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Comment by forrestbrazeal | Hacker News Reader

"Some have accused us of being pawns of the Russian government, but this misrepresents our principles and basic operations. ...We prefer not to know who our sources are; we do not want to.."

So they prefer to be unwitting pawns?

Transparency is great, freedom of information is great, but is there some point at which you have to step back and acknowledge that you're being used by a foreign power? Doesn't that undermine the good work that Wikileaks claims to be doing?

Again from the article: "The world is connected by largely unaccountable networks of power that span industries and countries, political parties, corporations and institutions; WikiLeaks shines a light on these by revealing not just individual incidents, but information about entire structures of power."

How does Wikileaks rationalize away the fact that one part of that 'unaccountable network' seems to be using them to exploit some other part?

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I believe strongly in transparency as a way to prevent corruption, but spreading misinformation doesn't stop corruption, it furthers it. It doesn't 'shine a light', it creates shadows where a brutal dictator can hide while he hurts others. Look up "useful idiots" to understand the role they played.

It's too easy to cite principle such as "transparency" in order to ignore the difficult questions of responsibility and consequences. If Wikileaks wants to help the world and 'shine a light' - well that sounds like what journalists do; why shouldn't Wikileaks also verify and corroborate information before giving it to the public?

Why would I trust any of the information if they don't? In a way, Wikileaks is the epitome of the propaganda and fake online news that influenced the U.S. campaign.

The linked article claims that WikiLeaks does "research, validate and contextualize the submissions we receive".

Of course, this process is conducted with an odd lack of transparency.

To be fair, they have a better track record than most media outlets. They don't trust the information at face value until, according to them at least, it has been verified. What that verification process is I have no idea, but so far it does appear to be working. I might just be out of the loop, though, so if that is the case what misinformation have they spread?

I've never heard of them verifying the information. They said they didn't even know where it came from. I doubt the DNC helped verify the emails.

> what misinformation have they spread?

Russian intelligence provided them with the data. I think we can assume it wasn't the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

EDIT: You are correct that I can't prove that it's misinformation. However, that is a normal part of a sophisticated misinformation campaign - that its targets can't discern real info from misinfo. It doesn't make my assertion correct but the absence of proof hardly makes it unlikely.

Uh, the emails were verified as unaltered via DKIM signatures. Once Wikileaks did this all the talk of doctoring vanished, but you appear not to have realized this.

That's not what I saw, I followed the issue closely and hardly saw anyone bring up that it was a likely misinformation campaign. But please let's discuss here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12990832

> Wikileaks is the epitome of the propaganda and fake online news that influenced the U.S. campaign

Did you notice that Wikileaks showed via DKIM signatures that the vast majority of the emails were cryptographically proven to be unaltered. After that the notion that the emails were doctored vanished.

TIL about DKIM signatures. Thanks!

Please see my response here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12984303

Wikileaks are not "spreading misinformation", they verify everything that they get before they leak it. This is why people take what they leak so seriously - any jackass with an internet connection can spread information, but wikileaks has a reputation for thouroughly vetting the information they recieve.

> why people take what they leak so seriously - any jackass with an internet connection can spread information, but wikileaks has a reputation for thouroughly vetting the information they recieve.

I haven't heard of them having a reputation for verifying of vetting their information. Among a large number of people, I think their reputation is that of the quadruped you referenced.

Wikileaks does not want to have editorial control over what they see as relevant or important, and what they see as irrelevant.

This is good because journalists are the ones that should be responsible for "verify[ing] and corroborat[ing] information" before presenting it to the public. You can go to many different news sites and see many different editorial perspectives on what of the Wikileaks leaks are important. This way the consumer of information can avoid the inherent weakness that only one editorial perspective would provide.

I would characterize US media as the most prevalent source of misinformation for Americans. From the outright lies, blatant propaganda and media manipulation that dragged America into the Iraq War, to the despicably hallow coverage of the Syrian proxy war with context like the genocide in Bahrain completely whitewashed, all the way to silly equivocations like "Trump and Putin are best friends" or "Putin got a boobjob."

The US media bubble exists to satisfy it's customers, which are NOT it's consumers. These media organizations are paid to bring stories, ideas and perspectives - in the form of media narrative - to audiences. The GAO has indicated that the US is a huge buyer in this regard spending billions in advertising and PR (a huge component of the entire international industry).

Wikileaks is (was?) a credible voice that didn't editorialize. It refused to partially edit collections of documents, disclosing them in full. When we got a bunch of nonsense from the media about the SONY hacks, Wikileaks backed up the US government take that the attack was from North Korea by connecting the attack to US propaganda operations involving themselves in the filmaking process, and evaluating how to direct the film in a way that might destabilize the country (efforts that of course failed).

Similarly, much of the news reporting on Wikileaks by some of its compeditors has been filled with nonsense and unattributed rumors about Assange and it's teams of lawyers.

Media outlets rarely (never) provide the context that the HB Gary Federal leaks implicated the US in plans to disturb the quality of reporting out of Wikileaks to discredit it, in retaliation for disclosing US diplomatic cables that did a huge amount of damage to the US reputation (for having been duplicitous in countless ways with the public and with allies diplomats).

I feel as though there is a vacuum that will be created if Assange is killed and/or Wikileaks dismantled by intelligence. A vacuum for a peek behind the curtain of pro-government narrative that US National Security spends so much treasure making ubiquidous. A loss of Wikileaks may very well lead to a series of replacements (many of them garunteed to be various intelligence agencies) and therefore more leaks, until the militaries of various countries can more totally solve the problem of information control in the new internet medium.

That's an interesting story, but it's not my experience and I see little to substantiate it.

Certainly all media organizations have real flaws and make serious errors, but that is true of all human institutions (name an exception!). Wikileaks is no exception either.

But there are large differences of degree. I feel like you describe the ideal of Wikileaks but not the reality. Transparency is a great ideal, but everything is a bad idea in the extreme - Wikileaks shouldn't publish information that puts lives at risk, for example, or helps the political ends of clearly bad people (and I know sometimes it's hard to draw the line between bad and good, but not always). The reality is that they were Useful Idiots (the technical term, not an insult) for Russian intelligence, and appear to have their own biases and vendettas.

> So they prefer to be unwitting pawns?

Yes, just as journalists often are when someone comes forward with a story or leaks information, etc.

By not making the sort of editorial decisions that would slant the meaning of the leaked data, WL stays above that. Other journalists are free to dig deeper and write full-scale investigative stories based on the data.

Choosing not to exercise judgement doesn't mean you stay above politics, it just means you're merely at the whim of it.

Only in the short term, in the long term naked truth is more important than the political concerns of the moment.

Yeah long term I don't see Wikileaks coming out of all this looking very good. Their final write up will be "Russian stooge".

Right, the US National Security apparatus will be the author of the writeup, and Americans won't have any access to a story outside the bubble.

governments can leak information with or without the help of wikileaks.

all wikileaks cares about is complete transparency and access to information.

if Wikileaks lets itself be used to prefer political candidates then they are failing in this mission.

How? In what way does preferentiality damage the transparency or validity of the information?

Have we seen a single shred of evidence of Russian involvement? Military types with a chest of medals saying so on CNN doesn't count btw.

Clapper today said that the government doesn't know how WL got the emails. And earlier statements have said that a "state actor" was suspected for circumstantial reasons (the claim was that government officials in a variety of nations were targeted). So you are correct, there has been zero evidence.

https://medium.com/@thegrugq/evidence-guccifer-2-0-is-russia...

Copying and pasting from down-thread - a Putin apparatchik was gloating to the Guardian that they helped sway the election the day after the results came in (ctrl+f "wikileaks":

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/09/putin-applau...

1. If they know who their sources are, if they are compromised, their source is compromised.

2. They don't need to rationalize it. It benefits Wikileaks to pit multiple parts of the "unaccountable network" against one another, increasing the number of leaks and therefore the transparency available to the common man, and weakening the overall "unaccountable network."

What would have happened to Hillary's emails if WikiLeaks would not have existed?

Russia (probably?) still would have released them. WikiLeaks is merely a tool for entities wishing to release secret information and documents.

Personally, I prefer WikiLeaks to be indiscriminate towards the secret documents they are entrusted with. If they weren't, another service would probably pop up doing exactly that.

> What would have happened to Hillary's emails if WikiLeaks would not have existed?

You mean the alleged (never verified) DNC emails. Hillary's emails were released by the FBI and in response to a lawsuit.

Many of the emails were proven authentic via DKIM signatures.

I searched and found no credible source supporting this claim. Do you know of one?

Wikileaks makes the claim, and some very partisan sources repeat it, but that's all I see.

You can check the headers yourself.

It's not realistic for me to figure out DKIM and verify thousands of headers.

Also, for other people, I'm not a credible source. Is there one?

There are two explanations for their seemingly biased reporting: either they had leaks from the Republican side and chose not to release them, or the only leaks they had were on the Democratic side. From the outside, it's hard to know which one is correct.

Perhaps what the world needs is multiple WikiLeaks-like organizations that don't have the same editorial slant as Wikileaks? That way leakers can leak their data in several places and it's more likely to be published. (One might even build an anonymous submission tool that makes the submitted data available to all such organizations at the same time.)

Of course, if the problem is simply that no one is bothering to attack the RNC, then no amount of additional organizations to publish the data would help. It might, though, lend some credibility to the claim that data isn't being withheld deliberately.

You are saying we should ignore the abuses of our ruling power because some foreign ruling power is rumored to expose them?

I don't want to live in fascism just so the communists don't win, that doesn't seem like a worthwhile tradeoff.

I'm not saying that at all.

What I'm saying is that WikiLeaks' guiding philosophy as espoused in this article seems almost willfully naive.

What would you propose they do? Not leak documents based upon who the source is?

If the documents are authentic, why does it matter who the source was?

If A leaks documents on B revealing corruption about B, just because A's motives may not be pure, doesn't make B any less corrupt.

"Authentic" does not always equal "worth publishing", of course.

I have no problem with them publishing stuff that's legitimately concerning. But a lot of the Clinton leaks (and I'm no Clinton fan) seemed to me like little more than doxxing, in the full knowledge that the emails would pick up a tinge of scandal by association simply because they showed up on WikiLeaks.

Well, they could have released them all at once, rather in daily drips and drabs in an effort to make it look like there was more newsworthy information than there actually was.

What would you propose they do? Not leak documents based upon who the source is?

Actually as far as I remember, this has always been part of their method of operation from the beginning, and they explicitly state this: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/784873305463459841.

They are more than just someone who releases whatever is given to them- they attempt to vet the information and publicise it as well. Which are functions that probably should be done, but it's very hard to appear impartial when you do that...

Yes they vet the information, but if the information is true, then they publish it, regardless of who the source was.

Vetting the information does not necessarily mean vetting the source.

I don't want to live in fascism

Right, I forgot exposing Hillary's emails prevented the rise of fascism.

As much as it supported communism. No worries, you can read up on it here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allusion

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