Mass Hacks of Private Email Aren’t Whistleblowing, They Are at Odds with It
justsecurity.org
justsecurity.org
The reality is that sometimes hacking is in the public interest and sometimes it's not, but figuring out when is not easy or black and white.
One aspect to these discussions that I find sort of befuddling is the idea that somehow those involved in "making the news" (so to speak) shouldn't have to think about what they're saying or how they're saying it unless they're "on the record," that we should expect their public face to be a mask hiding any insight into the private face behind it, and that somehow they ought to be magically protected from the potential publicizing of recordings, hacks, or eavesdropping.
Clearly the public at large is somewhat jaded and cynical, but there's still a very obvious desire to have "honest" and "open" candidates who make their goals, intentions, and ideologies clear. Of course the public theoretically wants to know how the sausage is made.
That the candidates can't recognize this and can't or won't operate as though the public might be watching without crying foul seems to me a bigger farce than pretending that one's own words are a conspiracy... but what do I know?
I guess the idea that one ought to maintain some level restraint and conviviality both publicly and privately is dated and quaint.
- Who decides that hacking the Mafia is Ok and someone else it is not? And if Mafia is ok, what about lesser criminals? What about someone you suspect is criminal but you are not sure?
- It is in theory laudable to ask full transparency from our politicians. And, yes, the on/off record distinction is sometimes problematic. But this is not what we are talking about. The article discusses private conversation between two public persons. They should think on how they express themselves in these conversations? This couldn't have the effect of freezing their ability to communicate? I have no idea, but I think it will be problematic. I'm not saying that one of the two involved parties could not breach the privacy assumption. That is own personal choice with the consequences to his reputation, so he could decide to do that according to his ethical consideration if he thinks what he has seen is wrong...
Everything we say, including the way we say it, is a reflection of our values and though processes. If the way somebody talks off-record is drastically different from the way he/she talks on record, the problem is not the off record talk. The problem is that this mismatch indicates that the on-record talk doesn't actually reflect the person's true values and opinions and is just a facade.
And that's without touching the problem of public policies. Honestly speaking, some issues are generally too complex to be analyzed in a debate or in public speeches. So complex articulated analysis needs to be reduced and simplified. On some topic, it is possible to have a point of view that, when expressed, is a very valid one, but requires a lot of education to get buy-in from the general public. So if you are a politician what do you do? You could choose to use part of your consensus to push for a dividing policy and educate the public on why you are right. Are you could decide to wait, flow with the public, until you are ready to make your position public.
Now if they go round saying the exact opposite in private, and condemn their own public remarks, then there's a problem. But that's mostly not the case.
The public may or may not have sympathy with it, but it's a crime. The hacker who did it would have committed a crime and would be sought out and prosecuted appropriately.
Some considerations:
* The hacker's intent--purely altruistic or otherwise--is irrelevant (or at least must be left to a judge/jury to consider)
* The hacker acted as vigilante. The argument that a hacker turning up dirt on "bad" people is acceptable would be arbitrary, and the rule of law would thereby be subverted. You can't have one set of laws for some folk and not for others under the rule of law.
As a corollary, I just listened to a guy at a security conference talk about how he had hacked black market credit card resellers and deleted their databases. Arguably a good thing, right? Ignore him, eh? Give him a medal, perhaps? Well... first he'd downloaded their inventory for his own black market site. Whoops.
FWIW, he did his time and now works for Wired as a security correspondent.
...but the Mafia are a priori criminals, while politicians are not (except in a sophomoric "all politicians are liars" kind of way).
What crime did Powell commit to have his everyday privacies exposed to the world?
I'm willing to stipulate there's an avenue for civil disobedience in which leaking of private information is used as a way to apply pressure to actors within the government and private industry who might be sanctioning the NSA's practices. In other words I could see a course of action that includes widespread, comprehensive attempts to hack and leak the emails of FISA court judges, employees and appointees of US intelligence agencies, executives and board members of companies like AOL, Palantir, and Verizon who are known to have enthusiastically participated in this surveillance, and elected officials in the executive or legislative branches of the government who have supported or perpetuated this spying. The idea being that if the people who keep this system of surveillance grinding onwards experience the personal consequence of having their private info leaked to the public, they might reconsider their actions.
I could see a course of action like this and even agree there's some valid arguments for it, but it's also incredibly dangerous, and would require, I dunno, a great deal of judgement and restraint to not cause huge collateral damage to perfectly innocent people, or to end up ruining the lives of people who were only tangential participants in the system. In other words, this strategy is deeply problematic and dangerous at the best of times.
But let's not kid ourselves that that's even what's going on here. You could try to argue that Hillary Clinton, as the likely next president, is a part of this system, and so she should be on the list of people who are targeted for leaking in the course of civil disobedience. But Trump also supports this surveillance, so he should too. But the thing is, we don't have to guess at the motives of Wikileaks here, they are quite clearly making no such civil disobedience claims [1]. And if you look at whose information is being leaked—Clinton campaign staffers, the DNC—and estimate where these particular actors fall on the scale of culpability in the NSAs spying (hint: well down the list), you start to see that trying to ascribe some higher civic purpose to these particular leaks isn't warranted.
Yes, civil disobedience in this context comes with consequences. It's a fight, people get hurt in fights. Lives have already been ruined by the surveillance state. It's important to keep in mind it's a path of action people feel forced down by the actions of their government.
> you start to see that trying to ascribe some higher civic purpose to these particular leaks isn't warranted.
You sure about that?
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/22030#efmABAADK...
Here's a bit of one of my comments from yesterday, "For instance, the stories about Podesta's dealings in Russia [1]. This email [2] includes an attached legal bill regarding formation of Leonidio LLC. Is that not government and business corruption? 1. http://www.wnd.com/2016/10/how-hillarys-campaign-chief-hid-m... 2. https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/13946
Ummm.... That's two years after she held any kind of public office.
How is it possibly "government corruption" for someone who is not a member of government to agree to meet people in order to solicit funds for their foundation? Bill Gates does this all the time, does he not?
Public service invites public scrutiny. The idea that it wouldn't seems ...undemocratic.
Imagine someone rilling everyone up about a pedophile who kidnapped their child and then, when everyone has kicked the kidnapper's door in and shot him, they reveal that it was actually just a rumor?
Why should we draw some hard line between sides of his life? I never hear prosecutors say "Well, he robbed a bank, but only as part of his day-job. When he retires he'll be guiltless."
Meanwhile: exactly why is it you believe it's OK to hack the personal emails of mafia members? Having committed some crime, is it your feeling that they simply deserve all the punishments we can conceive of? I agree with you: few would bat an eye were that the standard. You could probably break a few kneecaps, too, if you wanted. Fair's fair!
Who else's privacy can we simply ignore? How about Scientologists? The Ku Klux Klan? Sounds great so far. How about NARAL? CAIR? You want to take a vote and see how far we can go?
1) subpoena
2) FOIA request
So Americans (either government officials or private citizens) should have had access to them anyway.
Public servants in the US make a deal: if they want control or influence over the legislative process, then they have to be willing to release their emails.
Of course -- I dislike releasing emails for purely partisan purposes or releasing emails that don't expose any wrongdoing.
But, if we do not have some sort of punishment for people who refuse to respond to subpoenas or FOIA requests, then we open the door for these rules to be ignored.
Until government opens up and sheds the secrecy and outright deception, I have no pity or concern for them.
1: http://mentalfloss.com/article/21100/6-people-who-stole-nati...
I don't see where else the line of thinking that we deserve to have access to their email ends up, and it's pretty easy to argue that Podesta picking the brains of people he knows is not actually official party business.
My objection is that when I walk into the voting booth this November, I will be forced to vote for a Democrat. I mean this literally: most offices on my ballot will not be contested, not even by a Republican. The most competitive races will have a Republican versus a Democrat, but most actual races will just have a Democrat. The actual decision-making for most officials who run my life was decided in the Democratic Primaries. I voted in those too, but most of those weren't contested either.
This happens because if you're a Republican or Democrat, your party declares your candidacy and boom, you're on the ballot. If you're not, you need a signature drive to run for town dog-catcher.
I'm just saying that I want more than one choice for every election up and down the ballot, and I want the available choices determined by public support for the movement, party, or candidate, rather than by legal privileging of particular private organizations.
I say this on HN all the time.
The piece does not say "never leak emails ever", the piece says "only link emails that are of civil interest", which is exactly the position that Snowden has been espousing for some time. It says "with great power comes great responsibility", not "all hackers are bad! obey the government!"
It doubly says that if we permit all leaked emails, governments could use this against us by leaking things anonymously. The suggestion here is that honoring anonymously leaked troves of emails without considering their civil merit is itself a back door around the fourth amendment. At some point the government will anonymously leak something to wikileaks and use it against a citizen. The danger here is that were the government to effectively coop wikileaks itself, which you think is anti-government, it would become a brutal and effective trojan horse. If we put blind faith in wikileaks, it will eventually be co-opted by the institutions for which it was designed to provide oversight.
This piece is a defense of your right to privacy. I'm confused as to why it's being met with such resistance here.
The problem is that what is of civil interest is subjective. For example the transcripts of Clinton's speeches to wall street wouldn't be of civil interest except that she's running for public office. Hell, a strong case could be made that all communications of any government official or employee at any level is of civil interest. That's sort of the point of FOIA. Too bad that politicians and functionaries have been working hard to expand the boundary of what is protected from FOIA requests.
> The suggestion here is that honoring anonymously leaked troves of emails without considering their civil merit is itself a back door around the fourth amendment. At some point the government will anonymously leak something to wikileaks and use it against a citizen.
The government already indiscriminately gathers private data, picks through it, brings charges, and then lies about the provenance of the data. They call it parallel construction. It's too late to be worrying about whether the powers that be are going to skirt the constitution, it's a done deal.
These leaked emails were from govt agents and are unencrypted.
Also, government officials are held to a higher standard than private citizens. So if Wikileaks reveals something nasty about your senator, he might get investigated where another citizen might not.
Agreed. Much of the blog is of that quality: Thinking and writing on a level of nuance and sophistication well beyond almost all competition. There is no compromise, as far as I see, to the widespread style of hyperbole and incitement on the Internet, which makes it is such a pleasure to read.
The topic of the blog is a little narrow, law as applied to national security issues (from international laws of war to domestic law and courts to privacy), but it's a pleasure to read if only as a signal of intelligence in the world. It's like SETI found something on the Internet.
Also, I highly recommend their daily international news summary.
All that matters is whether the facts published are accurate. Maligning the source (particularly on speculation) is a pre-emptive ad hominem non-sequitor.
So, if WikiLeaks starting dumping private emails for random people, that would be acceptable because none of the information is actually false?
Given what turkish-speaking people say about the so called erdogan leaks, wikileaks already has started indiscriminately advertising leaks of peoples private data, putting them at risk. see for example http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zeynep-tufekci/wikileaks-erdog...
The "blind faith" (I'm not suggesting it exists [nor that it doesn't], as the author does) is a result of previously publishing many things that appear to be true with no examples (at least that anyone here has revealed) of published falsehoods.
>The danger here is that were the government to effectively coop wikileaks itself, which you think is anti-government, it would become a brutal and effective trojan horse.
The malignment is that "the government" would somehow use wikileaks to some negative ends [sneak into our minds?!].
>The entirety of his comment
You'll note that the original article doesn't even contain the word "trojan", and only mentions Wikileaks twice -- never in the context of it being co-opt'd by a government.
We're in a cold war, not with Russia or China, but with our own government, who views the citizenry as a threat pool, even when history overwhelmingly reveals that most threats to governments come from opportunists within governments, and not from plebian revolts or terrorists.
FWIW, the DNC leaks have been rather underwhelming, at best revealing that nominating a candidate for POTUS is not much different than nominating a high school class president, i.e. it's mostly an exercise in clique formation.
The author might better spend their time and energy teaching the government how to act transparently and respect privacy than trying to convince the proles their sense of payback is immoral.
I'd never heard that the Nixon team planned to release their recordings to the public.
The point of whistleblowing is that you reveal actual crimes, not just sharing private conversations.
I've no doubt that there were plenty of constitutional challenges to the statutes, none of which were successful.
Until our government actually starts being transparent these hacks are the only insight into the actual thoughts and motivations of our world leaders.
Americans read the government's emails: "This is an outrage!"
I'm pretty confident Zittrain would like to see greatly reduced government secrecy and greatly increased privacy protections and doesn't mean to defend the status quo around either of those things.
It's the government that should be the more transparent one - not the citizens, who are supposed to "own" the government.
Yet things are very much the other way around right now - by a long shot. Government secrecy has only expanded under Obama, even after promising more transparency compared to Bush's own secrecy. Almost every remotely sensitive government document gets "classified" these days. This nonsense needs to stop.
It's even worse when the media colludes with the government to tell citizens that it's "illegal" to read these emails.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161019/07004935835/cnn-t...
Should everyone who ever worked for the government have all of their private email and correspondence exposed? Should anyone who is connected to any political party in any way be subject to having their private digital lives splayed open for everyone to see?
I could see if someone was exposing some specific correspondence that is relevant to government wrongdoing. But what purpose does it serve to dump everything from someone's account(s) indiscriminately? Does the guy that does the trip-planning for the Secretary of State deserve that?
Going down this road, one can see how these hacks can be used to silence dissent, punish political dissidents, influence elections, and who knows what else. Maybe it is inevitable given that there are many state actors who will do whatever they want to further their goals.
But who knows, maybe stuff like this will convince the powers that be that trying to weaken or ban encrypted communications is a REALLY bad idea.
Was that rhetorical supposed to convince me of something?
Anyone who doesn't see how we are on the path to totalitarianism is deluding themselves.
why do you think you should have the right to this? it is quite extreme. anyone's "actual" thoughts are their own business. judge them by their actions. godknows, there's proof enough out there about how shitty the US government is.
Nonsense. The mass hacks have shone much-needed light into formerly dark places. It's a bit late to think civic and political participation has a chance against sentiment like this:
"And as I've mentioned, we've all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry", from https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3599
"I'm certain the poll-directed insiders are sure things will default to policy as soon as the conventions are over, but I think not. And as I've mentioned, we've all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly. This problem demands some serious, serious thinking - and not just poll driven, demographically-inspired messaging."
To unpack that (along with context from the rest of the email), Podesta's correspondent is bemoaning the fact that politics has begun to be covered as entertainment and celebrity gossip. He suggests that any hope that things will take a turn for the better after the election is misplaced, and that there's a larger issue: "we"—and by this he clearly means media elites, people in public office, and in general the milieu to which he belongs rather than some shadowy cabal of which he is a member—have not upheld their duty to help keep an informed and skeptical citizenry. He suggests that misguided attempts by the media to keep people compliant and docile have started to wear thin, but that in the absence of information and understanding all that anger is liable to attach itself to a demagogue like Donald Trump.
In short, he is advocating the exact thing mentioned in the article: informed civic and political participation! This is a perfectly anodyne line of thinking, and I don't really see what cause is served by stealing and leaking this person's private correspondence. And who is this dark and Machiavellian correspondent? This guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ivey
I thought he was saying they've all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and conspire to produce a compliant and unaware citizenry. That's what he says.
"He suggests that any hope that things will take a turn for the better after the election is misplaced, and that there's a larger issue: "we"—and by this he clearly means media elites, people in public office, and in general the milieu to which he belongs rather than some shadowy cabal of which he is a member—have not upheld their duty to help keep an informed and skeptical citizenry."
Except he says 'we've all been quite content to ... conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry', exactly the opposite meaning.
"He suggests that misguided attempts by the media to keep people compliant and docile have started to wear thin but that in the absence of information and understanding all that anger is liable to attach itself to a demagogue like Donald Trump."
Indeed.
"In short, he is advocating the exact thing mentioned in the article: informed civic and political participation!"
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.
"And who is this dark and Machiavellian correspondent? This guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ivey"
So, a close confidant of the Clintons (Bill made him Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts) and with strong connections to the current Dems (team leader in Arts and Humanities for the Obama transition).
I don't think it could be much more clear that this guy thinks that media coverage has "been" (and I quote him saying "been" because he's talking in the past tense) 1) sub-par, trivialised entertainment rather than thought-provoking information 2) needs to be something better in the future.
The author of this email writes books about policy and how to improve it! He's particularly interested in improving cultural and civic life. We can see quite clearly the context of his comments, and the broader context of who he is and why he's engaging in this dialog.
Or we could ignore all that and whip up a bizzarely contextless fantasy constructed around misreading the word "we" and ignoring pretty much everything else. Oh wait, I just said "we" in the previous sentence yet I don't mean myself - gee, how about that?
Worse still, I think you're actually guilty of the very problem he laments. Rather than having a dialog around politics of careful debate and fair analysis, we (again this "we" does not include me) are content to dismiss the facts, stir up fake controversy and peddle conspiracy theories and other attention-grabbing but ultimately misleading soundbites.
I don't see anything abnormal in this exchange at all: grizzled old adviser shares his thoughts on the entertainment-cum-revolution that is the Trump campaign and ruefully admits that the Dems need a rethink. And I'm not the one tying myself in angry knots trying to spin this as an innocent email encouraging greater civic participation.
Is it possible that sometimes people exaggerate a position of the establishment that they are themselves a part of, in order to make a point and push for a change?
Ignoring Context is Enlightenment.
There's a really good interview in the intercept between Glenn Greenwald and Naomi Klein about this exact issue. [1] Greenwald mentions:
"So [Wikileaks] were very much an ardent and enthusiastic proponent of that model — that when you get tons of information that belongs in the public eye, you have the corresponding responsibility to protect not only people’s physical security but also their privacy. I used to defend them on that all the time. Somewhere along the way, WikiLeaks and Julian decided, and they’ve said this explicitly, that they changed their mind on that question — they no longer believe in redactions or withholding documents of any kind."
"I think WikiLeaks more or less at this point stands alone in believing that these kinds of dumps are ethically — never mind journalistically — just ethically, as a human being, justifiable."
[1] https://theintercept.com/2016/10/19/is-disclosure-of-podesta...
That email is the perfect example of wikileaks publishing material irresponsibly. There is nothing in there that is in the public interest, nothing to justify the violation of the privacy of Podesta or the sender.
Not just 'a guy' - a highly intelligent, extremely well-connected confidant of the Clintons who used to serve in President Clinton's administration and who has warned before of the dangers of this approach.
"That email is the perfect example of wikileaks publishing material irresponsibly. There is nothing in there that is in the public interest, nothing to justify the violation of the privacy of Podesta or the sender."
Preach it, unaware and compliant citizen, preach it.