And Snowden, having escaped overseas but not being particularly hidden, would have had an encounter with some kind of nerve agent delivered by someone totally unconnected to the government he had leaked info from.
None of which endorses the US treatment of any of them.
> You will always find more dirt and problems in public/accessible records than in dictatorships.
If the US gov is a healthy, democratic, open gov, how and why can Wikileaks be so damaging?
Should we stop newspapers?
Because we are still humans and fallible. No matter how healthy, open gov or democratic our governing bodies are I suppose there will always be something going off rails at some points and it's much easier to spot it in transparent governing structures (which usually means democracies) than in non-transparent ones (which usually means dictatorships).
> > You will always find more dirt and problems in public/accessible records than in dictatorships.
> Wikileaks isn't some sort Wikipedia of public/accessible records, it's a platform to publish confidential information.
Yes, yes. But it's easier to feed wikileaks with information from democracies than from dictatorships.
> I believe the reason you are getting down voted isn't because you don't cite your source, but because the reasoning is absurd.
I am okay with downvotes ^^ as long as it's not a flamewar.
Did you look at what Wikileaks revealed? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Leaks
I don't think you realize the scale of what is happening. These aren't some cute human mistakes or tax evasion.
We are talking war crimes, environmental disasters, political corruption, ...
And yes - lots of it targets the US gov, maybe time to rethink what the US (and others) gov is and isn't ?
This isn't the work of fallible humans, this is the work of malfunctioning states.
Without Wikileaks, medias and investigation that reveals the wrongdoings ... dictatorship is at the end of the road.
This is why the reasoning that Wikileaks helps dictatorships and hurts democracies is absurd.
I never wrote that nor implied it. I wrote and I maintain that wikileaks deals more blows to democracies than dictatorships and that it's because of the very nature of democracies (edit: notwithstanding the whole anti-US bias of Assange).
I don't know how to make my point clearer:
- Wikileaks's leaks are mainly about democracies, not dictatorships.
- It creates tensions in these democracies and it does not in dictatorships.
- This consumes resources and has consequences in democracies (civil unrest, lack of trust from the population, investigations, weakening of governments, tensions in relationships with other nations, etc.)
- Whether it's a good thing or not, it's desirable or not doesn't change the fact that dictatorships are not diminished and are not the target of wikileaks while democracies are.
> We are talking war crimes, environmental disasters, political corruption, ...
And regarding my last point: I do not believe for a second that we should ignore those facts in order to appear strong or clean or whatever.
I think the central fallacy here is seeing the central operating principle of democracy, which is the informed public feeding their knowledge and judgement back in, as a blow to democracy. It is like a automotive mechanic saying "there's your problem, the fuel air mixture in your engine is exploding." The press reporting on the government is one link in democracy's central cycle.
Your are right about seeing reporting as a blow to dictatorship, of course. In their case the action of an informed public really is a blow to the state, following the fact that the public is not part of the state.
So in that light it's true that journalism does more to help free societies than it does to hurt dictatorships, since there's more of it in freer societies.
Phrasing it like this is misleading as it implies that Wikileaks is a neutral platform, a dumb tool that acts at the leaker's discretion. That isn't what we see when we look at their actual behavior. They do not publish every leak they receive and therefore they have editorial control over their platform. Assange himself has said they have received leaks about the Trump campaign that they wouldn't publish. That shifts Wikileaks from a neutral platform to publish confidential information to a political entity that uses leaked confidential information to achieve political goals.
EDIT: This is being downvoted so here is a source in which Assange talks about having leaked info about Trump and not publishing it.[1]
[1] - https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/2934...
Imagine a leak comes out about Putin (you don’t have to imagine that hard..). It would hardly make any noise: there’s no more free press to raise a stink about it, and the population is so used to swimming in the post-truth sewage spewing from the top that they’ll just ignore it
I have observed a `shark smelling blood` thing going sometimes on HN. If the timing is right and if a child comment in an upvoted parent that is at the top of post gets one or two downvotes then it has some visibility and then it attracts downvote clicks. If there are 4 or 5 other children they get ignored (I believe the last one gets all the downvote because people parse from top to bottom and only bother interacting with first or last elements... so some posts will get buried while others will sail through) shrug, it might be all in my head though ;).
There's a passage in Sarah Kendzior's book (Hiding in plain sight: the invention of Donald Trump and the erosion of America) which clicked (to me): ultimately things like wikileaks damage societies and governments that are transparent. You will always find more dirt and problems in public/accessible records than in dictatorships. These initiatives are doomed to be used at some points as tools against healthy democracies/open states.
edit: the passage
> Among the few who saw the threat clearly was computer scientist Jaron Lanier, who, in 2010, warned the public of a new danger: WikiLeaks. At the time, free speech advocates were hailing WikiLeaks, and its founder, Julian Assange, as defenders of government transparency. Their lionization of the leaker organization was largely due to frustration with the criminal impunity of the Bush administration. In February 2010, soldier Chelsea Manning exposed war crimes by sending classified documents to WikiLeaks, which WikiLeaks then published online. The emphasis on civilian victims led human rights advocates to believe that WikiLeaks would prove a formidable opponent for autocratic regimes. But after WikiLeaks dropped hacked documents from the US State Department in November, Lanier predicted the opposite—that WikiLeaks would ultimately ally with dictators and that social media networks would abet them:
>> The WikiLeaks method punishes a nation—or any human undertaking—that falls short of absolute, total transparency, which is all human undertakings, but perversely rewards an absolute lack of transparency. Thus an iron-shut government doesn’t have leaks to the site, but a mostly-open government does.
>> If the political world becomes a mirror of the Internet as we know it today, then the world will be restructured around opaque, digitally delineated power centers surrounded by a sea of chaotic, underachieving openness. WikiLeaks is one prototype of a digital power center, but others include hedge funds and social networking sites.
>> This is the world we are headed to, it seems, since people are unable to resist becoming organized according to the digital architectures that connect us. The only way out is to change the architecture.
> Social media sites didn’t change the architecture. Instead, over the course of the 2010s, the architecture changed us. The calculus of post–Cold War politics—that democracy spreads through engagement, that technology enhances freedom—was reversed. Hostile states used digital technology not only to attack their own citizens but to attempt to transform foreign democracies into dictatorships. We saw this with Russian influence operations in elections in the United States, France, and in the Brexit referendum, among others.10 The social media corporations that had once bragged of the internet’s liberating power now helped the hijackers of democracy. Networks like Facebook abetted, whether intentionally or not, the “iron triangles” of organized crime, state corruption, and corporate criminality, and they were aided by complicit Western actors content to let their own countries die while turning a profit.