Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

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People are confused by Assange apparently attacking one US political party and then switching to attack the other party.

What's missing is an understanding of his underlying motivations. This piece hints at it, but it doesn't quite get there.

Assange sees the existing power structure as a connected graph that requires secrecy to function.

His objective is to sever or degrade the links between nodes in the graph by exposing secrets.

  Information flows from conspirator to conspirator. Not every
  conspirator trusts or knows every other conspirator even though
  all are connected. Some are on the fringe of the conspiracy,
  others are central and communicate with many conspirators and others
  still may know only two conspirators but be a bridge between
  important sections or groupings of the conspiracy.

  If all conspirators are assassinated or all the links between
  them are destroyed, then a conspiracy no longer exists. This
  usually requires more resources than we can deploy, so we ask our
  first question: What is the minimum number of links that must be
  cut to separate the conspiracy into two groups of equal number?
  (divide and conquer).

  When we look at an authoritarian conspiracy as a whole, we see
  a system of interacting organs, a beast with arteries and veins whose
  blood may be thickened and slowed until it falls, stupefied;
  unable to sufficiently comprehend and control the forces in its
  environment.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070129125831/http://iq.org/con...

>> His objective is to sever or degrade the links between nodes in the graph by exposing secrets.

Not sure how you would classify the DNC emails as being "secrets". Hacking a DNC email server and then sending them to Assange to me doesn't really qualify as exposing secrets. If they were important, the DNC would've been encrypting their emails to protect what they were talking about.

The funny thing is people misconstrue the emails as an attempt to influence our election instead of actually looking at the fact that it exposed the idea that the DNC was already in the bag for Hilary long before the primaries even started.

If you want a conspiracy, you should look at how incredibly slanted the DNC was in favor of electing Clinton. All the emails did was confirm what a lot of people had long suspected was already going on.

>> Not sure how you would classify the DNC emails as being "secrets". Hacking a DNC email server and then sending them to Assange to me doesn't really qualify as exposing secrets. If they were important, the DNC would've been encrypting their emails to protect what they were talking about.

This seems to have a baseline assumption of competence that I don't think is warranted. There's shockingly little relationship between privacy intentions and privacy actions. Presumably "let's attack Sanders for being Jewish" isn't something the DNC wanted to see on the front page of a newspaper, no matter how clumsy they were about protecting it.

More broadly, what you describe in the other two paragraphs is exactly what Assange has been pulling for. Elsewhere, he's talked about raising the difficulty of secret dealings until powerful organizations have the choice of being ethical or inefficient. If transparent dealings are enough easier than opaque ones, opaque and anti-public-interest dealings should become rarer.

There are a bunch of criticisms here, some of which are quite reasonable. Assange nominally respects personal privacy while opposing institutional privacy, but revealing institutional behavior after the fact almost always compromises some personal information. And anti-public-interest is not 1-to-1 with opaque; plenty of groups do incredibly harmful things based on deniability or sheer boringness instead of secrecy.

Even so, I think things like "showing the DNC was in Clinton's pocket" are exactly in Assange's wheelhouse. If the DNC was neutral (as their bylaws required), there would have been no problem. If it had been an open pro-Clinton PAC it would have been non-notable. As is, he's hopefully raised the difficulty of screwing the public as a nominally-neutral organization.

> If they were important, the DNC would've been encrypting their emails to protect what they were talking about.

Don't you think this vastly overestimates the technical competence and infosec understanding/awareness of the organization in question? It seems obvious that they presumed that their unencrypted emails were not going to become public information.

I found this article eye-opening as to infosec wrt the DNC email server:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/hillary-clint...

What was particularly interesting was how behind-the-times White House IT was.

> Don't you think this vastly overestimates the technical competence and infosec understanding/awareness of the organization in question?

It vastly overestimating the technical competence of every organization. That the DNC presumed their unencrypted emails were not going to become public is the default stance of pretty much everyone.

The people talking about the emails influencing the election are talking about the Podesta emails that were dribbled out long after the D primary had concluded.

Sure. But they undermined the legitimacy of the DNC primary process, which undermined the legitimacy of Hillary as the candidate produced by that process. That has (at least potentially) the ability to influence pro-Democratic turnout in the general election.

His actions do not suggest such noble goals. I don't really care what he claims.

On iq.org he lists j u l i e n @ post.harvard.edu as one of his email addresses but people from Harvard, if Quora answers are to be believed, cannot confirm he ever was at Harvard in any capacity. Maybe a joke or smoke and mirrors?

What does Assange want to replace the conspiracy with? A true democracy. There is no such thing. Have you seen the Game of Thrones. That's how the world is without a super power. All that this will end up doing is cause the US to lose its place as a super power. Which will enable other powers play more freely. Which will in the end cause different types of chaos in the world rather than that which the US causes. These things don't go away. Problems are not solved, they just move, wiggle, and multiply.

That goes against everything sensible and is FUD(tbh, I don't watch Game of Thrones, I don't care much for fiction and prefer reality, history, etc). I'd like to see you make this offer with a straight face to all that have been affected by the imperialist policies. We don't even need to go too far, to the other side of the Atlantic, we can start with Mexico, central America, Honduras and Latin America.

The best painfully-funny bit I've seen recently is "Foreign power undermines election to install right-wing authoritarian; CIA outraged".

I'd challenge that poster to tell anyone from South America, East Asia, or the Middle East (or North Africa, or Eastern Europe, or...) that superpowers are a way to preserve effective democracy.

Well it's not to bash the person individually, but obviously it you think this through there's clearly double standards. Anyway, there's no morality here, it's all about power and control, I don't delude myself. But yeah, the US could at least own up to it, or be coherent with the values it says it defends(I guess it's too late for that tho). The hipocrisy is getting uglier with each passing day :/

They are not a way to preserve effective democracy. That's not what I was getting at. I was getting at the fact that it would be someone else who would install dictators instead. It would be Russia or China. The outcome will be different, but the problems will not get solved. In fact it may be worse. When you have many people playing, then the jockey for position and cause even more chaos.

Maybe a better democracy would do? Even if the US maintains its status as a world order keeper (which I'm not entirely opposed to, despite all criticism they've played the role remarkably well), we can/should all wish for more transparency from the government. Prevent another WMD fiasco, maybe?

His objective is to reduce their power of nuisance. Trump can't do anything on the international level because of ... Trump. On the other hand Clinton would be terrible in his logic because she is backed by everyone. The problems don't disappear but they can't grow much in those type of conditions. I'm just explaining the idea and not approving it.

But I watched Game of Thrones, and chaos was a ladder...

You do know Game of Thrones is fiction written by someone who has no experience in international politics, right?

Centralizing power insures that all are dominated by the most brutal. When power is decentralized, abuses are quarantined.

That's a bit naive. If you look at World War 1, you see a series of decentralized conflicts and power struggles that snowballed into a global conflict killing millions.

It snowballed because of treaties - many secret - that linked the nations into huge sides. It was a series of "conspiracies" which were mostly not democratically decided. If Austria-Hungary had gone to war with Serbia and maybe Bulgaria, it would have been terrible but it wouldn't have been WWI.

I think you're discounting the the interest the general public in Great Britain, Russia, and Turkey(Ottoman Empire) for score settling and imperial expansion. Treaties were only part of the issue. The power vacuum was a large driving force.

If you look at World War II you'd maybe see the point that was trying to be made.

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