Where else are we going to get insight into the globbal power "underworld", which the intelligence community just happens to always have a finger in? Anonymous sources feeding into New York Times? Because that's all we had before and continue to have today otherwise.
People just don't like when certain inconvenient information comes out and Wikileaks didnt care about the source.
People constantly try to pin ideological stuff on Wikileaks or data leaking in general but that misses the bigger point and it's a point that extends beyond Wikileaks itself and goes into information releasing in general (we don't need to defend Assange personally or Wikileaks itself to be concerned or defend the general idea). I also highly doubt they are selectively choosing NOT to release political information... like news outlets apparently do.
But I also don't care, there's a huge amount of risk and blowback doing such a mission regardless of source or content which we should respect.
They get what they can from where ever and publish it if it has some value to the general public, and we've gotten tons of value from Wikileaks already. So do plenty of other organizations now inspired by Wikileaks, plenty which have exposed corruption in a new way (like Panamaleaks).
The fact this sometimes can have an 'agenda' or be exploited by the original sources will never negate the value of a neutral 3rd party who releases stuff publicly we'd never see otherwise. And will continue to do so as long as operational.
My only fear is that there won't be people brave enough to do this given nation-state harassment and those who think its all a political-inspired conspiracy (which litter every social media site).
It turns out Wikileaks does care about the source https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-l...
To be absolutely clear: I don't have any reason to doubt the motivations of Wikileaks' current leadership. I also genuinely believe that they treat all leaks as "equal," in the sense that they believe in the absolute freedom of information and are liable to (eventually) release everything that they're given.
The observation is tantamount to the tragedy of the commons: give malicious actors unlimited means under an ostensibly just principle, and your principle will be monopolized for malicious ends or used to subvert itself.
But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have commons, or that I want to live in a world without Wikileaks. It's just an admonishment to be aware of a risk inherent in "neutral" venues.
I agree with your sentiment, but we are all aware of the role WL had in the 2016 election. And in chats Assange was found to have said, “We believe it would be much better for GOP to win,” .. and then he continued to play the Seth Rich conspiracy angle until finally distancing from it.
Under scrutiny, the agenda is not as neutral as one would like, and the consequences of this lack of neutrality are massive.
Nonetheless, in that case as well as in the case of Wikileaks, any result of reporting the truth should be blamed on the people who committed the unpopular acts, not the people who reported them.
1) Claims of neutrality are evidence against being neutral
2) performance of neutrality is evidence of neutrality
3) blind adherence to neutrality is evidence of not understanding the goals of neutrality
Everybody is biased. Always.
There are no exceptions to this rule.
>We believe it would be much better for GOP to win, Dems + Media + liberals woudl [sic] then form a block to reign in their worst qualities. With Hillary in charge, GOP will be pushing for her worst qualities, Dems + media + neoliberals will be mute.”
Not only is Assange allowed a personal opinion, why would a pro-GOP preference matter? Pro-GOP sites deserve their freedom of the press trampled?
...by exposing the hypocrisy of said liberal democracies. What good is a liberal democracy when the demos remains oblivious of the negative aspects what the cracy is doing?
If things like the collateral murder videos, or the treatment of Manning and Snowden are the work of said "liberal democracies", then I'm fully in the camp that wants to decline them, and replace them with better, more transparent, more accountable structures.
> If things like the collateral murder videos, or the treatment of Manning and Snowden are the work of said "liberal democracies", then I'm fully in the camp that wants to decline them, and replace them with better, more transparent, more accountable structures.
But that's not what will happen. Instead, populists will rise to power under the ruse of libertarianism, or going back to "the old ways." Eventually the nation will continue to divide itself until it collapses under internal infighting. Almost as if by design...
Exactly! But that's predicated on "we see wrong". What Snowden and Wikileaks (and the various paradise leaks) showed, is that there's a lot of wrongs we don't see.
Maybe I didn't specify this explicitly in my earlier post, but my core position is this: attacks on Wikileaks are attacks on the ability for the voting population to see the wrongs, and as such are attacks on democracy itself. It's ironic for the CIA to claim that Wikileaks "works towards the decline of liberal democracy", when the CIA itself is working to suppress democratic checks and balances.
the CIA in the past has installed brutal dictatorships and actively tortured the most vulnerable of our own citizens. I think it's fair to say protecting liberal democracy is hardly a priority of theirs.
Most people on HN are pretty well informed of the less than nice things the .gov has done over they years even if they bury their heads in the sand when advocating for expansion of government scope on <insert personal favorite issue here>.
And the right has their own laundry list of reasons the government is not to be trusted. Those people have nearly zero trust for pretty much any gun-toting federal agency.
I wouldn't say that people are "oblivious". I'd say that people are divided on how to fix the issues.
At least with information in the open, people can attempt to grok the full picture for themselves.
Wikileaks can't guarantee that.
How many of them were killed/disappeared? If you can't cite a number in the hundreds (or even one case), your comparison is false.
No contest but I think GP point was not about the absolute quality of democracy right now but rather about which power did more to destroy democracy in the recent years.
Are you really saying that the FBI has and continues to celebrate a criminal [1] and their own criminal behaviour as most exemplary? For nearly half a century now? And no bi-partisan political rebuke? And are not treated with total contempt by every adult in the USA and every court in the world?
How is that remotely possible? Surely this is a conspiracy theory?
Many Americans do hate him. But it's important to note that Hoover's criminality did not extend to the average White American: his efforts focused on Black Americans, gays, and anybody sufficiently "radical" by the standards of cold war America.
Ronald Reagan also has buildings named after him, mind you.
And this doesn't come up in every single news article about the FBI? This doesn't come up to discredit every single piece of FBI evidence in court?
I would believe that kind of thing about the Soviet Union. Or some other dictatorship. And this is happening, right now, in the USA, largely ignored by media, by politicians, by courts, with massive BLM protests, you say?
>Many Americans do hate him.
Many Americans believe the world is flat. Tragically what "Many Americans" believe means nothing about credibility.
No. What I said was that Hoover was a criminal, and that his reign at the FBI was marked by illegality. Whether or not the present FBI is a criminal organization is a separate claim that I'm not going to make right now.
> And this doesn't come up in every single news article about the FBI? This doesn't come up to discredit every single piece of FBI evidence in court?
It's an established fact about the FBI, the same way that the Tuskegee Experiment is an established fact about the CDC. Both agencies (claim to) have reformed, so there's nothing to "bring up" in court.
The fact that you don't personally know about it doesn't mean it's ignored. It's taught in US high schools as a critical part of America's cold war hysteria as well as the federal government's reaction to the civil rights movement.
> Tragically what "Many Americans" believe means nothing about credibility.
You asked specifically whether Americans hold Hoover in contempt, not for the factual content of their beliefs. I think that they're right to hate him, but the base factuality of their beliefs doesn't change the fact that his public image is negative.
Lets be serious here, the FBI continues to be a criminal organization like many other three letters: due to a top down compromise system... but why do I even bother with someone who has already slyly tried to dismiss the topic as surely a conspiracy theory (the implication being all conspiracy theories are false and/or batshit crazy). If your bias and immovable opinion weren't so obvious I might tell you more about things like the mafias (including Trumps mentor, Roy Cohn) part in the Hoover compromise, and other things.
edit: I got wooshed... https://youtu.be/QKVS8TMork4?t=23
The parent is clearly lampooning this perspective, not advancing it unironically. But I can kind of understand mistaking it for the real thing, the insistence on denying the possibility of conspiracies has reached some pretty serious Poe's Law proportions.
The incredulity is 100% genuine. Just seeing how everyone reacts looking at and seeing how absolutely fucking insane it is to have the FBI and their powers in a building named "J Edgar Hoover"
Someone said the fbi reformed since those days of criminality. Why would anyone believe that while they continue to celebrate J Edgar Hoover. While they go to work to protect the rule of law to a building named J. Edgar Hoover. Why would any judge take the word of any FBI agent when they've covered up criminal behaviour, and performed it and lied about it instead of arresting J. Edgar Hoover the first second they became aware of what he was?
They said they weren't criminals when Hoover was in charge. They lied. They continue to exult Hoover while claiming they aren't criminals anymore. Who actually isn't feeling sick at the idea of believing that? Hoover is the biggest FBI hero. A vicious criminal thug running the FBI as a criminal conspiracy is the FBI's biggest hero. Says so right there on their HQ.
It's something that's impossible to get your head around. 30 years ago. No sign of it changing?
The FBI flagrantly advertise their lack of respect for the rule of law. That's on all of us.
It is who and what the FBI are! Take them at their word when they tell us this! It's so much worse than any symbol. They are out there doing their J Edgar Hoover thing with the force of law behind them! And rubbing our noses in it.
Harry S Truman wrote during his presidency: "We want no Gestapo or secret police. FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail
He was a villain by any reasonable accounting whose exploits are at this point well known and his moral deviance, bigotry, hatefulness, contempt not so much merely for the letter of the law as for its spirit and purpose. A contempt for justice as it might be understood by anyone other than a straight, white, conservative, republican, man that ultimately overshadows his accomplishments.
I get this is supposed to be a debate, but the FBI never rolled tanks into Poland or Czechoslovakia. The FBI never annexed the peninsula of a foreign country, then set up fraud elections to make it look organic.
Most importantly, the US largely ended it's support of anti-democratic forces post-cold war. The KGB has no such intention.
Except in Venezuela, Bolivia, the Middle East...
Specifically voiced support for the pro-democratic opposition leader that arguably won the election.
> the Middle East
Supported democratic reforms in Egypt against a long time pro-US dictator in Mubarak. Supported Syria's right to self-determination to the point of fighting with FSA for years.
> Bolivia
Bolivia is an interesting case, the opposition claimed fraud but i've seen no evidence of it. A black eye for sure to come down against the results of their election without proof.
Processed into intelligence it was not. The video from the helicopter strike was technically processed, but by no stretch of the imagination was it intelligence that an American airstrikes hit two journalists and family with young children.
Out of the leaks listed on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Leaks), how many of those can honestly be classified as processed intelligence by a hostile power, under the guise of an ideology of totally free data?
Thus the attempts to nail Assange for conspiracy, something that is self-evident nonsense given the Adrian Lamo chat logs published by Wired show Manning contacting Assange with express intent to leak.
If there were equal amounts of dirt on every politician, then fine, but there is clearly not. This is what bothers me about the whole thing. It can be manipulated by powerful states, and some of them are more willing to use it than others.
It's a complicated balance act. You want to hold "your" party accountable, and the scale is not "better than the others". At the same time, you don't want to diminish the difference, by just talking about your side's problems. A "we publish everything we get" policy is then not necessarily balanced, if one party plays this game, and the other doesn't.
How do you know that wikileaks is trustworthy? Answer please.
If we are talking about the 2016 election then there is actually data on how much dirt was being thrown around. Looking at all the scandals being printed in news papers, with the big ones being the email scandals for Clinton and audio tapes for trump, the data as presented in a research paper was that the intensity of scandal articles was higher for Trump, but the duration of articles was higher for Clinton. Trump scandals got focused in the news during the last month of the election, while the Clinton scandals had been published on and off for almost a half year. In total, articles writing about scandals was around 3-4 times more in total for Clinton and distributed over a half year, than those of trump which was distributed over the last month of the election.
The general conclusion I got from that research is that dirt that can be dripped over a long period has a better chance to stick than a louder but shorter lived dirt. It also makes comparing one kind of dirt to an other difficult. This lesson seems to have been taken in by heart in the Snowden leaks and panamaleaks, both which stretched out their leaks for months.
Why "a blind eye"? An open eye. Wikileaks has no loyalty to the US government, and it isn't, nor should it be, a concern of theirs whether elements hostile to the US benefit or not from its publications. Wikileaks publishes information of public interest, and that's that.
Also, note that Wikileaks has published information about regimes the US perceives as hostile, e.g. Russia:
I said "liberal democracy," not "US government agencies." I also don't think the information itself is suspect. Please read the surrounding (very good) discussion around the difference between information and intelligence.
So, how does exposing high-level corruption, war crimes, mass surveillance, etc. lead to a 'decline of liberal democracy'? Unless you mean 'exposing the ways in which our society is not a liberal democracy leads to the decline of the illusion of liberal democracy'?
It used to be that Democracy meant that you could read any official document to make sure your government wasn't acting out. Intelligence agencies were a compromise on that, with the idea that at least if there was a disaster someone would speak out. Now even that is under threat?
The only long term vision that is compatible with this is the decline of democracy, liberal or not.
I, for one, think that all information should be free. I think Pompeo's motivations are suspect and geopolitical and I don't trust him personally. However, I also think that Wikileaks has a myopic view of information freedom that chiefly benefits powers whose long term vision is the decline of liberal democracy.