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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Wikileaks is apparently on a mission to destroy whatever credibility they had left. They seem to be taking a leaf out of the IS playbook here, any random attack that is moderately successful gets claimed as one of theirs.

It isn't a week since they were extremely economical with the truth regarding Assange's internet access ('state actor cut off their internet' -> 'Ecuador has pulled the plug on Assange's laptop').

The best way to deal with this would have been to distance themselves from anybody doing this, the very worst is to suggest they have the ability to issue orders to those perpetrating these attacks.

With supporters like these they wouldn't need enemies to begin with, it's a very negative association and they're purposefully aligning themselves with these so called hackers.

What will replace wikileaks?

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There is something really weird going on with the wikileaks twitter right now. Lots of odd posts, lots of misspellings, lots of links to things like Politico that they never linked to before. WAY more partisan than before.

This all started the day Equador cut off his net access. Assange has not been seen in public since.

How hard would it be for them to post a five second video clip with today's newspaper?

Current thinking is that wikileaks is no longer in control of their twitter account and/or Assange is missing.

Yeah. Until the Wikileaks twitter proves itself with a properly signed PGP message, I won't be trusting it anymore (but even then: If the twitter account has been compromised, maybe they also grabbed his PGP keys?). Also, I'm worried about the wellbeing of Assange. As you said, it shouldn't be too hard to give some sign of life, would it.

It's in Assange's interest to let some people believe he has been killed.

They released Part 15 of Podesta's emails 20 minutes ago. If someone had whisked away Assange and taken over his Twitter account, why would they continue the huge dump of emails?

Apparently nobody gives two shits of a fuck what is in those emails, no matter how unsettling their contents are. Why not keep publishing those while you destroy Wikileaks?

It is amazing to watch this. Even if you are the most dedicated Clinton supporter there is, you have to realize how one sided media orgs across the line can become.

> Even if you are the most dedicated Clinton supporter there is, you have to realize how one sided media orgs across the line can become.

You'd be surprised. My friends and family seem to be doubling down on it. They either outright don't care or they are encouraged by the underhandedness of it all.

I think you missed that nobody gives two shits because the contents are completely pedestrian except to conspiracy theorists who come up with conspiracies out of absolutely everything. Example: http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/10/wiki-10-draft-in-pro...

Are we reading the same emails?!

You tell me. I posted examples.

I mean, if Assange doesn't have access to the internet, this might not be him tweeting. It could be someone tweeting on his behalf, really poorly.

If what Assange and team are going through is any indication, the US Government has set a dangerous precedent in how it deals with people who go against the establishment, exposing it. They spin a narrative saying he broke certain laws, which is true, but doesn't explain how hard they are hitting Assange with behind the scenes activities to extradite him to the USA. The real motivation is to get back at Assange for publicly shaming the US Government on the world stage with various leaks.

> What will replace wikileaks?

Nothing, at least anytime soon. If wikileaks sticks to it's mission of opening Governments without the negative associations, as you said, that would suffice.

https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiLeaks/comments/587lbg/i_have_be...

It's looking like the latest allegations against him of pedophilia were totally false and fabricated by supporters of the Clinton campaign.

Edit: the above link doesn't spell it out but the the toddandclare.com website it is talking about is allegedly a totally fake dating site that submitted a false report to the Bahamanian police and issued a fake report that they tried to pass off as being written by the UN. That reddit post is describing how they think the fake dating site is linked to a private intelligence company.

http://www.snopes.com/2016/10/19/ecuador-cut-off-julian-assa...

https://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/10/17/1583749/-Julian-As...

That's not what it looks like at all...

Can you explain what you think it does look like? As a layperson, it's hard to know where the truth lies.

There is no evidence that Assange's internet access was cut off due to pedophilia charges. The origin of this story has admitted that the evidence was fabricated. http://m.dailykos.com/story/2016/10/17/1583749/-Julian-Assan...

It's not clear who fabricated the claims, but they definitely took advantage of Clinton supporters' willingness to spread dubious attacks on her enemies and their tendency to go after anyone who questions them. I mean, a dating site claiming to be UN members and that the UN is conspiring against them is way out there in nutty conspiracy-theory land, but if you look at the comments on say the Daily Kos article about this people didn't just go along with their claims, they even accused people questioning them on places like Twitter of all kinds of nasty things.

It's pretty clear from the Snopes article that the claims originated from the fake dating website.

I absolutely agree. What Wikileaks did for peace and democracy cannot be disputed but I could not say I am their supporter any more. I wonder how much of it is Assange's personality and questionable political views and how much is of it is campaign orchestrated by almost all-powerful secret services but it probably doesn't even matter at this point.

So you'd be fine with Wikileaks being shut down at this point?

How important are they really? If they aren't trustworthy -- and I think there's a great case to be made for the fact that Assange is not -- what can wikileaks do that some other website can't?

In what way are the wikileaks releases -- Not Assange, not their Twitter, but wikileaks releases -- not trustworthy?

Are any of the releases discredited?

They may not be discredited but you have to wonder what has been purposefully left out. Wikileaks as an institution depends very much on being perceived as a-political, simply a bunch of techies that will get your leaked documents out. Over the years they have shifted further and further to becoming a politically actve entity. Part of that is in response to the inevitable backlash to some of the released but that backlash was to be expected and the best way to deal with it would have been to ignore it.

Part of it may be because some of Wikileaks high value contacts are now in places where they are vulnerable (which adds weight to the call to Pardon Snowden, it would make it much easier for WL to release dirt on Putin and company, assuming they have any).

Assange set himself up to be easily corralled, not the smartest thing but he's not the first (and won't be the last) person that makes it into the limelight and ends up tripping up because of it.

Releases themselves can be independently verified, what data that is there that ends up labeled factually accurate is a great gift and I'm very happy they did what they did, however we will need more or other organizations like WL if we're to get the whole picture.

That would help in another way, you could immediately check for any modifications or selective withholding of information from the various sources.

So going back to my question, you think wikileaks should be shut down?

Shutting it down or not is up to those that run WL, I'm fine with them continuing to leak whatever people send them, in the meantime I'd love to see a serious competitor.

> what can wikileaks do that some other website can't?

No fear of going against the establishment. How many websites that you know of reveal such classified information and get wide press coverage for the same?

I don't fully understand Assange's political motivations, but the world is definitely better off with Wikileaks than without.

Think about a world where every country has an embassy with an Assange in it, and document dumps like we've seen are a routine weapon in information warfare.

It's not a very nice world to imagine. The people who get hurt are ordinary citizens whose info winds up in these giant data drops.

> Think about a world where every country has an embassy with an Assange in it, and document dumps like we've seen are a routine weapon in information warfare.

Most countries have this already. It's called the CIA or whatever the local equivalent is. The only difference is that rather than publishing directly, they leak information to media outlets for dissemination.

> It's not a very nice world to imagine. The people who get hurt are ordinary citizens whose info winds up in these giant data drops.

Bah, it can't be worse. The ordinary citizens that can get hurt by stuff like this are in countries that can (and will) already hurt them for less or even nothing. The common citizens of western democracies have nothing to fear.

If one really believes this, I have a very hard time understanding how they can believe dragnet surveillance is an important issue. After all, nobody is really getting hurt, except in the places where they can already get hurt just for chewing gum in public. So why not let the government search everyone's email for signs of terrorism?

Why is privacy super important, one of our most fundamental rights, until some dude with white hair who wrote a bad port scanner decides it doesn't matter?

> If one really believes this, I have a very hard time understanding how they can believe dragnet surveillance is an important issue. After all, nobody is really getting hurt, except in the places where they can already get hurt just for chewing gum in public.

Why is that so hard to reconcile? You don't draw a line between individual privacy rights and those of government officials?

> So why not let the government search everyone's email for signs of terrorism?

If you're going to go that route, take it one step further and ask: Why not have a camera in everybody's house to prevent battery?

What "government officials" are you talking about? Wikileaks leaked, wholesale, the personal information of millions of Turkish citizens. For that matter, in its attempt to sway the US elections, Wikileaks dumped personal emails from random staffers --- not the John Podestas of the world, but the one-step-above-intern people making $40,000 to do public service work. Not just their work-related emails. Their personal emails.

What part of taking $40,000 a year in salary from the government entitles Wikileaks to the contents of your personal emails?

http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/151983995587/on-the-wikileak-e...

> What "government officials" are you talking about? Wikileaks leaked, wholesale, the personal information of millions of Turkish citizens. For that matter, in its attempt to sway the US elections, Wikileaks dumped personal emails from random staffers --- not the John Podestas of the world, but the one-step-above-intern people making $40,000 to do public service work. Not just their work-related emails. Their personal emails.

They didn't get the personal emails of Turkish citizens, they got the emails of Turkish citizens that were on the AKP email server. That would be like complaining that a company has access to my personal emails because I use my work email to communicate with my non-work friends. The AKP is the government in Turkey so drawing a distinction between them as a private party and them as the government is weak.

> What part of taking $40,000 a year in salary from the government entitles Wikileaks to the contents of your personal emails?

None and if you don't mix personal and work, it makes it much easier to have that separation. If it's all one soup then you can't complain that the part gets released with the whole.

> http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/151983995587/on-the-wikileak-e...

Ditto for the DNC and RNC. I don't give a rats ass which side has their documents leaked. If it happens, I say it's fair game because, even though they're technically "private organizations", for all practical purposes they are the government.

If people want to avoid having "personal" comments and communications being impacted by this they need to maintain that separation and the poster child for what NOT to do is Hillary Clinton.

So, you disagree with Lessig. You feel, if someone gets involved in any way with politics, all bets are off. They should have Grugq-grade OPSEC or expect to read about their breakups on Pastebin.

> So, you disagree with Lessig. You feel, if someone gets involved in any way with politics, all bets are off. They should have Grugq-grade OPSEC or expect to read about their breakups on Pastebin.

Or just keep their political and personal lives separate.

Private individuals can be members of political parties and this is not something that should end up in the public domain. Really, this is about as easy to understand as it gets, in fact in many countries such party memberships and who you vote for is kept extremely secret to make sure that votes can be bought and/or to make sure that there is a place for 'unpopular' parties and candidates.

It's a cornerstone of democracy. Some countries take a much less serious approach to voter registration but especially in Turkey such lists are social dynamite and the release of those lists was absolutely uncalled for and irresponsible.

Too late to edit: substitute 'can't' for 'can' in the second sentence.

> Private individuals can be members of political parties and this is not something that should end up in the public domain. Really, this is about as easy to understand as it gets, in fact in many countries such party memberships and who you vote for is kept extremely secret to make sure that votes can't be bought and/or to make sure that there is a place for 'unpopular' parties and candidates.

> It's a cornerstone of democracy. Some countries take a much less serious approach to voter registration but especially in Turkey such lists are social dynamite and the release of those lists was absolutely uncalled for and irresponsible.

When there's a single ruling party, or two major parties in a system like the USA, the distinction between political parties and the government itself is blurred to point of being meaningless. For an even more extreme example of this see the CPC in China. They are the government, party business is government business, and vice versa. Hiding behind them being a private organization doesn't work.

> When there's a single ruling party, or two major parties in a system like the USA, the distinction between political parties and the government itself is blurred to point of being meaningless.

That's simply nonsense. The reason you might have two major parties forever is if you start making things like registered voters public. After all, who would dare to affiliate themselves with a third openly if that would lead to an immediate risk of being labeled in all kinds of nasty ways.

If Peter Thiel isn't immune to such pressure you can bet that ordinary citizens would be a lot easier to target.

The government and the citizens of a country are two disjoint entities, even in a 'one' party (that really means 'none') state.

Party membership does not equate to being a part of the government (though the one does not rule out the other).

Weapon? Think about a world where governments are run by representatives of the citizens using a system that is fully open to the citizens. Ability to communicate with them, for them to see every vote as it happens, and every communication between them. Both the elected and electorate seeing the same system, just with citizens having read-only access to some parts. It was impossible in the past for technical reasons, but could now happen. Spying and leaks would no longer be a weapon because the government would be open by default.

Wikileaks only coin was trust, they've lost that as far as I can see therefore their time of usefulness is more or less over. I really don't see how they will regain it at this point, sometimes a fresh start is better.

None of their releases have been discredited. Focusing on personalities is a mistake.

You are missing the possibility of selective withholding of information and possible changes of the information leaked to suit a political end.

Focusing on personalities is a mistake when it comes to mere technical ability, but when it becomes a political question I think it is a valid concern.

At a minimum I'd like to see another outlet next to WL.

No, I'm not missing the selective withholding.

And no one has shown any change to released information. Not once.

There's reason to believe, based on reports from people who leaked emails to wikileaks, that they selectively withhold information that shine light on russia: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/wikileaks-syria-russia...

In fact, if you really want to read into it:

> US govt funded #PanamaPapers attack story on Putin via USAID. Some good journalists but no model for integrity.

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/717670056650530816 almost sounds like WL had knowledge but decided not to act because it was critical of Putin.

You can absolutely create a narrative by removing quotes out of context. In the same way, you can create a narrative by withholding information.

> https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/717670056650530816 almost sounds like WL had knowledge but decided not to act because it was critical of Putin.

The problem with OCCRP is that they don't have knowledge critical of Putin - they have knowledge about people like, say, one of his ex-colleague's kids but make the headline and lede of every Russia-related article they post about Putin and not the actual people involved. They don't seem to take this approach with any of the other countries they report on. Wikileaks are far from being the only ones to remark on this.

Zeynep Tufekci had a pretty ruthless takedown of their indiscriminate data dump during the Turkish coup. They put thousands of ordinary citizens in danger for no reason whatsoever. The material wasn't even vetted by someone who spoke the language.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zeynep-tufekci/wikileaks-erdog...

If they were in danger, perhaps we should blame those who were pointing guns.

What invasion of privacy can't you excuse this way? Any harm caused by a violation of privacy will always have some more proximate cause.

> What invasion of privacy can't you excuse this way?

The ones made by the same people pointing the guns.

I'm completely at loss what to think about recent events, but godd2's argument isn't trivial.

That data dump of personal details wasn't even released by Wikileaks:

https://glomardisclosure.com/2016/07/26/the-who-and-how-of-t...

I'm not sure why you (and others) are trying to hold them responsible for it.

Quoting Zeynep in that piece:

“I actually never had a conclusion on who the uploader was, since it wasn’t central to my complaint about actions of Wikileaks: that they had misrepresented what the emails were, and that they had repeatedly publicized these doxing databases as “full data for our Turkey AKP emails + more”. I’m glad to see one party step up and take responsibility, but this doesn’t absolve Wikileaks of their role in all parts of this “leak” which never should have happened since it exposed no wrongdoing by a government or a powerful actor, merely the emails of ordinary people, and sensitive personal information of 20-30 million ordinary people. I tried to explain this directly to Wikileaks, but they blocked me after I started showing them tweets from Turkey’s leading anti-censorship activists who were disgusted and horrified by these actions, especially since they will now become a strong talking point for pro-censorship forces in Turkey.”

I find the fact that they blocked her especially obnoxious.

Didn't she say that after she was confronted about being wrong in the first place?

From your prior link: https://glomardisclosure.com/2016/07/26/the-who-and-how-of-t...

Indeed, personalities don't matter. To make an analogy, there are scientists whose personalities, and even political views, turn me off. But what matters is whether they do credible science.

If it's just somebody's hobby to release information, than that's as far as it goes. But in order for the information to be actionable, it requires interpretation, and then the process of choosing what information to release becomes important.

Imagine how a hypothetical scientist's results would be interpreted if it were known that they were only publishing the information that favored their own agenda -- personal, political, commercial, etc. Yet none of the data points that they publish can be discredited.

What are the questionable political views you are talking about?

My position exactly. They did a lot of good work in their early days, and although they handled the Manning leaks badly, I agree that it contained information that needed public scrutiny. But after that, the success and power seems to have gone to Assange's head. Some early Wikileaks members left because of conflicts with Assange. And now it increasingly looks like it's all about him, and not about fighting censorship and fighting for transparency.

So you only supported them when they leaked stuff about politicians you don't like?

When they acted as a pass through for leaks and supported govt.transparency. Now its pretty clearly a partisan attack on dems with the min focus of profiting and keeping wikileaks generating cash (check out their store, which used to never be a thing, if you don't believe me).

The first set of large leaks wikileaks ever did were simply dumps. Now they spoonfeed their leaks, which they claim everyone has a right to know, at a peace that is most beneficial to them. Its clear their primary objective is no longer govt transparency, but their own profits.

So they should only leak documents if they also have leaks for their subjects' opponents? That's silly.

They have a store? Large sites cost money to run. Shocker.

They play the PR game? They have to because their opponents use tactics to drown them out. They also know the mainstream media has a very short attention span and the leaks would never be talked about again once the news cycle changes. Dropping all the emails at once would be foolish.

If you have a problem with it you are free to start a competing outlet...

"Wikileaks is apparently on a mission to destroy whatever credibility they had left."

It seems disingenuous to accuse them simultaneously of throwing credibility to the wind and of carefully phrasing sensitive on-going matters like the disruption of Assange's internet access.

They're also not claiming this attack "as one of theirs", they're saying a third party who supports them is _and asking them to stop_. That distinction seems pretty clear, and is not an endorsement, it's a call for de-escalation.

From where I'm sitting it's the US state machine continuing their mission to destroy Wikileaks' credibility, by misrepresenting their M.O. and cherry picking tweets like this... only now the left-wing public is eagerly joining in as opposed to only the right-wing calling for their heads for being traitors. The thing about negative associations is, it's posts like yours that create them.

But when Palin called it "palling around with terrorists", the US left-wing was rather opposed to that tactic.

I haven't been following this, but are you saying that Wikileaks asked for this to happen?

Because what I read in the tweet pretty much says - we don't want this, please stop.

By saying "We don't want this, please stop" the implicit assertion is that it's being done on your behalf, and there's no reason at this point in time to assume it is.

They learned the lesson. No laws and rules and rights are respected,nothing is sacred, the only thing keeping the beast called man from your throat is nuclear weapons. The reason why Putin gets away with Syria and Ukraine, all that keeps you alive in this unraveling world is a gun. So why is this madness, its a nuclear weapons by a non-state entity, protecting rights that where once protected by constitutions.

The more erratically they act, the more attention they receive.

The more attention they receive, the more attention their email dumps receive.

Even Sean Hannity is praising them right now.

If their goal is to influence the election, then I think it's in their best interest to draw attention to themselves.

If anything, their credibility and the scope of their reach are increasing.

> What will replace wikileaks?

Pastebin seem popular tool for data dumps, and no one blames the owners for not redacting names. None also talks about the owner, their personality traits, and so on.

Pastebin's operators don't act as editor.

Wikileaks does not operate much differently from any other media organization: they take anonymous tips, they publish them, they work with others to sensationalize their findings, they have internal biases, and they likely are beholden to whoever is financing or supporting them. If Wikileaks went away, it would be bad, but not much different than if any other news gathering and distributing service went away.

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