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).
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.