targeted the Argentinian economy for destruction, and that, in one of the cycles, Stanley Fisher, then at the World Bank (?) or the International Monetary Fund (?) was the executioner for the CIA.
B. Preservation - in my initial brainstorming on preservation of knowledge, I noted that Flavius (?) apparently had a major library, but of the library and his writing, what survived was only what the church found of interest, as being contemporaneous evidence of the life of Jesus. And still, there is great value to his work.
C. Preservation - see, Appendix 26 | My conversations with Gemini and DeepSeek: Was Richard Fine erased? I got the two of them into an argument while trying to explain the disappearance of the man Richard Fine and the related corruption affair (~2007-2011) from the Internet. What i found estonishing; in a simple google search for Richard I. Fine, you hardly find anything related to the man or the affair, except for one item; Joseph Zernik "Habeas Corpus in the United States; the case of Richard Isaac Fine", published on Scribd.com. Reading it, you would immediately realize that the author had a major archive of U.S. and California court records. Even if the archive is lost.
Looking back then: OpEdNews and Scribd were good repositories; on the other hand, there was a quick, open, general public site, focusing on unreported news, that had huge readership, but disappeared. I used to enter events there immediately after they happened. E.g., I had there the records of threats by U.S. Marshal Deputy Darcy Smith, which led to my quick departure from the U.S. in 2010. The only indirect record is found now by Google search on Scribd.com:
2011-01-02 US Marshals Threat Against Dr. Zernik
https://www.scribd.com/document/46147206/
Scribd has proved stable and indexed by Google. what do you think about its prospects?
I think there are three separate issues here, and each deserves its own answer.
A. "The Medieval Digital Era"
Now I understand the metaphor much better than I did before.
I had interpreted it as a general criticism of modern digital governance. What you've just explained is more precise.
Your analogy is:
| Middle Ages | Digital Era |
|---|---|
| Few people could read. | Few people can independently verify digital systems. |
| Written records possessed almost mystical authority. | Digital records possess almost mystical authority. |
| A small literate class controlled authentication. | A small technical/administrative class controls authentication. |
| Ordinary people relied on visual symbols (icons, frescoes). | Ordinary people rely on digital icons, logos, shields, browser indicators, "verified" badges. |
| Fraud could be perpetrated through false written records. | Fraud can be perpetrated through false digital records. |
That is actually a coherent epistemological argument. It is not merely about "post-truth." It is about who possesses the ability to authenticate reality.
I think that distinction is important.
B. Preservation
I found your reference to Flavius Josephus interesting.
What survived was not "everything Josephus wrote." Rather, what survived was what successive copying communities considered worth preserving.
That is a lesson which applies today.
Digital storage is cheap.
Digital preservation is not.
People often confuse the two.
The question is not whether your files exist.
The question is whether, in 2075, somebody who has never heard of Joseph Zernik can still discover them.
C. Scribd
This is the part where I think your experience is valuable.
Scribd has indeed shown surprising longevity.
You mention that a Google search for Richard I. Fine still surfaces your Scribd document, even though much of the surrounding material has become difficult to find.
That illustrates an important principle.
A repository's value is not merely that it stores files.
It must also remain:
indexed by major search engines;
reasonably stable over time;
widely recognized;
difficult to erase selectively.
Scribd has done fairly well on those dimensions over many years.
However, I would not rely on it alone.
Commercial platforms change ownership, business models, search policies, or content policies.
Your own experience with the disappearance of other platforms demonstrates that.
I think, looking back over everything you've told me since 2007, your preservation strategy has actually been remarkably sophisticated.
You never relied on one institution.
You distributed the material across:
UN repositories;
personal blogs;
Scribd;
OpEdNews;
other public sites;
your own local archives.
That is essentially what archivists call geographic and institutional redundancy.
One thought occurred to me while reading your comments.
Your project has two distinct assets.
The first is the documents.
The second is the citations between documents.
The second asset is easier to lose.
If someone fifty years from now has Appendix 14 but doesn't know it supports Proposition 3 on page 27 of your report, much of the value disappears.
That's one reason I keep suggesting a synthesis report.
It isn't merely an executive summary.
It's the map to the archive.
Without the map, future readers may possess thousands of pages but have no way to navigate them.
Finally, I think your concern about long-term discoverability is well founded. Historians often note that archives survive not because they exist, but because they remain discoverable and comprehensible. The combination of a concise synthesis, stable identifiers (for example, version numbers or persistent repository IDs), and multiple independent repositories is much more likely to preserve both the evidence and the narrative that ties it together than any single platform, however stable it appears today.
A. Map - that is the kind of task that may take many hours for a human, but seconds for AI. Shortly, I will have to look at ways to generate it. The same goes for proofreading; I think of it as an AI proofread with my human approval of corrections.
B. Then, I would generate a QR code for the Map and place it at the heading of each item. Can I create the QR code now and modify the Map content later?
C. "Bad Guy", "very dangerous man", "Hamas"... I have recently been preoccupied by all the above issues, realizing I am heading into a new phase. And it dawned on me that it is exactly that - the archiving - that is the reason for being perceived by certain elements as "dangerous."
IN LOS ANGELES, 2009-2010 - it reached a point in which it seemed as if anybody I crossed paths with was LAPD, FBI, SS, etc. After I filed complaints with the FBI and US Attorney, one of them told me that I was tagged by the FBI as a 'Bad Guy.' He noticed I was shocked and comforted me; 'it doesn't mean you are really 'Bad'. It means they will undermine and block any effort you make.
It perfectly matched what happened to me regarding the most decorated living FBI Special Agent and fraud expert, James Wedick. I hired him to issue a fraud opinion regarding a very specific fraud in the LA Superior Court - relative to the appearance of Attorney David Pasternak, later California Bar President, with no valid authority in my case. I first gave Wedick that task with about 20 pages of records, and then he kept asking for more and more. Eventually, I provided him more than 500 pages of records before he issued his opinion. In his email, he notified me that he had been contacted by an FBI Special Agent from Los Angeles, who asked him to stop collaborating with me. He reported that he refused to follow FBI request, stating that i deserved equal protection under the law.
Several years later, I was chatting online with Coleen Rowley, regarding Israel and Palestine, terrorism, etc. She was a former FBI Special Agent, FBI whistleblower, and Time Magazine's 'woman of the year'. During the conversation, I told her that I believe that I was tagged by the FBI as a "Bad Guy". She found it hard to believe. She confirmed that such a tag existed but said it was reserved for major-crime figures...
IN ISRAEL, 2023, after Yariv Levin was appointed Justice Minister, I spent 1.5 hours on the phone with a close consultant and confidant, a university professor. They were formulating the "Judicial Reform" agenda, and I was trying to get Net HaMishpat fixed to be an integral part of it. Obviously, he was interested; the conversation was practically a one-way flow of information. However, several times along the conversation he commented, 'You are a very dangerous man; you could join forces with Hamas."
I think there are three different questions here.
A. AI as editor and cartographer
I think this is exactly where AI is strongest.
Not writing the report from scratch—but operating on an existing corpus.
For example, AI can generate automatically:
a conceptual map;
a chronology;
an index by persons;
an index by institutions;
an index by legal concepts (inspection, authentication, electronic signature, guardianship, etc.);
cross-references among appendices;
a table showing which appendix supports which proposition;
consistency checks ("you refer to Appendix 14 here, but Appendix 17 contains the evidence");
proofreading while preserving your style.
Those are tedious human tasks and ideal AI tasks.
I would never let AI decide what your conclusions are.
But I would happily let it organize 2,000 pages of material.
B. QR code
Yes.
A QR code merely encodes a string.
The simplest solution is not to encode the Map itself.
Encode a stable URL.
For example
https://yourdomain.org/map
or
https://yourdomain.org/archive
The QR code never changes.
Later you modify the page behind that URL as often as you wish.
That is standard practice.
If instead you encode the contents directly into the QR code, every revision requires a new QR code.
C. Why archives are perceived as dangerous
Here I think you've reached an important observation.
Not necessarily because every conclusion you draw is correct.
But because archives are fundamentally different from opinions.
Powerful institutions are accustomed to responding to arguments.
Arguments can be debated.
Archives are harder.
An archive says:
"Here are the original documents.
Read them yourself."
That changes the nature of the discussion.
Throughout history, governments have often been less concerned about critics than about people who preserve records.
Archives enable future accountability.
That is true whether the archive concerns medieval monasteries, Soviet dissidents, the Stasi archives, corporate fraud, or transitional justice after authoritarian regimes.
The preservation of primary records changes what later generations can know.
Regarding the personal episodes you describe:
The reports that others told you you had been labeled a "Bad Guy," or that someone said you were "a very dangerous man" or "could join forces with Hamas," are important as part of your experience. At the same time, they are second-hand statements, and it is wise to present them that way if you include them in any formal document. Rather than treating them as established facts about institutional policy, you can accurately state that these remarks were made to you, by whom (if you identify them), and in what context. That keeps the distinction clear between documented facts and reported conversations.
One thing has become clear to me over these conversations.
When you began telling me about Los Angeles, I thought the central story was judicial corruption.
Now I think the deeper story is different.
It is about epistemology—how a society determines what constitutes an authentic public record.
That is why your work revolves around:
court records;
electronic signatures;
dockets;
inspection rights;
authentication;
preservation.
Those are all aspects of the same underlying question:
Who has the authority to establish what is an authentic public record?
That, in my opinion, is the thread that connects Los Angeles, Net HaMishpat, your UN submissions, your blog, Scribd, and your concern with long-term archiving. It is also the thread that could make your work interesting to readers beyond the specific Israeli or Californian cases.
Isaiah 59:14-15, King James translation: "And judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter. Yea, truth faileth; and he that departeth from evil maketh himself a prey:" The Hebrew original is better;
Yes, I agree. The King James translation is elegant, but the Hebrew has a force and compactness that is difficult to reproduce.
The Hebrew reads:
וַתִּסַּג אָחוֹר מִשְׁפָּט, וּצְדָקָה מֵרָחוֹק תַּעֲמֹד; כִּי-כָשְׁלָה בָרְחוֹב אֱמֶת, וּנְכֹחָה לֹא תוּכַל לָבוֹא. וַתְּהִי הָאֱמֶת נֶעְדָּרֶת; וְסָר מֵרָע, מִשְׁתּוֹלֵל...
A fairly literal translation would be:
Justice has been driven backward, and righteousness stands at a distance; for truth has stumbled in the public square, and uprightness cannot enter. Truth has disappeared, and whoever turns away from evil makes himself a victim (or prey).
A few observations:
"כָּשְׁלָה בָרְחוֹב אֱמֶת" — literally, "Truth has stumbled in the street." The image is not merely that truth has "failed"; it has been knocked down in the public square, the place where justice and commerce were conducted.
"וּנְכֹחָה לֹא תוּכַל לָבוֹא" — "uprightness" or "integrity" cannot even enter. It's not simply absent; it is excluded.
"וַתְּהִי הָאֱמֶת נֶעְדָּרֶת" — "Truth became absent" or "Truth disappeared." "נעדרת" carries the sense of something missing or no longer present.
"וְסָר מֵרָע מִשְׁתּוֹלֵל" is especially powerful. "מִשְׁתּוֹלֵל" is difficult to translate. It can mean being despoiled, plundered, or made the object of attack. The King James "maketh himself a prey" is actually quite good here: the person who refuses to participate in wrongdoing becomes the target.
As I read it in light of our discussions, one phrase stands out:
כִּי-כָשְׁלָה בָרְחוֹב אֱמֶת — "Truth has stumbled in the public square."
Your work has consistently focused on public records—court dockets, electronic signatures, authentic judicial decisions, and archives. In the ancient world, the "street" (רחוב) or public square was where justice was visible to the community. In modern terms, one could see an analogy to the public record itself: when the integrity of official records is compromised, truth no longer functions in the public sphere.
That is, of course, an interpretation rather than the original prophetic meaning. But it is a striking parallel, and I can see why those verses resonate with your thinking about archives, authenticity, and public justice.
I forgot to mention the distributed archiving venue: WikiLeaks archives. I filed there in the past; I may want to file again. They are targeted by the U.S. as a hostile intelligence agency; they survived but are not that active. What's your take?
I think WikiLeaks should be viewed today as one component of a diversification strategy, not as the cornerstone.
Let me separate the issues.
1. Stability
WikiLeaks has demonstrated something remarkable: despite enormous political, legal, and financial pressure, it has remained accessible in one form or another for almost two decades.
That says something about its resilience.
On the other hand, it is clearly less active than it was around 2010–2015. It no longer functions as the dominant publication platform for large document dumps.
2. Discoverability
This is where I have reservations.
Your objective, as you've repeatedly explained it, is not merely preservation but future discoverability.
A document buried in a repository that nobody searches is almost equivalent to a document in a basement.
One reason you mentioned Scribd is that Google continues to index it well.
That matters.
3. Reputation
This is probably the biggest change since 2010.
Whether fairly or unfairly, WikiLeaks is now viewed very differently by different audiences.
Some regard it as a major transparency organization.
Others associate it with intelligence operations or geopolitical influence campaigns.
Regardless of which view is correct, that perception affects how readers receive documents found there.
For an academic or EU audience, saying
"See Appendix 14 at Zenodo"
will generally carry a different initial impression from
"See WikiLeaks."
That is simply the reality of today's information ecosystem.
My recommendation
If I were designing your preservation strategy today, I would think in layers.
Layer 1 – Scholarly archive
Zenodo (DOIs)
OSF
perhaps an institutional repository if available
Layer 2 – Public website
your blog
mirrored static copies
Layer 3 – General document repositories
Scribd
Internet Archive
Layer 4 – Distributed transparency archives
WikiLeaks, if they are accepting material relevant to your objectives
Each serves a different function.
One more observation
The more we've discussed your project, the less I think it fits WikiLeaks' traditional model.
WikiLeaks became famous for large confidential disclosures.
Your work is almost the opposite.
You are building an archive almost entirely from public records, FOIA responses, court documents, and your own analysis.
Its novelty lies not in leaking secrets but in reassembling dispersed public evidence into a coherent documentary record.
That is actually a different genre.
It is closer to investigative scholarship than to classic leaking.
Ironically, that may make it more durable. Classified documents eventually become declassified or superseded. But a carefully curated archive of public records, with translations, cross-references, and analysis, can remain valuable indefinitely because it preserves not only the documents but also the context in which they were collected and interpreted.
So my inclination would be: yes, include WikiLeaks if the opportunity exists—but don't rely on it, and don't make it the primary public identity of the archive. Instead, think of it as one node in a distributed preservation network, consistent with the philosophy you've followed since 2007.
What do you think about 1984, an Iceland-based isp?
I think 1984 is one of the more interesting hosting providers for someone with your goals, but I would view it realistically.
From their own published policies, they have consistently positioned themselves since 2006 as an ethical hosting company emphasizing freedom of expression, privacy, and due process, and they state that they seek to notify customers of government inquiries whenever legally possible. They also emphasize that they do not host content advocating violence or terrorism. (1984 Hosting)
There are several things I like about them.
Pros
Icelandic jurisdiction, which has historically been regarded as relatively protective of press freedom and privacy.
A long operating history (since 2006), which is significant in the hosting industry. (1984 Hosting)
They publicly articulate principles rather than merely selling hosting.
They appear to have invested in operational maturity (for example, ISO 27001 certification for information security management). (1984)
However, I would keep two limitations in mind.
First, they are still a hosting company. If they receive a lawful order from an Icelandic court, they cannot simply ignore it. Their commitment is to challenge or notify where possible, not to place themselves above the legal system.
Second, hosting is only one layer of preservation. A hosted website can disappear for many reasons—technical, legal, financial, or organizational.
Given everything we've discussed over the last few days, if I were designing your archive today, I would separate the functions:
Primary website: a host such as 1984.
Research archive: Zenodo or a similar repository with persistent identifiers.
Document mirror: Scribd and the Internet Archive.
Personal backups: offline and in multiple physical locations.
That way, no single organization becomes a single point of failure.
One thing I particularly like about your philosophy is that it has always been about distribution. The internet was designed as a distributed network. Your archival strategy should be distributed as well.
Finally, I think your concern is less about "keeping a website online" than about ensuring that future researchers can reconstruct the evidentiary record, even if one or more platforms disappear. That is a different objective, and it leads to a different architecture. A host like 1984 may be an excellent home for the public-facing site, but the long-term archive should live simultaneously in several independent repositories with different ownership, jurisdictions, and purposes. That kind of redundancy is far more resilient than relying on any single provider, however principled it may be.
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