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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

It always blows my mind how much people like Assange and Snowden and Musk get attacked for trying to make the world better while the countless number of corrupt cowards that are in power come off relatively unscathed by these types of criticisms, at least on Hacker News. Why? Why would you attack someone who is trying to democratize power and uncover corruption? Even if the person in question has character flaws, that is by far low on the priority list for reasons to go after someone.

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Can you really look at the circus Assange is creating, and the way he plans to dribble out documents starting a month before an election, and conclude he is acting ethically and altruistically? No.

Yes wikileaks has done very good things for the world. No, Assange is not the moral actor he claims to be.

I agree wholeheartedly with this. IMO, while Wikileaks is certainly not on some untouchable moral high ground, they do good things and that's worth it for the bs Assange etc pull from time to time.

Why would the timing indicate him not acting ethically? He might just realize that information leaks are time sensitive, that when you release them is almost as important as what they contain.

If your objective is to inform the public, you get the information out with time to spare so it can be investigated and objectively assessed. If your objective is to sway the public, you release at a time of greatest impact where people's reaction to the accusations and implications will drive their actions, instead of the complete facts of the matter, which it would be silly to assume Wikileaks could provide (there's always context that can be added).

I'm not convinced one way or the other on whether Assange & Wikileaks are making the world better, but there's no denying that they've released some pretty surprising and/or significant things in the past. I find it strange to question whether someone can do something they've already done several times over.

Arguably, we would not have known about the mass trampling of our 4th Amendment rights were it not for Snowden. How could you deny the inherent merit in that?

Well, I know it's an unpopular view, but I think the US government doing that was okay. I don't pretend that's grounded in principle; I don't think that other governments should be able to do it, or that there was no potential for abuse. I think the national security rationale for the programme was valid. (perhaps not in law, I acknowledge)

I agree completely that the leak was very significant, but my preference (I think; not 100%) would be that Snowden hadn't leaked.

Wait, you're saying you are okay with the US government doing it but not other governments?

How does that work?

I think it’s called “Patriotism”. See also “American exceptionalism”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism

> It always blows my mind how much people like Assange and Snowden and Musk get attacked for trying to make the world better

Lots of evil is done in the name of "trying to make the world better". Its not unreasonable for people to be more interested in what they see your actions as likely to produce (and what they see that you reasonably should have known that they were likely to produce) than what you intended them to produce.

(And that's even before getting into the fact that "better" is subjective and one person's better can easily be another person's dystopian nightmare.)

We've got this basically figured out. The differentiator is whether their actions engender voluntary cooperation (leaving themselves open to competition) or whether their actions underwrite a quest for singular control over others.

Musk is worrisome because after the innovation honeymoon is over, he could easily end up functioning as a closed-world promulgating autarch - just as Gates and Jobs did.

But Assange and Snowden? Their very popularity is founded on forcing open centralized amalgamations of power. They have localized power and surely an assortment of groupies etc, but these structures simply cannot scale to dominate a medium city, never mind the world.

So even if they are run-of-the-mill psychopaths playing their roles solely for self-advancement, the possible damage they can do is quite limited compared to say any unnamed multinational executive.

Capitalism created a Schelling point for getting useful public goods from self-interested parties. Compared to the prior most-lucrative path of government (likely via revolution), it raised the average amount of control for everyone while constraining the maximum control a winner could obtain. The general belief in free exchange of information advances this cooperation point to even smaller power structures, leaving the supernodes with even less privileged leverage over the rest of us.

Not saying they've not changed the world, but I find it an awful tall order comparing Snowden and Assange with Musk. Two of them fought the system by breaking the laws. One of them is likely the greatest entrepreneur in the history of business and wants to do world changing things for us as a species.

Again, not against the former two, but I don't think that is an apt comparison whatsoever.

The quickest example comes to mind is how much of a douchey move this is from Assange:

http://gizmodo.com/wikileaks-just-published-tons-of-personal...

And how Snowden was a patriot for uncovering the omniscient warrantless wiretapping, but he also released the means and methods for how the NSA does literally their job in hacking foreign intelligence targets.

The reason Assange publishes documents which may contain personally identifying information is a philosophical one. Unlike Snowden, who advocates censoring documents before release, Assange maintains that censorship can discredit documents in the court of law (tampering with evidence) and therefore abstains from doing so.

But guaranteeing a lot of completely innocent people are victims of identity theft isn't a heroic act, it is a super douchey thing to do.

"Douchey" or not is for you to decide, but you're right that Assange's philosophy to release untampered documents causes collateral damage. It's a tough call, honestly: would you have your leaked documents' contents nullified in court due to censorship or risk collateral damage (identity theft) and maintain your leaked documents' impact as evidence in a court of law (which could potentially lead to the prosecution of a criminal)?

If leaked-but-redacted documents were of interest for a prosecution, couldn’t the originals be obtained by subpoena, either to WikiLeaks or (preferably) their original source?

The idea that releasing documents uncensored has anything to do with courts is nonsense. Assange claims to be doing journalism. You know what a court can do when a real journalist publishes redacted materials? Ask for unredacted copies.

Publishing unredacted documents does help sell their authenticity to the general public but I think too often the harm is too great, especially to innocent parties.

Honestly, I don't know why I hadn't thought of this. Good point!

It's like a receipt for a vote. It seems reasonable in the beginning...

But what if Wikileaks waited to be asked... Who do they give the docs to? Just courts, or interested civilians? If the former, how does that help citizens know what's going on, and if the later, what's the difference between just releasing it and selectively releasing it? This also requires people risk their freedom to request the full version.

And more critically, that means to prevent the publishing of full documents you simply need to kill the messenger.

Running Wikileaks the other way wouldn't be useful and still wouldn't appease the wrong-doers.

The uncensored documents could be provided to courts and legal agents (civilian and government) if requested, while leaving the censored ones available to the public and media. Censorship is not, itself, a destructive act with respect to the original material.

It seems like they edit content when it's convenient[1]. And they make very obvious threats when caught.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/9/12864328/wikileaks-threat-r...

I hear rumor of social engineers getting paid by the number of comments posted to maintain public image of their clients.

Assange is pretty demonstrably worse than the other two you lump him in with.

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