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.
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...
Are any of the releases discredited?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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...
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.
Or just keep their political and personal lives separate.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
And no one has shown any change to released information. Not once.
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.
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.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zeynep-tufekci/wikileaks-erdog...
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.
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.
“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.
From your prior link: https://glomardisclosure.com/2016/07/26/the-who-and-how-of-t...
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.