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Comment by redthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Or they're just a front for Russian intelligence, as has been suggested for years, as evidenced by the fact that Assange says there's no need to report on Russia because of the "free and open media" they have, as evidenced by his show on RT, as evidenced by their facilitating Snowden's defection, as evidenced by...

It seems like there are a few die-hards left who thought Assange and Manning were the greatest thing ever exposes the big bad USG, and are refusing to acknowledge the obvious: wikileaks exists so the FSB can run agitprop against its geopolitical foes.

Edit: I'd just like to point out the fact that all of these downvotes are flooding in at 3:00 am PST on a Friday night. Can anyone think of a timezone that might coincide with?

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Making an inflammatory claim and calling it "obvious" guarantees the kind of thread we don't want on HN. That amounts to trolling. Please don't do it, and please don't stoke flamewars once they get going, either.

Accusations of astroturfing or shilling without evidence are not allowed on HN. Rushing to that as an explanation is, invariably, evidence of sloppy thinking—or maybe non-thinking, of the kind that political passion leads us all to. It should have been obvious that there are many countries where people were reading HN at that hour and that you'd given plenty of them plenty of reason to downvote. It's embarrassing to see a comment here insinuate that only Russian spies could possibly disagree, and just as embarrassing to see how many users upvote such an absurdity.

This community is deeply divided on divisive issues. People on all sides need to conduct themselves more civilly than this, so please don't do it again.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13343037 and marked it off-topic.

Mind giving the source where Assange said that?

See: https://theintercept.com/2016/12/29/the-guardians-summary-of...

I recall about a week after the Snowden disclosures some people saying the Snowden leaks were deliberate and that NSA has kept up this tradition of false flag disclosures. If anything, the whole web is certainly more secure now, and Snowden is even quoted as saying: "I still work for the NSA" after the leaks. I don't buy the rhetoric that NSA is simply all about slurping up plaintext. They have a duty to secure the web too. It's a weird paradox that they both want more security and want all the plaintext they can salvage.

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