> 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.

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.

> 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?

http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/151983995587/on-the-wikileak-e...

> 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.

> 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.

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.

Too late to edit: substitute 'can't' for 'can' in the second sentence.

> 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).

In what way are the wikileaks releases -- Not Assange, not their Twitter, but wikileaks releases -- not trustworthy?

Are any of the releases discredited?

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.

So going back to my question, you think wikileaks should be shut down?

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.