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Comment by SEJeff | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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...

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)?

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.

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?

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