Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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.

Wikileaks previously did work with journalists to leak only things of interest to the public, they abandoned that position because it doesn't make sense to protect the state.

These leaked emails were from govt agents and are unencrypted.

Wikileaks documents aren't enough to get a conviction, and probably aren't enough to get a warrant or begin a formal investigation. So if these are true, I don't see how they're a backdoor around the 4th amendment.

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.

Depends if its a civilian that say news international or a jounalists wants to "monster"

> this is a gorgeously written piece

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.

The faith in WikiLeaks isn't blind. It will only take one false publication to destroy its credibility.

All that matters is whether the facts published are accurate. Maligning the source (particularly on speculation) is a pre-emptive ad hominem non-sequitor.

The faith in WikiLeaks isn't blind. It will only take one false publication to destroy its credibility.

So, if WikiLeaks starting dumping private emails for random people, that would be acceptable because none of the information is actually false?

That's not what they said. They said a false publication would destroy its credibility. They did not say that WikiLeaks is always in the right so long as they publish accurate information.

Correct. And the parent was asking a different question.

> So, if WikiLeaks starting dumping private emails for random people

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...

Did you read the piece? Because it sounds like you didn't. It doesn't malign the source.

Did you read my comment? It wasn't about the piece, but the comment I responded to.

The entirety of his comment was summarizing the piece (To quote it: this is a..., The piece does not say...., It doubly says that if we..., This piece is a defense of...). and he didn't add any maligning.

I was referring to this:

>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.

As the articles argues, selective releasing of true facts cant paint a false moaaic.

I'm not maligning the source, I'm maligning the material. I'm asserting that truth and utility are separate and equally important dimensions of scrutiny. It is not enough that a document be genuine: it must also be of consequence. Many of the Podesta emails are of no consequence whatsoever.

If the faith is blind, then why would one false publication destroy it? If the faith was blind, then no false publications would affect how people see it.

I assume the author didn't mean literal-figurative blind faith, as how would you even know to associate something with wikileaks?

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.

And how do you determine that a publication is false? If someone denies that a leak is true, or accurate, are you going to believe them or Wikileaks?