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Comment by skywhopper | Hacker News Reader

Wikileaks has released some important things, but they should be embarrassed that they thought the personal emails of Hillary's campaign staff saying sometimes silly things to each other was at all newsworthy. It was sensational, sure, but it revealed nothing important or even interesting. Anyone who spends a moment considering the question would expect campaign operatives to gripe about their opponents in over the top terms, to use unthoughtful language and spitball dumb ideas to their boss. Turns out the Clinton campaign did these things. The DNC emails showing that they preferred a solid Member of the Democratic Party win the nomination over someone who has not spent decades supporting the party should surprise and upset no one. And without the context of seeing Trump's campaign staff's emails or the RNC's emails in a similar perspective, the release of so much pointless but unflattering material related to Hillary and the Democrats does a major disservice to the public.

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I disagree with you about the DNC emails, they go above and beyond preference into outright campaign strategy coordination and undermine the whole idea of the primary process. I think if they could have had and released the emails sooner the behavior could have been addressed and that would have been a service to Democrats and the public. It's awful medicine sure, but something has to wake the patient up.

I have not read the subsequent email leaks so I don't have an opinion on whether they were worth releasing or not. For what it is worth, I think their effect on the election was overblown and people who distrusted Hillary would have continued to do so in the absence of such weak evidence.

> I disagree with you about the DNC emails, they go above and beyond preference into outright campaign strategy coordination and undermine the whole idea of the primary process.

What exactly do you think the primaries are? They are not official elections. The democratic party (and the republican party) exist to help the candidates they want to support get elected. Note the mere existence of superdelegates. Primaries are designed to allow people to have some influence on the party's choice (and to get the electorate feeling invested in the party's choice of candidate... obviously the DNC messed that up), but really, the primaries are designed to maximize exposure for the candidates to help them in the general election. Trump is the perfect example of why the parties want some control over who they lend their name to in the general election. I'm sure that the emails flying around the RNC while they had a chance of influencing Trump's election put the DNC to absolute shame.

Bernie was not even a democrat at all prior to this election. Bernie has been an independent for his whole political career. He joined the democratic party just for this election, and he's now an independent again. It seems absurd to expect party support with that context. I think Bernie made a deliberate choice to run in the Democratic primary (despite not being a Democrat) to avoid the spoiler effect in the general election, knowing that it was unlikely he would get DNC support. I respect him a lot for that decision.

Don't get me wrong, I would have been very happy if Bernie won (especially over Trump), but this idea that the DNC is a rotten institution that deserves an organizational death penalty for working with Clinton over Bernie is ridiculous.

This is perfectly spot on. However, I'd argue that it took the DNC leaks for people en masse to understand this. People broadly thought that they had a legitimate say in the candidate promoted by the party affiliation.

Today, people still haven't really figured out that there are very narrow ideological differences between the two parties that control the entire electoral process. It's very obvious, of course, but it takes things like "shocking" leaks that show the emperor is naked.

I understand how the DNC has been in the past but that doesn't tell us how it should be in the future.

Primaries are supposed to generate winning candidates, not lend support to people because of their longtime service to the party. Maybe you disagree, but I bet the majority of democrats do not.

The vote matters because it is like a massive poll of who will energize the base the most. And the emails show the methodologies used weren't good. If we care about getting democratic candidates in the White House, we should care about fixing those methodologies.

There was plenty of relevant info in those leaks, such as Obama's 2008 cabinet being chosen by a Citibank executive

https://newrepublic.com/article/137798/important-wikileaks-r...

I mean, I guess, but (a) it's old news and (b) you could call him a Citibank executive, or you could call him the Chief of Staff in Bill Clinton's Treasury Department.

That article mentions Froman's October 6, 2008 email.

Here's an October 27, 2008 CBS story that talks about the role Froman was playing in the transition: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/whos-really-backing-barack-obama...

Here's the Treasury Department's announcement of the staff change, including Froman as Chief of Staff: https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CDIR-1997-06-04/pdf/CDIR-1997-...

I guess the new news is that we see a bit of how the sausage is made, but my assumption was always that the inner circle of advisors has a lot of clout in deciding who staffs the positions. I don't really see this email as damning one way or the other--what am I missing?

> you could call him a Citibank executive, or you could call him the Chief of Staff in Bill Clinton's Treasury Department

You could point to a revolving door of administration between the private and public sector, along with public-private partnerships that launder would-be-illegal acts between public and private sectors.

It's a pretty big deal to have anyone besides a president elect choose their cabinet, much less an oligarchic figure.

> they should be embarrassed

I think the people who wrote some of those horrible and immature emails should be embarrassed.

Why must we respect authority figures when they (clearly) have not earned it. There were so many minor things in those emails that reveal just what kind of people seek power. Disgusting.

Yeah there was no big smoking gun, no lizard people, but there was a lot of shady deals. And most of all, I find interesting is, what wasn't there - not a lot of concern for regular people. Not a lot of "yeah we should figure out how to reach out to folks struggling with finding work, inner cities have more crime than expected we should find a way to help there.."

But there was a lot of "let's take this angle, let's paint Bernie as a atheist, they'll hate him then".

One illustrative example of the email about Theano and its relationship to the Clinton Foundation. Also apparently Chelsea started digging too much and at some point was under the illusion that the charity was just that, a charity. She had to be reminded how things really worked and such. And anyone who thinks Saudi Arabia is donating money to CF cure AIDS is deluded. And of course, it had to be followed through with threats to blackmail her: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/52046

This is extremely naive. These guys are professional marketers and they are doing a job. When you build a product do you really think house best can I help my customer or how can optimize to get the best click or get the best conversion or get the best retention?

> When you build a product do you really think house best can I help my customer

This might be a surprise but yes I do! I worked for a tech company which survived and did well for 20+ some years and the reason is because they thought and cared what the customer wanted and always put them first, even at the detriment of yearly revenue.

It turns out we didn't need sales people, MBAs or much marketing either, customers were marking for us.

I am bit saddened that you think this is "this is extremely naive".

At scale and over time, how do you measure "what the customer wanted" except by revenue? Do you give every support request equal weight? How do you measure the satisfaction of customers who never complain? Do you respond to customers with explanations about how horrible your software is (I've never met an engineer who thought their company's software beautiful), or do you emphasis more constructive questions and disclosures? Do you visit their home and chat with them about their feelings and anxieties?

Economists call money a signaling mechanism for a reason. It scales and it's honest. It's not the only mechanism, but at scale and over time it's perhaps the most honest one of all. Emphasizing money or votes is hardly something to apologize for, as long as you don't overlook the limitations and ignore other forms of feedback.

> Do you give every support request equal weight?

Not necessarily. You read them and figure out who it is from and what it says.

> How do you measure the satisfaction of customers who never complain?

That's harder. You still talk to them, ask the for their opinion. They are people too besides just being "revenue generators". Our customers quite often just wrote back and praised us. We put that on our social media (FB, Twitter, our site). Someone was doing that as a part-time thing.

> Do you respond to customers with explanations about how horrible your software is

It really depends what it is. Sometime they might be upset about something else in the product or they try to solve a completely different problem. Sometimes they use the product how it is not intended and another company might be a better help for them.

> Do you visit their home and chat with them about their feelings and anxieties?

Home? No, but we did invite some onsite to visit us. Asked them about their families and had lunch with them. As surprising as it is, customers are people too. Treat them like people they'll sell the product for you.

> Emphasizing money or votes is hardly something to apologize for, as long as you don't overlook the limitations and ignore other forms of feedback.

And that's probably why Hillary lost. It was just about getting the right vote blocks. Women: that's easy, she's a woman "so I'm with her" works, done. Blacks: "Let's hire Jay-z to throw the N-bomb at them I hear they like that". Easy-peasy, that block is good. We'll call them back in 4 years. And so on.

Everything looks good on paper, polls look good, did the right tricks in the book yet delivered the worst Democratic performance in what 20 years?

Is fanatical customer support and putting customer needs first really such a radical idea? I would say failure to understand and connect to customer's needs is as a common cause of why companies fail.

Regardless of how (in)significant you think the material they release is, there's no such thing as too much transparency.

> there's no such thing as too much transparency

Should military plans be transparent? Your private health records? Rape victims' names? Should the President be able to receive confidential advice - if not, they may receive much less good advice and make worse decisions.

EDIT: Reworded it to remove the hyperbole

> Should military plans be transparent?

Yes when they contradict lies told to the people to help sell a war.

Secrecy is a privilege that officials need to earn. In the US there is widespread abuse of power when officials make unflattering information top secret so it won't be released to the public. That's what the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs showed us.

Obviously some things should be kept secret, but in the US we have way too much government secrecy and it's used as a tool to help officials abuse power.

If everyone's military plans were transparent maybe we'd have a chance for world peace.

This 100x. Either the US is a democracy or it isn't.

It's really bizarre how your comment has made it to the top of this thread, considering that it seems that the prevailing opinion here on HN is supportive of wikileaks.

Your claim that the leaks are not newsworthy is absurd in the extreme, and your judgement is in question. There are hundreds of items of greater interest and importance in those mails than in a good portion of news stories published by most major news outlets. You are either grossly misinformed or purposefully misleading readers.

It is bizarre. GP is, as you said, "either grossly misinformed or purposefully misleading readers". There is plainly illegal activity in those emails, and massive evidence of electoral fraud.

But whatever, it was the blue team that did it, so they get a pass. This is why it's actually good that Trump was elected. Now suddenly everyone cares again about mass deportation, war crimes, lobbying, etc. Now that we have an out-of-the-closet fascist as president, legislation like the 2012 NDAA doesn't seem like such a good idea anymore does it blue team?

The sentiment seems to have switched ever since they released any democrats material. It's the result of the two party system, where "if this isn't helping my party it must be because you are against me" thinking trumps any logical thought.

I don't care for either color of political party, so I can appreciate cryptographically authenticated information leaks for what they are.

> "if this isn't helping my party it must be because you are against me" thinking trumps any logical thought.

Well put. Seemingly party loyalists are so blind to the idea that someone could actually care about principles (like transparency) that everything is a sinister plot against their faultless leader.

Those emails were quite a bit more serious than just political sausage-making. For one thing, they contained evidence of blatantly illegal behavior, i.e. the coordination of the campaign and "independent" groups.

This is particularly noteworthy because of the hypocrisy involved. Clinton has put a lot of effort into vilifying Citizens United - she was calling for more restrictive campaign laws while at the same time breaking the ones that pass constitutional muster.

I'm not sure if this is the same group of emails you talked about, but at the very least they admitted to a conspiracy to try to incite a "revolution" within the Catholic Church using pseudo-Catholic lay organizations with morally progressive agendas. That doesn't seem like a small thing.

That is not true; it's a wild exaggeration, part of the misinformation campaign. Whatever we may think politically, we all can agree that we don't need more of that!

The email in question: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/6293

For those who don't know the term "Spring" means a fake, externally organized revolution that is seen as legitimate because it aggravates insiders to the cause.

These are all the hallmarks of misinformation campaigns:

1) How do we know the email, provided by Russian intelligence, is real? Do we take Russian intelligence at face value?

> "Spring" means a fake, externally organized revolution that is seen as legitimate because it aggravates insiders to the cause.

2) An unfounded allegation, part of a misinformation campaign: Make enough of them and be angry enough, and A) people seem to bypass the somewhat crucial stage of examining them for truth, and B) because it's much faster and easier to make unsubstantiated allegations than to refute them (it's quick and easy to make things up, hard to find evidence), you can overwhelm the target.

You have little idea what the author was thinking when they wrote words in a casual email (it's not a formal document; it's not the Declaration of Independence). You (or whoever you read) has chosen to apply an extreme meaning to someone else's words, but words have many meanings and can always be taken the wrong way if you want. For example, I could say 'we need to revolutionize Linux kernel management'. Someone could say, 'revolution means violent overthrow - he means to kill the kernel maintainers!'

Spring also refers to a new awakening. It also could refer to the Arab Spring, which wasn't a 'fake, externally organized' revolution. Or it could refer to something that the readers of the email understand between themselves and they used in their private correspondence, but you and I don't. Certainly I say things to associates that could be taken way out of context. One sysadmin I know used to say, about intransigent problems, 'it's time to wave a dead chicken over it'.

FUD. Trying to involve conspiracy theories about intelligence agencies. Trying to motivate a list (of two?) "hallmarks" that are neither a list nor hallmarks.

Regarding Spring, the Arab Spring was externally organized. It fed on real desires of real people inside of autocratic regimes.

For another example, take a look at the "Cuban Spring" and Zunzuneo.

In any case, please stop spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt. The internet has enough misinformation and confusion without specific attempts to introduce more.

If you would substantiate what you say, I might be interested in responding. As it reads, it's anger and loose accusations.

Its a very serious intrusion that was denounced by the by American Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz and others.

The front organisations are real and the intent of starting a 'Catholic Spring' was descussed by Podesta and other high ranking DNC officials.

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/6293

It's pretty incredible how casually members of the US government and party officials invoke the concept of galvanizing revolutionary movements.

There's a concept within the US government that "it's better to convince than to conquer" but there's been a growing awareness and resistance to the emotional abuse that comes from the exhausting onslaught of ideological infiltration and astroturfed revolutionary appeal.

The US has been involved in 'Color Revolutions' for a long time. There is evidence that Ukrainian revolution was in part aided by US and EU.

George Soros Is also a big player in financing NGOs that work to establish phony social movements. Both Hillary and the DNC are connected to Soros Open Society Foundations. Soros is also funding BLM and other groups that are active in the protests/riots going on.

For those who don't know, that is right out of the Russian propaganda talking points.

Note the complete lack of substantiation; sensational, inflammatory claims have a bizarre way of causing people to stop thinking and asking the question: Is there any credible evidence, or is this just part of the endless BS that fills our world?

I would say that his post is highly corroborated with what I've read from Stratfor and other leaked documents (not through Wikileaks).

Indeed, the CIA have terms for different kinds of propaganda. White propaganda is true things that aide your message. Black propaganda false things that aide your message. Grey in the middle.

This is definitely right out of the Russia "white propaganda" playbook, as the history fully corroborates it.

Would you provide some evidence to the rest of us?

Can you point to evidence of any of this?

Organizing people for a political cause is not a conspiratorial front, it's democracy. That's the fundamental means of participating in it.

They were trying to incite a moral revolution within the Catholic Church to conform to their own moral standards, but the Catholic Church is not a democracy, the morals and rules are not decided by the collective members of the Catholic Church, which is what makes this move downright unethical.

That isn't evidence; it would be great if this discussion could be informed with it, because now all we have is more and more noise from more and more people, making it harder to get to the truth.

The rules are pretty arbitrary, and decided by councils of Bishops though. Trying to influence them, trying to bring the church out of the dark ages, can be seen by some to be laudable.

You're right, some will think so, but only those who are not familiar with how Catholic doctrine works.

The rules are not arbitrary. Things like the requirement to go to Mass on Sunday are man-made rules, but made by those with authority, and for very good well-thought-out reason. Regardless of whether you agree that their authority is valid, it's not arbitrary in the least.

And others are immutable laws of existence, like the fact that it is an impossibility for women to be ordained. It's like wanting to change the quantity of 3 (not the symbol but the actual number) to be 4. It's just simply impossible. These laws are not arbitrary either, they're solidly based in logical reasoning of philosophy and theology.

I respect your belief that these things are immutable, but the belief of many is that it's not true. These are rules of men, and if they wanted to change them then IME with many such immutable principles in many contexts, they suddenly find a way.

Some of the things are legitimate rules, like the fact that priests need to be celibate. Other things are immutable principles that cannot be changed, like the fact that a Baptism requires the use of water (and not e.g. soda or orange juice) for it to be valid. The rules can be (and have been) changed, because the people in charge of them were given authority to institute and dissolve their own rules. The laws (in the sense of "laws of nature" rather than "laws of government") cannot be changed.

Well. They used to be different, how about that? For instance priests being celibate was just a marketing move. Doesn't sound so immutable.

History shows the 'laws' were as fungible as the situation required.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/religion/post/2009/0...

Yeah no that didn't happen.

You're confused. Celibacy for the priesthood is a rule made by the Church, not an immutable law. The fact that Baptism requires water is an immutable law.

Convenient. If it changes, its a rule. If it hasn't changed (for a while) its a law. Do I have that right?

Sure. Just like traffic laws. How convenient that we change the rules on how long to stop at a stop light, even though we can't change the speed of light. How convenient.

Donna Brazile was booted from CNN for rigging the national debate. Multiple people had to resign from the DNC for sending political agitators to Trump rallies to provoke violent confrontations. Journalists across all of the mainstream media outlets were coordinating stories with the DNC and gave editorial control to the John Podesta.

Those are some seriously disturbing and undemocratic acts that We should all be appalled by. Do not let your partisanship distort your vision. The things that were exposed by Wikileaks are what destroys democracy.

Exactly. These are truly disturbing things that I'm still processing and am deeply troubled by.

In my opinion, the worst is the deliberate undermining of the Democratic party by HRC's loyal henchpeople to help HRC win the primary unfairly.

How can someone who doesn't respect the idea of a fair party primary respect the idea of the rule of law in general?

There are so many horrifying revelations that its hard to keep track of them all.

You had Debbie Wasserman Schultz rig the primary and resign in disgrace then immediately go to work on Hillary's campaign.

Million dollar 'gifts' to the Clinton Foundation from foreign governments while she was the secretary of state.

It just goes on and on.

Yes, I hope someday we learn the details of which of those things were actually illegal and which were not. Schultz being immediately re-hired with no contrition or acknowledgement of wrongdoing by HRC was bizarre, I'd have thought the press would have forced some sort of statement on the subject.

The incredible thing is that this type of coordination is not at all unusual. It's how the US media and propaganda system works. It's how stories from US narrative pervade all corners of US media simultaneously.

Plenty of people in Washington think what happened to the DNC was unfair. Because that's the way our system works. The only outcry was against the DNC because only the DNC was disclosed as participating in it.

There just simply haven't been a collection of leaks yet to "shock" the American public into understanding how coordinated the media is with US government narrative.

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