- Who decides that hacking the Mafia is Ok and someone else it is not? And if Mafia is ok, what about lesser criminals? What about someone you suspect is criminal but you are not sure?
- It is in theory laudable to ask full transparency from our politicians. And, yes, the on/off record distinction is sometimes problematic. But this is not what we are talking about. The article discusses private conversation between two public persons. They should think on how they express themselves in these conversations? This couldn't have the effect of freezing their ability to communicate? I have no idea, but I think it will be problematic. I'm not saying that one of the two involved parties could not breach the privacy assumption. That is own personal choice with the consequences to his reputation, so he could decide to do that according to his ethical consideration if he thinks what he has seen is wrong...
Everything we say, including the way we say it, is a reflection of our values and though processes. If the way somebody talks off-record is drastically different from the way he/she talks on record, the problem is not the off record talk. The problem is that this mismatch indicates that the on-record talk doesn't actually reflect the person's true values and opinions and is just a facade.
And that's without touching the problem of public policies. Honestly speaking, some issues are generally too complex to be analyzed in a debate or in public speeches. So complex articulated analysis needs to be reduced and simplified. On some topic, it is possible to have a point of view that, when expressed, is a very valid one, but requires a lot of education to get buy-in from the general public. So if you are a politician what do you do? You could choose to use part of your consensus to push for a dividing policy and educate the public on why you are right. Are you could decide to wait, flow with the public, until you are ready to make your position public.
Now if they go round saying the exact opposite in private, and condemn their own public remarks, then there's a problem. But that's mostly not the case.
The public may or may not have sympathy with it, but it's a crime. The hacker who did it would have committed a crime and would be sought out and prosecuted appropriately.
Some considerations:
* The hacker's intent--purely altruistic or otherwise--is irrelevant (or at least must be left to a judge/jury to consider)
* The hacker acted as vigilante. The argument that a hacker turning up dirt on "bad" people is acceptable would be arbitrary, and the rule of law would thereby be subverted. You can't have one set of laws for some folk and not for others under the rule of law.
As a corollary, I just listened to a guy at a security conference talk about how he had hacked black market credit card resellers and deleted their databases. Arguably a good thing, right? Ignore him, eh? Give him a medal, perhaps? Well... first he'd downloaded their inventory for his own black market site. Whoops.
FWIW, he did his time and now works for Wired as a security correspondent.
...but the Mafia are a priori criminals, while politicians are not (except in a sophomoric "all politicians are liars" kind of way).
What crime did Powell commit to have his everyday privacies exposed to the world?
I'm willing to stipulate there's an avenue for civil disobedience in which leaking of private information is used as a way to apply pressure to actors within the government and private industry who might be sanctioning the NSA's practices. In other words I could see a course of action that includes widespread, comprehensive attempts to hack and leak the emails of FISA court judges, employees and appointees of US intelligence agencies, executives and board members of companies like AOL, Palantir, and Verizon who are known to have enthusiastically participated in this surveillance, and elected officials in the executive or legislative branches of the government who have supported or perpetuated this spying. The idea being that if the people who keep this system of surveillance grinding onwards experience the personal consequence of having their private info leaked to the public, they might reconsider their actions.
I could see a course of action like this and even agree there's some valid arguments for it, but it's also incredibly dangerous, and would require, I dunno, a great deal of judgement and restraint to not cause huge collateral damage to perfectly innocent people, or to end up ruining the lives of people who were only tangential participants in the system. In other words, this strategy is deeply problematic and dangerous at the best of times.
But let's not kid ourselves that that's even what's going on here. You could try to argue that Hillary Clinton, as the likely next president, is a part of this system, and so she should be on the list of people who are targeted for leaking in the course of civil disobedience. But Trump also supports this surveillance, so he should too. But the thing is, we don't have to guess at the motives of Wikileaks here, they are quite clearly making no such civil disobedience claims [1]. And if you look at whose information is being leaked—Clinton campaign staffers, the DNC—and estimate where these particular actors fall on the scale of culpability in the NSAs spying (hint: well down the list), you start to see that trying to ascribe some higher civic purpose to these particular leaks isn't warranted.
Yes, civil disobedience in this context comes with consequences. It's a fight, people get hurt in fights. Lives have already been ruined by the surveillance state. It's important to keep in mind it's a path of action people feel forced down by the actions of their government.
> you start to see that trying to ascribe some higher civic purpose to these particular leaks isn't warranted.
You sure about that?
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/22030#efmABAADK...
Here's a bit of one of my comments from yesterday, "For instance, the stories about Podesta's dealings in Russia [1]. This email [2] includes an attached legal bill regarding formation of Leonidio LLC. Is that not government and business corruption? 1. http://www.wnd.com/2016/10/how-hillarys-campaign-chief-hid-m... 2. https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/13946
Ummm.... That's two years after she held any kind of public office.
How is it possibly "government corruption" for someone who is not a member of government to agree to meet people in order to solicit funds for their foundation? Bill Gates does this all the time, does he not?
Public service invites public scrutiny. The idea that it wouldn't seems ...undemocratic.
Imagine someone rilling everyone up about a pedophile who kidnapped their child and then, when everyone has kicked the kidnapper's door in and shot him, they reveal that it was actually just a rumor?
Why should we draw some hard line between sides of his life? I never hear prosecutors say "Well, he robbed a bank, but only as part of his day-job. When he retires he'll be guiltless."
Meanwhile: exactly why is it you believe it's OK to hack the personal emails of mafia members? Having committed some crime, is it your feeling that they simply deserve all the punishments we can conceive of? I agree with you: few would bat an eye were that the standard. You could probably break a few kneecaps, too, if you wanted. Fair's fair!
Who else's privacy can we simply ignore? How about Scientologists? The Ku Klux Klan? Sounds great so far. How about NARAL? CAIR? You want to take a vote and see how far we can go?
The reality is that sometimes hacking is in the public interest and sometimes it's not, but figuring out when is not easy or black and white.
One aspect to these discussions that I find sort of befuddling is the idea that somehow those involved in "making the news" (so to speak) shouldn't have to think about what they're saying or how they're saying it unless they're "on the record," that we should expect their public face to be a mask hiding any insight into the private face behind it, and that somehow they ought to be magically protected from the potential publicizing of recordings, hacks, or eavesdropping.
Clearly the public at large is somewhat jaded and cynical, but there's still a very obvious desire to have "honest" and "open" candidates who make their goals, intentions, and ideologies clear. Of course the public theoretically wants to know how the sausage is made.
That the candidates can't recognize this and can't or won't operate as though the public might be watching without crying foul seems to me a bigger farce than pretending that one's own words are a conspiracy... but what do I know?
I guess the idea that one ought to maintain some level restraint and conviviality both publicly and privately is dated and quaint.