I will say this; the Podesta emails revealed a lot about the internal politics of the DNC. Why are we not treating this type of leak with the same level of respect as the Ellsberg leaks? Or for that matter, the Snowden leaks? Who is really controlling the narrative here?
Randomly dumping personal emails isn't the same as Ellsberg and Snowden working with reporters to blow the whistle on specific transgressions in war and mass surveillance.
Interesting article exploring this issue of exercising discretion and developing new ethics in the age of leaks: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/05/opinion/what-were-missing-...
http://www.mostdamagingwikileaks.com/
The press never covered most of it because a lot of the leaks are things that make them look bad. For example, Glenn Thrush:
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/12681
> No worries > Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains > to u > Please don't share or tell anyone I did this > Tell me if I fucked up anything
He tried to get out of this by saying he was just fact-checking. But that normally doesn't require a request for secrecy and one would just send specific items they wanted fact checked, not a prerelease copy of the article.
I just randomly picked links and citations. Sorry, but I didn't find any there there. (I skipped the secret email server, mostly because I don't care.)
Just one example, in #6 its clear from context that Bill Ivey's use of "we" refers to society as a whole. Further, he's venting about the decline of civic engagement, an opinion shared by many (such as myself).
My primary reaction is "Hate the game, not the players." Politics sucks. All of it. But why is any one surprised by the corruption? This is the system we designed, or at least accepted. If we hate it so much, they we should support publicly financed campaigns, restoring the fairness doctrine, shortening the political cycle, etc, etc. But we don't. Because Freedom Markets™ booyah!
My secondary reaction is "Wow, this InfoWars stuff makes my head hurt." I can never tell if cherry picking quotes out of context and making wild inferences is intentional obfuscation or just how some people process the world.
Any way, thanks for the link.
PS- The spirit worshipping stuff is hysterical.
Read the PDF on here for more: https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/30324
This is part of what Colin Powell said that I think it especially illustrative of how big of a security risk people like this are when put in power:
Now, the real issue had to do with PDAs, as we called them a few years ago before BlackBerry became a noun. And the issue was DS would not allow them into the secure spaces, especially up your way. When I asked why not they gave me all kinds of nonsense about how they gave out signals that could be read by spies, etc. Same reason they tried to keep mobile phones out of the suite. I had numerous meetings with them. We even opened one up for them to try to explain to me why it was more dangerous than say, a remote control for one of the many tvs in the suite. Or something embedded in my shoe heel. They never satisfied me and NSA/CIA wouldn't back off. So, we just went about our business and stopped asking. I had an ancient version of a PDA and used it. In general, the suite was so sealed that it is hard to get signals in or out wirelessly.
But can't you see the vast amount of corruption? The DNC rigged the primary for one candidate. We need to hold our political parties accountable for their actions.
Every time I see someone write something like this my knee jerk reaction is to either assume they're lying or they are clueless. Can you point to the vast amount of corruption you claim is self evident?
I can't tell if people hawking such ridiculous ideas are truly naive or are just following a motivated reasoning to reach some post-hoc justification of their dislike.
Clearly there were people within the DNC who preferred clinton, but in what sense did they rig the vote?
Whatever the case was, 126K Brooklyn-based democrats were unable to cast votes in the primary http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/officials-investigating-...
Brooklyn is one of the parts of the NYC area that have ultra liberal demographics, so one could draw the conclusion that Brooklyn's voting power would have tipped the NY primary towards Sanders.
I'd like to see the RNC's emails now. What kind of dirt do the republicans have? Is it not being released because it's being used to blackmail them?
The big things that came out of the leaks for me is the explicit and cosy relationship with specific members of the media who were instructed to produce and disseminate certain messaging against Bernie Sanders.
They also asked those "media resources" to prop up Trump, Cruz and Carson because they naively believed that Trump would be a push-over, for example.
...which is not actually part of the government. I expect political parties to have internal politicking, which is somewhat bad. But ultimately parties are private organizations that are subject to quite different laws and obligations than parts of the government.
a. Democrats and Republicans are guided by very different moral philosophies - the kind of thing that courts eschew dealing with as 'political questions' because which one you plump for depends less on reasoned argument than on which basic premises you adhere to. As inherently political entities, it's irrational to demand they hew to some objective standard of political behavior as if there were a knowable truth of conduct that transcended politics.
b. Fringe parties are always running colorful candidates for high-visibility executive positions and then complaining than the system is exclusionary when they inevitably fail against better funded and organized opponents from parties with long track records (whether or not you approve, at least you sorta know what you're gonna get). This is a crap strategy and the idea that the fringe party should get some sort of help in the next election cycle for having shown in a previous one is mystifying to me.
The path to power in the US is through legislative capture. That's how the Tea Party hijacked the GOP - not spontaneously but as the culmination of a long, focused effort. Conservatives chose to worth within the framework of an existing party. Leftists have attempted to do the same in the Democratic party but frankly they're not that good at entryism as a political tactic, lack a coherent alternative to liberal capitalism, and so end up demanding change while being unable to articulate a plan for how to achieve it. You will see a redoubling and refinement of these effort sin the next few years. but if you don't want to work within an existing party, then the next best thing is a party that focuses on legislative representation like the Working Families Party, whose principles I only partly agree with but whose tactical instincts are excellent.
c. Brokerage (as in back-room political favor-trading and negotiation) is an unavoidable components of representative democracy and wishing it away is like asking it to only rain at night. If you want to change this then you need to think about changing the basis of of the political system itself. For example, one could have election by sortilege, where legislators were chosen involuntarily, like jury service. Or we could move away from producing laws like books authored by committee and adopt Wikiism, such that instead of legislative debates we have edit wars on the legal corpus. The main problem with Wikiism (or Social Coding or Participativism or some similar autology) is that implementation in the real world lacks authoritative grounding or operational consistency, which is probably why you don't see many corporations using this model to carry on business.
Don't get your hopes up. Bruce Schneier drank the Kool-Aid and is completely on board with the "ruskies did it because experts agree" narrative: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/08/hacking_the_v...
Look at how he calls whistleblowing "organizational doxing" and he urges a swift and exemplary response to the "national security threat". Somewhere along the way, the respectable security writer became a silly neo-mccarthyist pundit.