So there are a few nuanced points that I think we disagree on. Together they add up to a lot.
First, you seem to object to this leak on the grounds that "due process" forbids it. I agree. I just don't think due process should apply. The press is not the judiciary, they don't have the same responsibilities and duties.
Second, and (I think this is something wikileaks consistently fails to clarify) Wikileaks is press. They are publishing information from a confidential source. The source may be a data thief, the data owner or a whistleblower (terrorist or freedom fighter?) but that's a judgement about whoever leaked the data, not wikileaks. There are some laws and a lot of ethical concerns regarding what the press should and shouldn't publish. There are also laws protecting and empowering the press.
You might berate them for insensitivity, irresponsibility but you can't accuse them of theft, IMO.
The ethical considerations of the press are about balancing things like privacy with newsworthiness and the public's right and need to know. There are definitely emails in here that do not meet that definition. Wikileaks' model is pretty scattergun, but realistically it's the only way to get that kind of volume. I'm not sure where I fall on balance but I would be more wholeheartedly pro-wikileaks if they did a better job of selecting only relevant documents for publication.
I think this is where we disagree the most.
Third, I don't buy the idea that corporations have all rights. A violation of a corporation's right to privacy is not as bad as a violation of an individual's. That'a a whole can of worms in itself, but perhaps we can leave this as a moral disagreement.
Incidentally, press doesn't default to being for the net good just because it's press (which is a broad classification, and an amoral one). It still has to act on behalf of good, and on a case by case basis.
As far as corporate rights go, it's not black and white, but we shouldn't lose sight that corporations are made of up people, and those people should have rights, and it's probably better not to just throw those rights away just because something was done in the context of work (since work is such a huge and generally unavoidable part of all of our lives).
Thanks again for thoughtfully debating. I appreciate that.
WikiLeaks publishes information. It's not a force for good or bad, but a resource that can be used to change the world. They didn't steal the information, but they collected it. They've done no wrong in presenting it this way. I understand why you're angry - people were deceived and their (believed private) conversations were made public. But blame the hackers, the internet, Sony's infosec team, or the executives that prompted this breach. WikiLeaks had nothing to do with it.
By using their megaphone to give these documents publicity, by making them easily accessible and searchable, Wikileaks is absolutely complicit and has done wrong.
Did you just claim that Wikileaks committed a "gross violation of privacy" by publishing the emails, and then unironically admit, in the very next sentence, that you looked at them?
It's possible that I could have obtained these emails when the Sony hack was in the news (I think there were some archives on bittorrent). But that takes a lot of time and effort and at least some skill, and I was never interested. By making these emails findable via a mouse click (not to mention indexed by google) Wikileaks ensured that large numbers of people would look at them.
Certainly there's an argument to be made on the optimal outcome for the individuals concerned. Which is worse? Their stolen information being traded invisibly on a darknet, or publicly visible on Wikileaks?
However, as a separate argument, I'd hold very strongly to the idea that Wikileak's publication of information is good for society as a whole. (Aka the no-public-release vs full-disclosure security debate of the 90s)
As the Target and Home Depot breaches demonstrated, corporations don't give a damn about their customer's privacy - only the revenue that might be lost by losing goodwill.
And only by keeping these incidents in the news for long enough will it hurt severely enough to be taken seriously.
If the front door is unlocked and you walk in, you still chose to walk in.
Under this analogy, WikiLeaks is putting up billboards detailing all homes with open doors, as well as providing a full searchable inventory of the contents of all homes.
"We're just providing the information" they say. "Just a middle man!"
EDIT: Instead of silent downvotes, can you respond with why you disagree? WikiLeaks took stolen private documents and made them easily accessible and searchable by people who otherwise would not have accessed them.
Please be respectful and engage in conversation, not downvotes.
If you want email and privacy, you need to encrypt.
Email is as secure like a postcard; at least that is what we use tell the people that wanted to append long email disclaimers.
For WikiLeaks to be doing what your analogy is saying then they would of had to have figured out what systems were vulnerable on the whole of the internet, downloaded all of the contents from those servers, and then made them available.
Verifying that no intruders are in the house because some num-nuts left the front door open is a pain in the butt.
Privacy-rights are quite upside-down in the US right now with personal privacy being almost non-existent and our Government almost totally lacking in transparency. Clearly a discussion about Fair-use should be happening transparently in public - not hidden in emails.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150416/17252230680/chris...
Security (and privacy as a result) is something hugely important to customers, whether they know it or not, but not so important to corporations except for how it might damage their bottom line from backlash.
If we don't show them how they can also suffer from bad security practices, then nothing will ever be done to fix it. I am 100% certain that Sony and many other large organizations are now spending a hell of a lot more money on their security teams.
If I go to your house and break a window and steal a bunch of stuff, am I justified because you needed to learn a lesson about security? If I go up to you and beat you up, is that ok because you should know how to defend yourself better?
I don't understand this self righteous hacker mindset that if you're able to exploit someone somehow then they deserve it. How about respecting people's boundaries in the first place? Recognize that as a company a&r, finding new talent, marketing existing projects, managing key relationships, etc etc are probably seen as where they should actually put their money rather than security?
"This hacker guessed a password for their Unix system. From there, he became super-user by planting an egg in the systems area, then sliding into my computer.
A couple days later the SOB called me. Said his name was Dave. From Australia.
"I broke in to show that your security isn't very good."
"But I don't want to secure my computer," I replied. "I trust other astronomers."
Dave had other reasons for breaking in, too. "You think that hackers are bad. This proves otherwise."
"Huh? You break into my computer to show that hackers are good?"
"Yeah," Dave replied. "We're helping you out by finding your security faults."
Clifford Stoll, The Cuckoo's Egg
In that sense you could say, in the same way that the US populace has allowed for the Fed to steal trillions from Americans over 100+ years, this same US populace sometimes picks "private" individuals and companies for targeting its complicitness. This time they picked Sony. Why do you seem to be more angry about this small choice the US populace made, when the bigger choice they made causes a lot more harm overall?
If I complain about business regulations people tell me I'm in the wrong and I should move out of the country, because people here have decided they will be complicit in regulating companies.
Same with Sony, I say. The people have decided to be complicit in leaking company data. Sony was the target this time. If companies don't want to ever have their data leaked they can leave the country.
Don't the people decide the price companies must pay to do business here? We force them to comply with regulations, and now the populace, acting as informal lobbyists, are forcing companies to be OK with leaks once in a while as part of the cost of doing business here.
Actual lobbyists make much worse things happen than to cause some company to leak some data. But when the population lobbies, through tacit, implicit compliance, then everyone is suddenly holier-than-thou. I guess you need a lobbying license to avoid being judged by the HN crowd.
>If we decide that it's up to thieves to decide what we do or do not get to keep private in our own lives, then we'll have fallen so far as a society. Good luck when they come for you next.
You're assuming that you can't keep your private life secure. The longer people try to hide and minimize the damage of data leaks the longer we'll have insecure systems.
Wikileaks and "thieves" are creating an incentive for the tech sector to become more secure so that things like this don't happen. By continuing to sweep these things under the rug we're just leaving our selves open for another attack. Wikileaks is forcing people to take this seriously.
I don't always agree with Wikileaks stance, however I do believe that for the larger good, releasing information about the corrupt and unjust can only be a good thing. However, that shouldn't be done at the cost of all that is right and just... so it's a bit grey. I believe in the principle for which they stand, I just find it hard to agree with the process they follow. They're kind of like the Boondock Saints for information... except they don't appear to care so much about the innocent that get hurt by the fallout - making them more like the U.S. Government in their "war on [enter trending reason of the day for going to war]"
I think that you can have organizations like Wikileaks or you can have personal privacy and the protection of legal due process, but you cannot expect to have both. The former exists to render the latter obsolete.
If a corporation sends an email back to me, that email should also be defacto public?
I have a lot of emails coming to and going to corporations with very private information in them.
Pedantic, but I expect you really mean "(FERPA? HIPAA?)" here.
(The first is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, and the second is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.)
EULAs, DRM, Super PACs - corporations are our rulers and we should not lay down and quietly submit.
If Wikileaks had reviewed these emails and released only the ones that are of genuine interest to the public (or did not disclose sensitive personal information), as it did with the Manning leak, that would be one thing. But I can't agree that it's responsible to release the entire trove of emails simply because they were sent to and from corporate email accounts.
And whose servers were they on? Sony's.
When your correspond with someone, the only rights you can claim are on your end.
Would it be appropriate for all YC funded companies to have all of their emails published on WikiLeaks tomorrow?
If not, what's the difference, and where do you draw the line?
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men,
I will find something in them which will hang him."
Sony has been engaged in some questionable activity with questionable organizations making questionable deals. The reason is transparency so illegal activity can be exposed.
Or MR X has a medical condition - congrats your insurance premiums just went up 100% - and possibly your kids in the future if its genetic
The whole idea that business email (and email in general) isn't already essentially public is a farce - the business itself has at will access to any employee's mails, and it can all be subpoena'd without warrant.
At best we should feel sorry for the employees not understanding this and treating their employer as a benevolent and trustworthy party.
Do you think we should do that? Where is the line?
If you get your email stolen and the people who got access to it found out you were doing some illegal activities, then it would be irresponsible not to publish your email to expose those illegal activities, especially if you are a Fortune 500 company.
Until the government protects the privacy of digital correspondence this should continue until we know all of the dirty little secrets our governments and corporations are hiding.
And as other commenters have said, none of the individuals caught up in this should have had an expectation of privacy anyway. The IT dept of Sony could have already accessed this info, and it's theirs anyway.
Like if your money gets stolen out of the bank.
The cognitive dissonance in this thread is astounding.
Note that there is also a due process for whistleblowing; there are Inspectors General whose entire professional careers are based on handling allegations of misconduct. The leakers in previous cases chose not to follow that process.
The so called "due process" is a joke. Whistleblowers are often ignored, harassed, lose their job, or even jailed in some cases.
If you look at historical whistleblowing (e.g. 1980s, 1970s, etc) and even today, nothing has improved. A whistleblower's life will still be "ruined" by whistleblowing.
Remind me again, is Snowden back in American living free and clear? Or is he still effectively excommunicated into Russia of all places with the threat of a jacked-up criminal prosecution looming over his head?
> The leakers in previous cases chose not to follow that process.
If they had have followed "that process" they would have been fired, and the general public wouldn't have heard a peep about any of this.
Give us an example of a whistleblower who did follow the process and that it worked out just fine.
The US Department of Labor says otherwise: http://www.whistleblowers.gov/whistleblower/wb_data_FY05-14....
> Remind me again, is Snowden back in American living free and clear?
Snowden isn't a whistle blower. He didn't report any wrongdoing to his superiors, personally stated that he took the Booz Allen job in order to get access to more information to leak, stole more documents than he possibly could have read and left the country with intent to release them and evade law enforcement. Whistle blowing is seeing something wrong and reporting it, not pulling as much information as you can get and handing it off to reporters. Regardless of whether or not you think there was benefit to the NSA leaks, what Snowden did is not whistle blowing.
> Give us an example of a whistleblower who did follow the process and that it worked out just fine.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6930197.stm
After blowing the whistle on Abu Ghraib, Sergeant Joe Darby was personally thanked by Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of his unit (the ones that weren't arrested). Ironically, he claimed that it wasn't until his name was released to the public that he started to receive any harassment; and it wasn't from his employer, but regular civilians that were angry about the news. I think that says something about blasting people's personal information out to the world like Wikileaks just did.
Yes he did[0].
> Whistle blowing is seeing something wrong and reporting it
So, like Snowden did?
> not pulling as much information as you can get and handing it off to reporters
After following the internal process failed multiple times.
> Regardless of whether or not you think there was benefit to the NSA leaks, what Snowden did is not whistle blowing.
According to your own definition it is. Also he received the biennial German "whistleblower prize." The New York times described him as a Whistleblower and talks about why contractors aren't granted the same legal protection[1]. He also appears on Wikipedia's "List of Whistleblowers[2]."
> Joe Darby
He wasn't blowing the whistle on the US Government. He was blowing the whistle on other soldiers. Not comparable to someone going against a large and powerful organisation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#NSA_contractor [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/opinion/edward-snowden-whi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_whistleblowers
These are Snowden's actual words on the subject[1]:
"What did you report?" Williams asked. "What was the response?"
"So," Snowden said, "I reported that there were -- real problems with the way the NSA was interpreting its legal authorities. And I went even further in this -- to say that they could be unconstitutional -- that they were sort of abrogating our model of government in a way that empowered presidents to override our statutory laws. And this was made very clear. And the response more or less, in bureaucratic language, was, 'You should stop asking questions.' And these are — these are recent records. I would say one of my final official acts in government was continuing one of these — one of these communications with a legal office. And in fact I'm so sure that these communications exist that I've called on Congress to write a letter to the NSA to — to verify that they do. Write to the office of general counsel and say, "Did Mr. Snowden — ever communicate any concerns about the NSA's interpretation of its legal authorities?"
and[2]:
When you go to the legal bosses, typically what they’ll do is they’ll not respond or they’ll give a general response, or they will say basically ‘call me… don’t go through this in writing but call me, let’s do this verbally.’
Now go and read the actual e-mail he sent: [3] It's clear he's referring to the same one in those two interviews. It was one of last acts - right before he took off to Hong Kong and five months after he first contacted Glenn Greenwald. It does talk about interpretations of legal statutes. The response was general and did tell Snowden to call if he wanted to discuss it further. The only thing missing is any actual report of wrongdoing. If Snowden really did sent dozens of e-mails to report wrongdoing, why hasn't he produced one yet?
> So, like Snowden did?
Depending on whose numbers you go by, Snowden took between 50 thousand and 1.7 million documents. He said in an interview that he "carefully evaluated every single document [he] disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest"[4]. According to the NSA, he began taking the documents from NSA servers in the summer of 2012. Assuming he started on June 1st, stopped on May 19th (he arrived in Hong Kong on May 20th) and is getting 8 hours of sleep a night, that means if he was working non-stop over the course of those 352 days he would have to have fully evaluated each document within the span of 10 minutes (if he only took 50k) or one document every 17 seconds (if he took 1.7m). This is something that dozens of reporters (some dedicated exclusively to the Snowden documents) haven't been able to fully evaluate over the course of two years, but Snowden did all this while simultaneously working his 9-5 job, eating, commuting to work, living in general, etc. Of course, we don't even really need to go over how ridiculous his claim is anymore since he finally admitted in his interview with John Oliver that he didn't actually read all of them.[5] So how exactly can you blow the whistle on something you haven't even read?
> After following the internal process failed multiple times.
As far as I can tell, he never even tried the internal process. He claims that he sent dozens of e-mails, but has yet to produce a single one to back up his claims.
> Not comparable
You're right - Joe Darby, while already in a war zone, reported the illegal treatment of prisoners at the hands of people working for the US Government. He was already in dangerous place, and he faced physical retaliation from other soldiers and disciplinary action from his superiors. His family was put in physical danger when angry citizens learned his identity. Snowden risked losing his job at worst. Darby risked significantly more. Instead of following Darby's example, Snowden decided to flee to another country, almost immediately hand over details of NSA offensive operations against China in order "ingratiate himself to the people of Hong Kong and China"[6], and is now apparently living a quaint little dacha with his girlfriend under the protection of the Russian government.
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/edward-snowden-interview/edwa...
[2] https://www.edwardsnowden.com/2014/06/25/edward-snowden-spea...
[3] http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/post/87218708448/edward-j-sn...
[4] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-...
[5] http://www.businessinsider.sg/snowden-and-john-oliver-2015-4...
[6] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/25/greenwald-s...
He hasn't tried to placate people like you for the same reason Obama didn't both answer the birth-cerificate Truthers even if it would have been easy - you're trolling. Don't feed the trolls.
You couldn't write so many words and quote so many articles without reading about previous NSA whistleblowers and knowing how they were treated. And to know that it's not the whistleblowers duty to change the system from inside - when they're rebuffed by a broken and hostile system they're advised (by past whistleblowers, lawmakers, etc) to stop trying.
> Depending on whose numbers you go by, Snowden took [...] finally admitted in his interview with John Oliver that he didn't actually read all of them.
You're mad someone gathered the NSA's data in bulk?
Because he's never claimed he "read every word of" every document, he said he carefully evaluated - which in my mind is looking at the grep context and skipping the file if it's a false positive. I've scanned literally hundreds of thousands of torrent links, carefully selecting individual ones to download...
You know, I'd have been happy to have the leaks even if Snowden had to bulk post everything on 4chan to get it out. That he seems to have done an actual good job is a bonus since he's the one doing us the favor.
Yeah, because it would have worked great for them, and the public would have learned the facts if they used those procedures...
The damage is done. All Wikileaks is doing is making it available, with the intent that journalists will peruse it.
I don't agree with releasing these emails, I certainly wouldn't want my private correspondence published or intercepted. But in this case blaming Wikileaks is erroneous.
Even if you supported the publishing of the NSA documents on the grounds that it was whistle-blowing, and thus aided in uncovering a greater crime, there's no such possible justification here. (Certainly not in publishing them in bulk.)
We have due process for the discovery of private communication, and that process protects all of us. In fact, our personal freedoms depends on our consistent application of those protections, regardless of whether they're being use to protect you, me, our best friend, or someone we don't even like.
If we decide that it's up to thieves to decide what we do or do not get to keep private in our own lives, then we'll have fallen so far as a society. Good luck when they come for you next.
(Personal request: since this is obviously a polarized topic, consider posting your rebuttal as a comment, so everyone including me can learn more about the nuances of the debate.)