Snowden and WikiLeaks clash over leaked Democratic Party emails | Hacker News Reader

Snowden and WikiLeaks clash over leaked Democratic Party emails

washingtonpost.com

40 pointstooba67 comments

This is really illustrative of the motivations of Snowden VS Wikileaks. Wikileaks was founded under the idea that you could disrupt governments by leaking their private data so that they become so paranoid that they can't function. Thats why they don't do any curation.

Snowden's motivation is to reform the Intelligence Organizations in the United States. Thats why he supports curation and attempted to make the information that he leaked only have the information to reform.

http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf

Regardless of where you stand, leaking the credit card numbers and personal information of innocent participants in these documents is not cool.

Same goes for undercover agents whose very life depends on such confidentiality.

DNC policies affects way more people in the world that they should (innocent people in Syria and Libia, for example), so I see the leak as a problem that DNC is responsible, not the "leaker".

This is like saying that if somebody leaves their door unlocked, it's their fault if they get robbed and the robber shouldn't be held responsible.

If what you hide there is a dead body and the robbers tell the cops anonymously, you're guilty of murder :) and then, I don't care if you got robbed.

Except Wikileaks is hurting people that have nothing to do with the leaked documents, like Democratic campaign donors (even those who donated $5)

If Wikileaks believe an organisation is bad, they would of course also think that the supporters of this organisation (the donors in this case) are bad. We can argue whether their initial belief is appropriate or not, but their actions appear to be consistent.

It's not nice, but if those people get harassed, then that'll put more pressure on the parties. So it still helps the goal of making it hard for government orgs to operate.

Yeah, and if some Republican's daughter gets an abortion, we should totally publish her medical records to prove he's a hypocrite. Maybe next time she'll choose a better father.

> making it hard for government orgs to operate

Sure, that will be lovely

Just remember what might happen if firefighters, police, CDC, FAA, FDA have trouble operating

Not agreeing just saying it clearly adds pressure to the org.

>Wikileaks was founded under the idea that you could disrupt governments by leaking their private data so that they become so paranoid that they can't function.

Except for Russia and China, for some reason (clearly not for the lack of leaks).

Even though I think, Snowden is on the right here, lets not kid ourselves, they using Snowden right now to trash Wikileaks, anyone remember when Snowden leaks came out, he was a russian spy, who apparently went to Russia by himself and dumped American intelligence documents to them.

now according to most mainstream publications Wikileaks are shill for Putin, cold war era rhetoric in 2016.

Who is 'they'?

Big media outlets and the DNC? CNN even had their frontpage with Trump and Putin pictures side by side saying "Russia Helping Trump?" The actual story was more clear that it was just someone in a campaign accusing Russia. But the headline and setup was obviously intended to convey a different idea.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-trai...

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/24/politics/robby-mook-russia...

wat u call trolling when not funny?

It's illuminating that this isn't framed as Snowden vs. Assange. Certainly if they could frame it that way for their juicy story, they would.

We don't know (at least here on HN) who personally posted that reply on the WikiLeaks Twitter feed. It seems reasonable to assume that there are internal differences today just as there were a few years ago when Assange publicly battled a top ex-WikiLeaker, among other conflicts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Defections

So what is "WikiLeaks" to us aside from the material they produce?

Aside from that, as has been pointed out, different legitimate tactics can serve different legitimate goals, and in different strategic contexts.

Hilarious what you can turn into an article these days. The basis of this "clash" seems to be two single tweets.

My thoughts exactly. This article basically just showed two different very small stories and the two tweets. Very short, pointless article.

The WaPo has something more juicy they could investigate, too:

https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/2699

===

From:kaplanj@dnc.org To: RangappaA@dnc.org Date: 2015-09-22 13:29 Subject: Re: WaPo Party

Great - we were never going to list since the lawyers told us we cannot do it.

We are waiting

===

They aren’t going to give us a price per ticket and do not want their party to be listed in any package we are selling to donors. If we let them know we have donors in town who will be at the debate, we can add them to the list for the party.

"Breaking news! Two people have different opinions! More at 11."

Kind of getting tired of internal intelligence agencies wars getting all this attention...

>The group's recent release of emails from the Democratic National Committee exposed things such as the credit card numbers, social security numbers and passport numbers of some donors -- putting them at risk of identity theft.

It is not like any of the people that wrote the information in the emails has any fault, right? It is not Wikileaks' job to save DNC's collective ass.

You put your donor's info in jeopardy - you are to blame. If there was common sense in the DNC - the leak would not have been possible.

It's not Wikileaks' job to save the DNC, but they could claim more moral authority if they didn't so brazenly also play a role in disseminating donor financial information.

That's essentially what Snowden is saying. Go ahead and expose things worthy of exposure (by all means!), but doing so in a way that puts others at risk is irresponsible.

If your home gets broken into because the door was left unlocked, is the thief innocent because "you are to blame"? No. Sure, you bear some responsibility for not being more responsible and exercising better judgment; but you're not the one who committed the theft.

The analogy is wrong - the DNC situation is akin to Oberyn Martell saying he don't need helmet.

Everybody that has spent more than 3 hours on the internet already knows that everyone is out there to get you.

>Everybody that has spent more than 3 hours on the internet already knows that everyone is out there to get you.

Yes, just like every adult knows thieves are out there to get to your valuables. It means you should secure them, sure, but that doesn't absolve them of guilt if/when they successfully steal based on your failure to store everything in an underground vault.

The problem is, the word 'theft'. There is no theft possible in an open protocol such as email. There is only interception and observation - which occurs inherently as a part of the way email is handled.

If the original author of the leaked emails had used encryption, none of this would matter. The fact that they chose not to encrypt the contents of the email, instead stupidly thinking that email was secure by nature (it most definitely is NOT), is the real issue here.

If I hear you shouting your social security number at the top of your voice to your friend across the room, its not my responsibility that your information is no longer secure or protected. Its yours, and yours alone.

The technological incompetence of the authors of DNC emails is the issue here, people. Do you really want someone running the country who can't even fathom the most basic, basic aspects of the technology that runs the world?

No, this is wrong from a legal standpoint, at least with US law and many EU laws as well. Ownership laws are fairly clear and have lots of precedent in regards to email, and there are also clearly defined cases of theft and violations of the CFAA.

Your analogy breaks down in that the leaks are are a result of a breach, most certainly a violation of CFAA. No current understanding of law shares your opinion that because it's an open protocol that you no longer have agency over the content. Security measures were put in place, though certainly not enough to prevent a major leak. Though I hate bringing in analogies, you're not more culpable for your house being broken into just because you don't have 6 cm steel shutters for all openings; it's certainly more secure, but illegal access is illegal access.

I say this next part not to be demeaning but to state an assumption of mine, but I'm going to assume you probably dislike the CFAA; I do as well, but to say there's no theft possible is a naive notion in the face of labyrinthine laws. The world has been dealing with email breaches since your average hacker got a home connection fast enough to move a few megabytes of data without timing out. The law's opinion on theft of email is incredibly different from your own.

>The law's opinion on theft of email is incredibly different from your own.

Fair enough. But since when was the DNC officially a part of the US Federal Government? Also, since when was Hillarys' personal email server covered by the same facet?

As an outsider looking in, it doesn't appear to me that CFAA applies: are the DNC computers exclusively for the use of the US Gov't? Was Hillarys' email server?

I think these are very interesting questions .. and I ask them in earnest, since I'm clearly naive about the CFAA (and thank you for making this point clear..)

>Fair enough. But since when was the DNC officially a part of the US Federal Government?

U.S. Law (U.S. Code or "U.S.C.") doesn't just cover the government. It covers, well, the U.S. Were you thinking Constitutional Law, which limits the powers of the government?

The issue here is that the hackers are foreign. Had you compromised DNC (or RNC! or Goldman Sachs') servers and were an American, you can rest assured there'd be some not-so-friendly men in suits at your door.

It's one among a body of laws that makes black hat hacking and theft of private information illegal. That doesn't strike me as overreaching. I'd prefer that my computer (or my bank's servers) not be hacked – and that there be criminal laws in place to deter it. Just like how I should protect myself such that I'm not a victim of homicide... but I still appreciate homicide laws in place.

Sure, both I and the bank should have proper security protocols in place, but there should also be some criminal recourse for those who decide to commit such crimes.

CFAA applies to basically all computers in the US (technically it doesn't if no network traffic crosses state borders, but that seems hard to argue in the days of the internet), not just those under government control. The requirement is either government use or interstate communication, not both.

That is indeed a broad and over-reaching law. Fascinating, thanks for the education.

Even if you hear somebody shouting a secret across the room, you can choose not to rebroadcast that information.

Well, if we are talking about common sense. I should never make a payment transaction online. Never send personal details to doctors, freinds or family. Never provide information under nda to parties online.

This isnt a problem of common sense, this is a problem of encryption, who has access and how easy it is to force access. Saving emails could also prove things in the courts defensively if necessary

Never do it .. unless its encrypted. (Hint: you can do this pretty easily, if you learn how.)

Email is not, by default, encrypted. Anyone on any of the networks between the send and the recipient of any of those emails could have seen this data.

The security failure happened when the person composing the email typed in the data that should have been protected. People - especially people in power - need to realize that email is NOT private by default - it is by its very nature, an open and public line of transmission, and can be very, very easily intercepted by interested third parties.

So, lets stay focused on the real point where the security failure occurred: whoever typed the data in, in the first place, while composing their 'very important' emails ..

Your expecting people who have spent their lives climbing the political ladder and understanding / memorizing / interpreting law to then be able to know that their emails are viewable by a man in the middle or anyone able to read the harddrive?

If anything, this is a problem with their IT staff. Now that being said, the DNC may have not made it obvious that this was necessary and thats where the burden can rest. They knew that everything needed to be secure but either assumed incorrectly that it was encrypted or didnt want to inform IT that there are sensetive materials

> Your expecting people who have spent their lives climbing the political ladder and understanding / memorizing / interpreting law to then be able to know that their emails are viewable by a man in the middle or anyone able to read the harddrive?

Yes, yes I do. It takes less than an hour to learn how to use pgp.

It takes less than a second to understand why you don't put passwords, credit card details or root passwords in email.

Is that so much to ask from the nation's Ivy League elite?

>Your expecting people who have spent their lives climbing the political ladder and understanding / memorizing / interpreting law to then be able to know that their emails are viewable by a man in the middle or anyone able to read the harddrive?

Yes, indeed, I do expect that level of competence from people who aspire to govern the subject.

Would end-to-end encryption have helped this situation at all? None of the emails were intercepted between parties, to my knowledge.

It's likely, unless the email dump also included private keys of recipients.

Some of that data was almost certainly sent encrypted. I'd be slightly surprised to find that their internal emails weren't encrypted at the transport layer. If they were using Exchange or even GApps, that'd be the default.

It looks like a few individual mailboxes were popped. So even with a secure network, the result would have been the same.

That the DNC is partially at fault doesn't absolve all other involved from their part.

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