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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice if it were so simple -- wikileaks is just a version of YouTube.

But they're not. They don't publish everything they get. They have an agenda. And they don't seem to have publication guidelines, which even YouTube (and every other quasi-anonymous publisher) has. In addition, everything they publish is supposed to be against the wishes of some national government somewhere.

Nope. Once they gave up neutrality, they're not a publishing channel. They're a political cause masquerading as a public service.

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Your argument seems to have troubling conclusions, so please correct me if I'm reading you wrong.

So... political causes don't get free speech anymore? What United States is it that I'm living in, where political causes can be censored?

I think the whole thing is a tricky wicket.

Free speech is first and foremost political free speech. You have a right (and obligation) to assemble and speak on matters of public policy.

But you don't have a right to say just anything. Obviously if you decided to "out" all the spies in Bulgaria and that resulted in dozens of deaths? A crime has been committed.

I absolutely support political organizations and their right to speak out. But that's not a blank check.

Right, it's certainly not as clear cut as some people have been making it out to be. I think that by and large, though, Wikileaks has not released anything that would come in conflict with the "clear and present danger" criterion pioneered by Schenck v. United States. Otherwise they wouldn't have such a clean legal slate.

So I agree that there are limitations to be placed on free speech, as the Supreme Court agrees, but in Wikileak's case people are trying to silence information that is legal by the court's judgment. And I don't think the CIA should be above the law, although it seems to disagree.

Yes. I think we understand each other.

As a contrarian, my concern is that this issue is being painted with way too broad of a brush. There are limits from a U.S. constitution standpoint for free speech. There are also practical limits as to how useful to the global public an organization can be if it has an agenda and a megaphone for disseminating secrets. Lots of room for third-party players to screw with public opinion.

As a libertarian, however, I think these guys are doing the work of the angels and I support anything that levels the playing field between the individual and the state. Rock on.

I just don't think everybody involved has thought it through completely, though. Lots of sloganeering and simplistic arguments going on. And that keeps nagging at me. I get this feeling that we are missing something important.

What have they acquired and not published?

I would imagine they don't publish things that they cannot verify as probably true, or things that aren't newsworthy.

On the other hand, here's something they did publish: a leak of their own donor list. http://www.newswiretoday.com/news/46864/. I see that as pretty good evidence of their integrity.

According to a WikiLeaks member, they publish all true and false documents together with a judgment whether they think it's true/false and why. For example, they published a fake Steve Jobs medical report together with a note why they considered it a fake. They do have criteria (e.g. no self-made write-ups, no publically available documents), but nothing against boring or false stuff.

http://blog.chaosradio.ccc.de/index.php/2009/08/24/cr149-wik... (if you understand spoken German, that is)

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