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Comment by discreteevent | Hacker News Reader

"Real leaks don't have fancy websites" How something looks. It really is the shallowest form of dismissal, since the days of the village gossips.

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Your missing the point, it's clear they this leak is planned and not someone just uploading a bunch of files.

People don't seem to understand what I mean by the above^.

The question is would it not be better to dump the entire data set to the public, instead of it being funnelled by reporters?

> it's clear they this leak is planned

But you haven't produced any real evidence for this claim.

The ICIJ has co-ordinated the reporting on the leak, sure; but that's not the same as claiming the leak itself was in bad faith, part of some wider state-sponsored conspiracy from G20 nations, etc.

Planned by whom? To what end? Do you have any information to substantiate this claim?

I'm referencing the fact that some leaks you get the whole enchilada and it's up to you or the media to sift though.

In the case it's a leak which is being funnelled by the reporters.

Maybe this is because of legal reasons, I have no idea, but would it not be better they just dumped the whole data set onto the web?

Did you have this same position with the Snowden leaks? Dump it on the web and it lacks credibility. Filter it through journalists who can use their resellers to make sense of it and the public gets to hear the important repercussions of the leak instead of having to try and figure it all out themselves.

Why not both?

At least they were transparent to exactly why the information was filtered. Credibility is certainly a good point but 100 people are going to have issue with sifting through terabytes of data.

They state at the very outset that they worked on the data for over a year, doing OCR, analyzing, digesting, cross-referencing, etc. No one is presenting a false front -- they aren't claiming that this is a bunch of files that they got yesterday, and instead are quite up front that they've done a lot of leg work on top of it.

So yes, the presentation was clearly "planned". That doesn't make the data any less real.

It would lose credibility if it was just a dump. Some would claim its false, others would alter it, to the point that enough confusion would be created to make it totally untrustworthy. Unfortunately thats how manipulation works.

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