Wikileaks is apparently on a mission to destroy whatever credibility they had left. They seem to be taking a leaf out of the IS playbook here, any random attack that is moderately successful gets claimed as one of theirs.
It isn't a week since they were extremely economical with the truth regarding Assange's internet access ('state actor cut off their internet' -> 'Ecuador has pulled the plug on Assange's laptop').
The best way to deal with this would have been to distance themselves from anybody doing this, the very worst is to suggest they have the ability to issue orders to those perpetrating these attacks.
With supporters like these they wouldn't need enemies to begin with, it's a very negative association and they're purposefully aligning themselves with these so called hackers.
I absolutely agree. What Wikileaks did for peace and democracy cannot be disputed but I could not say I am their supporter any more. I wonder how much of it is Assange's personality and questionable political views and how much is of it is campaign orchestrated by almost all-powerful secret services but it probably doesn't even matter at this point.
How important are they really? If they aren't trustworthy -- and I think there's a great case to be made for the fact that Assange is not -- what can wikileaks do that some other website can't?
They may not be discredited but you have to wonder what has been purposefully left out. Wikileaks as an institution depends very much on being perceived as a-political, simply a bunch of techies that will get your leaked documents out. Over the years they have shifted further and further to becoming a politically actve entity. Part of that is in response to the inevitable backlash to some of the released but that backlash was to be expected and the best way to deal with it would have been to ignore it.
Part of it may be because some of Wikileaks high value contacts are now in places where they are vulnerable (which adds weight to the call to Pardon Snowden, it would make it much easier for WL to release dirt on Putin and company, assuming they have any).
Assange set himself up to be easily corralled, not the smartest thing but he's not the first (and won't be the last) person that makes it into the limelight and ends up tripping up because of it.
Releases themselves can be independently verified, what data that is there that ends up labeled factually accurate is a great gift and I'm very happy they did what they did, however we will need more or other organizations like WL if we're to get the whole picture.
That would help in another way, you could immediately check for any modifications or selective withholding of information from the various sources.
Shutting it down or not is up to those that run WL, I'm fine with them continuing to leak whatever people send them, in the meantime I'd love to see a serious competitor.
> what can wikileaks do that some other website can't?
No fear of going against the establishment. How many websites that you know of reveal such classified information and get wide press coverage for the same?
I don't fully understand Assange's political motivations, but the world is definitely better off with Wikileaks than without.
Think about a world where every country has an embassy with an Assange in it, and document dumps like we've seen are a routine weapon in information warfare.
It's not a very nice world to imagine. The people who get hurt are ordinary citizens whose info winds up in these giant data drops.
> Think about a world where every country has an embassy with an Assange in it, and document dumps like we've seen are a routine weapon in information warfare.
Most countries have this already. It's called the CIA or whatever the local equivalent is. The only difference is that rather than publishing directly, they leak information to media outlets for dissemination.
> It's not a very nice world to imagine. The people who get hurt are ordinary citizens whose info winds up in these giant data drops.
Bah, it can't be worse. The ordinary citizens that can get hurt by stuff like this are in countries that can (and will) already hurt them for less or even nothing. The common citizens of western democracies have nothing to fear.
If one really believes this, I have a very hard time understanding how they can believe dragnet surveillance is an important issue. After all, nobody is really getting hurt, except in the places where they can already get hurt just for chewing gum in public. So why not let the government search everyone's email for signs of terrorism?
Why is privacy super important, one of our most fundamental rights, until some dude with white hair who wrote a bad port scanner decides it doesn't matter?
> If one really believes this, I have a very hard time understanding how they can believe dragnet surveillance is an important issue. After all, nobody is really getting hurt, except in the places where they can already get hurt just for chewing gum in public.
Why is that so hard to reconcile? You don't draw a line between individual privacy rights and those of government officials?
> So why not let the government search everyone's email for signs of terrorism?
If you're going to go that route, take it one step further and ask: Why not have a camera in everybody's house to prevent battery?
What "government officials" are you talking about? Wikileaks leaked, wholesale, the personal information of millions of Turkish citizens. For that matter, in its attempt to sway the US elections, Wikileaks dumped personal emails from random staffers --- not the John Podestas of the world, but the one-step-above-intern people making $40,000 to do public service work. Not just their work-related emails. Their personal emails.
What part of taking $40,000 a year in salary from the government entitles Wikileaks to the contents of your personal emails?
> What "government officials" are you talking about? Wikileaks leaked, wholesale, the personal information of millions of Turkish citizens. For that matter, in its attempt to sway the US elections, Wikileaks dumped personal emails from random staffers --- not the John Podestas of the world, but the one-step-above-intern people making $40,000 to do public service work. Not just their work-related emails. Their personal emails.
They didn't get the personal emails of Turkish citizens, they got the emails of Turkish citizens that were on the AKP email server. That would be like complaining that a company has access to my personal emails because I use my work email to communicate with my non-work friends. The AKP is the government in Turkey so drawing a distinction between them as a private party and them as the government is weak.
> What part of taking $40,000 a year in salary from the government entitles Wikileaks to the contents of your personal emails?
None and if you don't mix personal and work, it makes it much easier to have that separation. If it's all one soup then you can't complain that the part gets released with the whole.
Ditto for the DNC and RNC. I don't give a rats ass which side has their documents leaked. If it happens, I say it's fair game because, even though they're technically "private organizations", for all practical purposes they are the government.
If people want to avoid having "personal" comments and communications being impacted by this they need to maintain that separation and the poster child for what NOT to do is Hillary Clinton.
So, you disagree with Lessig. You feel, if someone gets involved in any way with politics, all bets are off. They should have Grugq-grade OPSEC or expect to read about their breakups on Pastebin.
> So, you disagree with Lessig. You feel, if someone gets involved in any way with politics, all bets are off. They should have Grugq-grade OPSEC or expect to read about their breakups on Pastebin.
Or just keep their political and personal lives separate.
Private individuals can be members of political parties and this is not something that should end up in the public domain. Really, this is about as easy to understand as it gets, in fact in many countries such party memberships and who you vote for is kept extremely secret to make sure that votes can be bought and/or to make sure that there is a place for 'unpopular' parties and candidates.
It's a cornerstone of democracy. Some countries take a much less serious approach to voter registration but especially in Turkey such lists are social dynamite and the release of those lists was absolutely uncalled for and irresponsible.
> Private individuals can be members of political parties and this is not something that should end up in the public domain. Really, this is about as easy to understand as it gets, in fact in many countries such party memberships and who you vote for is kept extremely secret to make sure that votes can't be bought and/or to make sure that there is a place for 'unpopular' parties and candidates.
> It's a cornerstone of democracy. Some countries take a much less serious approach to voter registration but especially in Turkey such lists are social dynamite and the release of those lists was absolutely uncalled for and irresponsible.
When there's a single ruling party, or two major parties in a system like the USA, the distinction between political parties and the government itself is blurred to point of being meaningless. For an even more extreme example of this see the CPC in China. They are the government, party business is government business, and vice versa. Hiding behind them being a private organization doesn't work.
> When there's a single ruling party, or two major parties in a system like the USA, the distinction between political parties and the government itself is blurred to point of being meaningless.
That's simply nonsense. The reason you might have two major parties forever is if you start making things like registered voters public. After all, who would dare to affiliate themselves with a third openly if that would lead to an immediate risk of being labeled in all kinds of nasty ways.
If Peter Thiel isn't immune to such pressure you can bet that ordinary citizens would be a lot easier to target.
The government and the citizens of a country are two disjoint entities, even in a 'one' party (that really means 'none') state.
Party membership does not equate to being a part of the government (though the one does not rule out the other).
Weapon? Think about a world where governments are run by representatives of the citizens using a system that is fully open to the citizens. Ability to communicate with them, for them to see every vote as it happens, and every communication between them. Both the elected and electorate seeing the same system, just with citizens having read-only access to some parts. It was impossible in the past for technical reasons, but could now happen. Spying and leaks would no longer be a weapon because the government would be open by default.
Wikileaks only coin was trust, they've lost that as far as I can see therefore their time of usefulness is more or less over. I really don't see how they will regain it at this point, sometimes a fresh start is better.
You are missing the possibility of selective withholding of information and possible changes of the information leaked to suit a political end.
Focusing on personalities is a mistake when it comes to mere technical ability, but when it becomes a political question I think it is a valid concern.
At a minimum I'd like to see another outlet next to WL.
The problem with OCCRP is that they don't have knowledge critical of Putin - they have knowledge about people like, say, one of his ex-colleague's kids but make the headline and lede of every Russia-related article they post about Putin and not the actual people involved. They don't seem to take this approach with any of the other countries they report on. Wikileaks are far from being the only ones to remark on this.
Zeynep Tufekci had a pretty ruthless takedown of their indiscriminate data dump during the Turkish coup. They put thousands of ordinary citizens in danger for no reason whatsoever. The material wasn't even vetted by someone who spoke the language.
“I actually never had a conclusion on who the uploader was, since it wasn’t central to my complaint about actions of Wikileaks: that they had misrepresented what the emails were, and that they had repeatedly publicized these doxing databases as “full data for our Turkey AKP emails + more”. I’m glad to see one party step up and take responsibility, but this doesn’t absolve Wikileaks of their role in all parts of this “leak” which never should have happened since it exposed no wrongdoing by a government or a powerful actor, merely the emails of ordinary people, and sensitive personal information of 20-30 million ordinary people. I tried to explain this directly to Wikileaks, but they blocked me after I started showing them tweets from Turkey’s leading anti-censorship activists who were disgusted and horrified by these actions, especially since they will now become a strong talking point for pro-censorship forces in Turkey.”
I find the fact that they blocked her especially obnoxious.
Indeed, personalities don't matter. To make an analogy, there are scientists whose personalities, and even political views, turn me off. But what matters is whether they do credible science.
If it's just somebody's hobby to release information, than that's as far as it goes. But in order for the information to be actionable, it requires interpretation, and then the process of choosing what information to release becomes important.
Imagine how a hypothetical scientist's results would be interpreted if it were known that they were only publishing the information that favored their own agenda -- personal, political, commercial, etc. Yet none of the data points that they publish can be discredited.
My position exactly. They did a lot of good work in their early days, and although they handled the Manning leaks badly, I agree that it contained information that needed public scrutiny. But after that, the success and power seems to have gone to Assange's head. Some early Wikileaks members left because of conflicts with Assange. And now it increasingly looks like it's all about him, and not about fighting censorship and fighting for transparency.
When they acted as a pass through for leaks and supported govt.transparency. Now its pretty clearly a partisan attack on dems with the min focus of profiting and keeping wikileaks generating cash (check out their store, which used to never be a thing, if you don't believe me).
The first set of large leaks wikileaks ever did were simply dumps. Now they spoonfeed their leaks, which they claim everyone has a right to know, at a peace that is most beneficial to them. Its clear their primary objective is no longer govt transparency, but their own profits.
So they should only leak documents if they also have leaks for their subjects' opponents? That's silly.
They have a store? Large sites cost money to run. Shocker.
They play the PR game? They have to because their opponents use tactics to drown them out. They also know the mainstream media has a very short attention span and the leaks would never be talked about again once the news cycle changes. Dropping all the emails at once would be foolish.
If you have a problem with it you are free to start a competing outlet...
By saying "We don't want this, please stop" the implicit assertion is that it's being done on your behalf, and there's no reason at this point in time to assume it is.
If what Assange and team are going through is any indication, the US Government has set a dangerous precedent in how it deals with people who go against the establishment, exposing it. They spin a narrative saying he broke certain laws, which is true, but doesn't explain how hard they are hitting Assange with behind the scenes activities to extradite him to the USA. The real motivation is to get back at Assange for publicly shaming the US Government on the world stage with various leaks.
> What will replace wikileaks?
Nothing, at least anytime soon. If wikileaks sticks to it's mission of opening Governments without the negative associations, as you said, that would suffice.
It's looking like the latest allegations against him of pedophilia were totally false and fabricated by supporters of the Clinton campaign.
Edit: the above link doesn't spell it out but the the toddandclare.com website it is talking about is allegedly a totally fake dating site that submitted a false report to the Bahamanian police and issued a fake report that they tried to pass off as being written by the UN. That reddit post is describing how they think the fake dating site is linked to a private intelligence company.
It's not clear who fabricated the claims, but they definitely took advantage of Clinton supporters' willingness to spread dubious attacks on her enemies and their tendency to go after anyone who questions them. I mean, a dating site claiming to be UN members and that the UN is conspiring against them is way out there in nutty conspiracy-theory land, but if you look at the comments on say the Daily Kos article about this people didn't just go along with their claims, they even accused people questioning them on places like Twitter of all kinds of nasty things.
Wikileaks does not operate much differently from any other media organization: they take anonymous tips, they publish them, they work with others to sensationalize their findings, they have internal biases, and they likely are beholden to whoever is financing or supporting them. If Wikileaks went away, it would be bad, but not much different than if any other news gathering and distributing service went away.
There is something really weird going on with the wikileaks twitter right now. Lots of odd posts, lots of misspellings, lots of links to things like Politico that they never linked to before. WAY more partisan than before.
This all started the day Equador cut off his net access. Assange has not been seen in public since.
How hard would it be for them to post a five second video clip with today's newspaper?
Current thinking is that wikileaks is no longer in control of their twitter account and/or Assange is missing.
Yeah. Until the Wikileaks twitter proves itself with a properly signed PGP message, I won't be trusting it anymore (but even then: If the twitter account has been compromised, maybe they also grabbed his PGP keys?). Also, I'm worried about the wellbeing of Assange. As you said, it shouldn't be too hard to give some sign of life, would it.
They released Part 15 of Podesta's emails 20 minutes ago. If someone had whisked away Assange and taken over his Twitter account, why would they continue the huge dump of emails?
Apparently nobody gives two shits of a fuck what is in those emails, no matter how unsettling their contents are. Why not keep publishing those while you destroy Wikileaks?
It is amazing to watch this. Even if you are the most dedicated Clinton supporter there is, you have to realize how one sided media orgs across the line can become.
> Even if you are the most dedicated Clinton supporter there is, you have to realize how one sided media orgs across the line can become.
You'd be surprised. My friends and family seem to be doubling down on it. They either outright don't care or they are encouraged by the underhandedness of it all.
I think you missed that nobody gives two shits because the contents are completely pedestrian except to conspiracy theorists who come up with conspiracies out of absolutely everything. Example: http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/10/wiki-10-draft-in-pro...
Pastebin seem popular tool for data dumps, and no one blames the owners for not redacting names. None also talks about the owner, their personality traits, and so on.
They learned the lesson. No laws and rules and rights are respected,nothing is sacred, the only thing keeping the beast called man from your throat is nuclear weapons. The reason why Putin gets away with Syria and Ukraine, all that keeps you alive in this unraveling world is a gun.
So why is this madness, its a nuclear weapons by a non-state entity, protecting rights that where once protected by constitutions.
"Wikileaks is apparently on a mission to destroy whatever credibility they had left."
It seems disingenuous to accuse them simultaneously of throwing credibility to the wind and of carefully phrasing sensitive on-going matters like the disruption of Assange's internet access.
They're also not claiming this attack "as one of theirs", they're saying a third party who supports them is _and asking them to stop_. That distinction seems pretty clear, and is not an endorsement, it's a call for de-escalation.
From where I'm sitting it's the US state machine continuing their mission to destroy Wikileaks' credibility, by misrepresenting their M.O. and cherry picking tweets like this... only now the left-wing public is eagerly joining in as opposed to only the right-wing calling for their heads for being traitors. The thing about negative associations is, it's posts like yours that create them.
But when Palin called it "palling around with terrorists", the US left-wing was rather opposed to that tactic.
I do find that there is something surreal about Twitter and the U.S. election, it has become a primary communication channel. We used to have 'I have a dream' speeches, nowadays it is lol txt tweets. Donald Trump's contribution to this tweet-thread is an example:
"Wow! @wikileaks admits its supporters are engaged in anti-American cyber-terrorism. No wonder Wikileakes loves me so much! #ImWithPutin"
Is that really from a presidential candidate? With a misspelling and a hashtag that is not what you would think would chime with the electorate. Plus some narcissism thrown in, just to make you cringe.
As for the tweet itself, I am amazed that Wikileaks thinks Assange is that much of a hero that they think that some anonymous fan would take down the internets in response to Assange's internets being taken down. There is some conspiracy minded thinking going on there, warranted or not, it is not the sort of mindset that Wikileaks need to be in if they are to function as an organisation. For instance, if some real conspiracy was going on, e.g. the U.S. military were running a 'cyberstorm exercise', then Wikileaks would have taken the bait. In so doing this takes discussion away from what Wikileaks seek to publish and towards the ethics of hacking.
Don't be too nostalgic. How much of the "I have a dream" speech can you directly recall beyond the first 140 characters? How much of our politics has been sound bites, misinformation, and trumped up ideology for the past few decades. There are villains in this age, but communication in 140 characters is not it.
Perhaps, then, twitter is not a malady but a symptom. The idea that we can whittle all of our ideas down to 140 characters has been building for decades, as you say, and only now manifests itself explicitly.
I don't think it's too nostalgic to pine for longer, epic exhortation of ideas. People still give memorable speeches (cf. Obama's "More Perfect Union"), and people still memorize the speeches of old. They give context to the soundbites and give depth when we want to go beyond the misquotes. But yes, blaming twitter goes too far, because it certainly has its place, too. It's just another tool of communication that has its benefits and pitfalls.
Not to mention the utter cruelty that set the backdrop for the I Have a Dream speech.
We get moving speeches when issues hit so close to home that the words serve as kindling for our deeper emotions. Every speech is inextricably tied to its own context.
Malcolm X, "The Ballot or the Bullet"
Ronald Reagan's Space Shuttle Challenger address
LBJ, "We Shall Overcome"
JFK, "Ich Bin Ein Berliner"
None of these speeches would have been as meaningful in a different time, with different events and feelings and happenings.
You pine for the days of long form communication and yet you can't even correctly determine who the source of the tweet you quote is (hint: not Donald Trump).
Fyi at this point there is speculation that something has happened with WikiLeaks, including Assange, who has not been seen for a week now since the early morning events at the Embassy (when his Internet was cut). Their subreddit has had their share of panic threads. Take this with a grain a salt, and I won't link to 4chan where this was first pointed out, but the last two days of tweets have also included typos/ missing letters that come close to spelling out "help him," overall to a small p-value.
No way, that's absurd (the "help him" message, not that Assange might be in danger). First, those tweets were not posted one after another, or even in chronological order. Second, it's a mixture of missing letters and extra letters, and for example in "recipie" they select "e", when it's obviously "i" that is the extra letter. And then why take three letters from "algorithim"? And most importantly, many of these tweets were posted before Assange even lost his internet connection.
I will say that I am totally dismayed by the general response toward Wikileaks on HN. I wish Assange the best, and hope Wikileaks continues with its work in the American political sphere for a long time. I don't know so much about Wikileaks' activity relating to Turkey, for instance, and if that was handled improperly, but the Podesta and DNC leaks are proving extremely valuable to American democracy.
Let's go through the various possibilities, here. I see three of them:
1. this is over interpretation and there is no message
2. there is a message because wikileaks account is under control and want to get a message through
3. there is a message because wikileaks want to gain favors from conspiracy theorists
(please people, feel free to add more)
I would tend to see the first possibility as the most probable, because indeed, the "rules" used to compose this message are really not rigorous.
I would give same probability to the two next ones. Gaining access to the people handling the account and forcing them into tweeting damaging things seems possible. I would not understand why this would be accomplished instead of just taking over the account, though.
Leveraging conspiracy theorist also sounds like a possibility. Rumors are a strong weapon, easily undermining convictions with background doubt. And if confronted about it, they could totally say they never intended to do such thing and it's plain over interpretation. But of course, tin foil support is not the best support you can hope for.
That's not true, they were posted in the last ~48 hours and Julian has been cut off since last Sunday. And only one letter is out of order. I'm not saying we should have full confidence that this is a distress message, but it deserves to raise an eyebrow and put some pressure on figuring out what has (or hasn't) become of Julian.
Really? I'm pretty sure I searched through and saw some dating back to at least October 15th, and others I kept scrolling back and couldn't even find them via a CTRL-F search. I'm not super versed in Twitter though so maybe I made a mistake, I'll have to double-check.
EDIT: Ok yeah, I definitely made a mistake about those dates. I can't find the tweet containing "recipie" at all, was it deleted? Sorry, I had no intention to mislead anyone.
As far as I'm concerned Assange is a delusional megalomaniac and has attracted similar types it seems. The organisation could have been something special instead of a support structure for this self-important, posturing bloviating. Snowden has advanced the cause far more with his considered advocacy.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadAnd when you're not, you're with some underworld spy
Or the wife of a close friend,
Wife of a close friend...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQZmCJUSC6g
It isn't a week since they were extremely economical with the truth regarding Assange's internet access ('state actor cut off their internet' -> 'Ecuador has pulled the plug on Assange's laptop').
The best way to deal with this would have been to distance themselves from anybody doing this, the very worst is to suggest they have the ability to issue orders to those perpetrating these attacks.
With supporters like these they wouldn't need enemies to begin with, it's a very negative association and they're purposefully aligning themselves with these so called hackers.
What will replace wikileaks?
Are any of the releases discredited?
Part of it may be because some of Wikileaks high value contacts are now in places where they are vulnerable (which adds weight to the call to Pardon Snowden, it would make it much easier for WL to release dirt on Putin and company, assuming they have any).
Assange set himself up to be easily corralled, not the smartest thing but he's not the first (and won't be the last) person that makes it into the limelight and ends up tripping up because of it.
Releases themselves can be independently verified, what data that is there that ends up labeled factually accurate is a great gift and I'm very happy they did what they did, however we will need more or other organizations like WL if we're to get the whole picture.
That would help in another way, you could immediately check for any modifications or selective withholding of information from the various sources.
No fear of going against the establishment. How many websites that you know of reveal such classified information and get wide press coverage for the same?
I don't fully understand Assange's political motivations, but the world is definitely better off with Wikileaks than without.
It's not a very nice world to imagine. The people who get hurt are ordinary citizens whose info winds up in these giant data drops.
Most countries have this already. It's called the CIA or whatever the local equivalent is. The only difference is that rather than publishing directly, they leak information to media outlets for dissemination.
> It's not a very nice world to imagine. The people who get hurt are ordinary citizens whose info winds up in these giant data drops.
Bah, it can't be worse. The ordinary citizens that can get hurt by stuff like this are in countries that can (and will) already hurt them for less or even nothing. The common citizens of western democracies have nothing to fear.
Why is privacy super important, one of our most fundamental rights, until some dude with white hair who wrote a bad port scanner decides it doesn't matter?
Why is that so hard to reconcile? You don't draw a line between individual privacy rights and those of government officials?
> So why not let the government search everyone's email for signs of terrorism?
If you're going to go that route, take it one step further and ask: Why not have a camera in everybody's house to prevent battery?
What part of taking $40,000 a year in salary from the government entitles Wikileaks to the contents of your personal emails?
http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/151983995587/on-the-wikileak-e...
They didn't get the personal emails of Turkish citizens, they got the emails of Turkish citizens that were on the AKP email server. That would be like complaining that a company has access to my personal emails because I use my work email to communicate with my non-work friends. The AKP is the government in Turkey so drawing a distinction between them as a private party and them as the government is weak.
> What part of taking $40,000 a year in salary from the government entitles Wikileaks to the contents of your personal emails?
None and if you don't mix personal and work, it makes it much easier to have that separation. If it's all one soup then you can't complain that the part gets released with the whole.
> http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/151983995587/on-the-wikileak-e...
Ditto for the DNC and RNC. I don't give a rats ass which side has their documents leaked. If it happens, I say it's fair game because, even though they're technically "private organizations", for all practical purposes they are the government.
If people want to avoid having "personal" comments and communications being impacted by this they need to maintain that separation and the poster child for what NOT to do is Hillary Clinton.
Or just keep their political and personal lives separate.
It's a cornerstone of democracy. Some countries take a much less serious approach to voter registration but especially in Turkey such lists are social dynamite and the release of those lists was absolutely uncalled for and irresponsible.
> It's a cornerstone of democracy. Some countries take a much less serious approach to voter registration but especially in Turkey such lists are social dynamite and the release of those lists was absolutely uncalled for and irresponsible.
When there's a single ruling party, or two major parties in a system like the USA, the distinction between political parties and the government itself is blurred to point of being meaningless. For an even more extreme example of this see the CPC in China. They are the government, party business is government business, and vice versa. Hiding behind them being a private organization doesn't work.
That's simply nonsense. The reason you might have two major parties forever is if you start making things like registered voters public. After all, who would dare to affiliate themselves with a third openly if that would lead to an immediate risk of being labeled in all kinds of nasty ways.
If Peter Thiel isn't immune to such pressure you can bet that ordinary citizens would be a lot easier to target.
The government and the citizens of a country are two disjoint entities, even in a 'one' party (that really means 'none') state.
Party membership does not equate to being a part of the government (though the one does not rule out the other).
Focusing on personalities is a mistake when it comes to mere technical ability, but when it becomes a political question I think it is a valid concern.
At a minimum I'd like to see another outlet next to WL.
And no one has shown any change to released information. Not once.
In fact, if you really want to read into it:
> US govt funded #PanamaPapers attack story on Putin via USAID. Some good journalists but no model for integrity.
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/717670056650530816 almost sounds like WL had knowledge but decided not to act because it was critical of Putin.
You can absolutely create a narrative by removing quotes out of context. In the same way, you can create a narrative by withholding information.
The problem with OCCRP is that they don't have knowledge critical of Putin - they have knowledge about people like, say, one of his ex-colleague's kids but make the headline and lede of every Russia-related article they post about Putin and not the actual people involved. They don't seem to take this approach with any of the other countries they report on. Wikileaks are far from being the only ones to remark on this.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zeynep-tufekci/wikileaks-erdog...
The ones made by the same people pointing the guns.
I'm completely at loss what to think about recent events, but godd2's argument isn't trivial.
https://glomardisclosure.com/2016/07/26/the-who-and-how-of-t...
I'm not sure why you (and others) are trying to hold them responsible for it.
“I actually never had a conclusion on who the uploader was, since it wasn’t central to my complaint about actions of Wikileaks: that they had misrepresented what the emails were, and that they had repeatedly publicized these doxing databases as “full data for our Turkey AKP emails + more”. I’m glad to see one party step up and take responsibility, but this doesn’t absolve Wikileaks of their role in all parts of this “leak” which never should have happened since it exposed no wrongdoing by a government or a powerful actor, merely the emails of ordinary people, and sensitive personal information of 20-30 million ordinary people. I tried to explain this directly to Wikileaks, but they blocked me after I started showing them tweets from Turkey’s leading anti-censorship activists who were disgusted and horrified by these actions, especially since they will now become a strong talking point for pro-censorship forces in Turkey.”
I find the fact that they blocked her especially obnoxious.
From your prior link: https://glomardisclosure.com/2016/07/26/the-who-and-how-of-t...
If it's just somebody's hobby to release information, than that's as far as it goes. But in order for the information to be actionable, it requires interpretation, and then the process of choosing what information to release becomes important.
Imagine how a hypothetical scientist's results would be interpreted if it were known that they were only publishing the information that favored their own agenda -- personal, political, commercial, etc. Yet none of the data points that they publish can be discredited.
The first set of large leaks wikileaks ever did were simply dumps. Now they spoonfeed their leaks, which they claim everyone has a right to know, at a peace that is most beneficial to them. Its clear their primary objective is no longer govt transparency, but their own profits.
They have a store? Large sites cost money to run. Shocker.
They play the PR game? They have to because their opponents use tactics to drown them out. They also know the mainstream media has a very short attention span and the leaks would never be talked about again once the news cycle changes. Dropping all the emails at once would be foolish.
If you have a problem with it you are free to start a competing outlet...
Because what I read in the tweet pretty much says - we don't want this, please stop.
> What will replace wikileaks?
Nothing, at least anytime soon. If wikileaks sticks to it's mission of opening Governments without the negative associations, as you said, that would suffice.
It's looking like the latest allegations against him of pedophilia were totally false and fabricated by supporters of the Clinton campaign.
Edit: the above link doesn't spell it out but the the toddandclare.com website it is talking about is allegedly a totally fake dating site that submitted a false report to the Bahamanian police and issued a fake report that they tried to pass off as being written by the UN. That reddit post is describing how they think the fake dating site is linked to a private intelligence company.
http://www.snopes.com/2016/10/19/ecuador-cut-off-julian-assa...
https://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/10/17/1583749/-Julian-As...
This all started the day Equador cut off his net access. Assange has not been seen in public since.
How hard would it be for them to post a five second video clip with today's newspaper?
Current thinking is that wikileaks is no longer in control of their twitter account and/or Assange is missing.
You'd be surprised. My friends and family seem to be doubling down on it. They either outright don't care or they are encouraged by the underhandedness of it all.
Pastebin seem popular tool for data dumps, and no one blames the owners for not redacting names. None also talks about the owner, their personality traits, and so on.
It seems disingenuous to accuse them simultaneously of throwing credibility to the wind and of carefully phrasing sensitive on-going matters like the disruption of Assange's internet access.
They're also not claiming this attack "as one of theirs", they're saying a third party who supports them is _and asking them to stop_. That distinction seems pretty clear, and is not an endorsement, it's a call for de-escalation.
From where I'm sitting it's the US state machine continuing their mission to destroy Wikileaks' credibility, by misrepresenting their M.O. and cherry picking tweets like this... only now the left-wing public is eagerly joining in as opposed to only the right-wing calling for their heads for being traitors. The thing about negative associations is, it's posts like yours that create them.
But when Palin called it "palling around with terrorists", the US left-wing was rather opposed to that tactic.
The more attention they receive, the more attention their email dumps receive.
Even Sean Hannity is praising them right now.
If their goal is to influence the election, then I think it's in their best interest to draw attention to themselves.
If anything, their credibility and the scope of their reach are increasing.
"Wow! @wikileaks admits its supporters are engaged in anti-American cyber-terrorism. No wonder Wikileakes loves me so much! #ImWithPutin"
Is that really from a presidential candidate? With a misspelling and a hashtag that is not what you would think would chime with the electorate. Plus some narcissism thrown in, just to make you cringe.
As for the tweet itself, I am amazed that Wikileaks thinks Assange is that much of a hero that they think that some anonymous fan would take down the internets in response to Assange's internets being taken down. There is some conspiracy minded thinking going on there, warranted or not, it is not the sort of mindset that Wikileaks need to be in if they are to function as an organisation. For instance, if some real conspiracy was going on, e.g. the U.S. military were running a 'cyberstorm exercise', then Wikileaks would have taken the bait. In so doing this takes discussion away from what Wikileaks seek to publish and towards the ethics of hacking.
I don't think it's too nostalgic to pine for longer, epic exhortation of ideas. People still give memorable speeches (cf. Obama's "More Perfect Union"), and people still memorize the speeches of old. They give context to the soundbites and give depth when we want to go beyond the misquotes. But yes, blaming twitter goes too far, because it certainly has its place, too. It's just another tool of communication that has its benefits and pitfalls.
We get moving speeches when issues hit so close to home that the words serve as kindling for our deeper emotions. Every speech is inextricably tied to its own context.
Malcolm X, "The Ballot or the Bullet" Ronald Reagan's Space Shuttle Challenger address LBJ, "We Shall Overcome" JFK, "Ich Bin Ein Berliner"
None of these speeches would have been as meaningful in a different time, with different events and feelings and happenings.
http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/94081465/julian-assange-w...
http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/94082701
http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/94075699
I will say that I am totally dismayed by the general response toward Wikileaks on HN. I wish Assange the best, and hope Wikileaks continues with its work in the American political sphere for a long time. I don't know so much about Wikileaks' activity relating to Turkey, for instance, and if that was handled improperly, but the Podesta and DNC leaks are proving extremely valuable to American democracy.
1. this is over interpretation and there is no message
2. there is a message because wikileaks account is under control and want to get a message through
3. there is a message because wikileaks want to gain favors from conspiracy theorists
(please people, feel free to add more)
I would tend to see the first possibility as the most probable, because indeed, the "rules" used to compose this message are really not rigorous.
I would give same probability to the two next ones. Gaining access to the people handling the account and forcing them into tweeting damaging things seems possible. I would not understand why this would be accomplished instead of just taking over the account, though.
Leveraging conspiracy theorist also sounds like a possibility. Rumors are a strong weapon, easily undermining convictions with background doubt. And if confronted about it, they could totally say they never intended to do such thing and it's plain over interpretation. But of course, tin foil support is not the best support you can hope for.
EDIT: Ok yeah, I definitely made a mistake about those dates. I can't find the tweet containing "recipie" at all, was it deleted? Sorry, I had no intention to mislead anyone.