You know who else profits from misery? Doctors, and funeral home owners. Pretty much anyone in the media. I certainly hope my doctor isn't making terrible jokes about how much money he's going to make from my disease, but even if he was, it wouldn't be illegal nor would I find it a justifiable reason to leak his personal information (let alone his clients' information!).

You also assume everyone is already split into either the pro-Wikileaks camp or their detractors. As someone who has mixed feelings about Wikileaks, this definitely affected my view of them negatively. (Full disclosure - my card was among those leaked. But even if it hadn't been, if I had just been someone who knew about Stratfor rather than a subscriber, this would have put Wikileaks in a bad light for me).

I might suggest that doctors and funeral home owners profit by alleviating the misery of others.

Also, it would be different if we did a dump of all the emails from oncologists at the Moffitt Center and found out they were putting doctors on the news to say smoking is good for your health and then highfiving each other via email after.

You would be actually shocked how driven by money many oncologists are. Back when I used to consult, I had an oncologist tell me, with no hesitation, that he prefers to prescribe the drugs that give him the best profit margin, even if that means it's not the best choice for the patient.

I'm pretty sure if you checked his email you'd find some pretty shocking stuff as well.

In which case, publishing them would be a public good - doctors who put profit over positive outcomes for their patients should be named and shamed and patients would be better off knowing to avoid them.

This is in fact a solid argument for why transparency of this kind is a Good Thing.

Yes, as opposed to actively encouraging or causing it.

An ethical problem happens when the doctor conditions the alleviating of misery with the alleviating of the money from the miserable in moments of greatest weakness of people.

It negatively affects my view of Stratfor that they are not PCI compliant and have this sort of credit card information just lying around in emails. That is pretty grossly irresponsible.

Agreed. It affected my view negatively enough that I am no longer a subscriber. But somehow dumping all the credit cards on the Internet seems even more grossly irresponsible to me.

The point is that it is a data dump of emails and there is no reasonable reason for anyone to believe there is credit card information in there. I'm not sure why anyone should expect Wikileaks to scour the materials for this sort of thing. They only seem to redact in life-and-death sort of situations.

When doctors start joking about giving out .22LR zip guns to inner city 17 year old drug addicts, and funeral home directors start encouraging people to drink poisoned water , maybe then your parallel will ring true ...

They don't create or facilitate misery though..

None of that matters. They can read what they're posting and filter out personal information. Who cares what the detractors think, it's the right thing to do.

"Two wrongs don't make a right"

EDIT: people understand that Stratfor is a small publishing company, right? They sell subscriptions to a security-focused newsletter of debatable influence. They have no operational capability.

Yes it does matter. The right thing to do is transparency and that's what's happening here. If Bad Person & Associates are doing evil, they're not going to get a break just because their messages also contain personal love letters.

What great evil, exactly, has been done?

See post by kid0m4n below. It's the worst kind of evil: warmongering.

I had a much better opinion of Stratfor until now. They were plotting how to best sell misinformation. Misinformation that could start a war in which millions could die. They thought they could get away with this shit.

That's not how I read that email. I read that as a joke, kinda like a bunch of doctors talking about a disease epidemic and joking that it'll help put their kids through college.

Good point. We don't know the context of these emails. Are they being serious? Are they joking? Are we to assume every email in the 500k is to be taken seriously?

I'm sure many HNers have sent joking emails concerning their work to fellow coworkers. It happens in almost every office. I'm not saying that's the case here, but you never know.

"War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone but affect the whole world.

"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from the other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."

Does Stratfor have the capability of initiating wars?

I think this quote is worth thinking about, which is why I put it here. A bit of a non sequitur, perhaps.

I respect the ideal behind wikileaks but its not very important, and i believe that it takes a quite considerable amount of naivete to believe that this behaviour is beneficial to the masses rather than the groups and organisations that wikileaks is 'against' (!)

The 'transparency' is only of value for people who are too fucking stupid to understand that people are people no matter what job they are in, and should absolutely be expected to behave this way if there are not checks and balances in place.

Spamming out people's personal details is not just sloppy, it is giving ammunition to criminals and maybe even the target of this press release...

Personally I consider that to be very /wrong/ it may be legal or illegal or whatever, but its just wrong - people can come to some kind of harm as a result of this action. Conversely the benefit is that stupid people get their eyes opened? You can fuck right off frankly...

Noble intentions or not, wikileaks should not give people genuine reasons to attack them. This is precisely one.

Why is it OK to read the email of people who work for groups you don't like? Shouldn't the have the same rights as everyone else? If this is acceptable, why is it wrong when the NSA hacks into email accounts of groups they don't like?

(And putting "people" in scare quotes as if there's some doubt that they're human? Grow up.)