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Comment by RobLach | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame that when I see "Wikileaks reveals CIA" I'm thinking "Hmm, I wonder what's happening today RE Russia" instead of being concerned with the actual release.

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It's really sad that this is what Wikileaks has turned into.

Regardless of the authenticity of the information, they clearly only release information when it is politically beneficial for their(?) motives.

Right - it seemed like they supported "the people" in the early days. They exposed Bush and Obama when they had things worth exposing.

Then came the promises of damning Bank of America leaks that never materialized, holding on to Guantanamo docs until NYT scooped them, the 2010 insurance file that was never cracked, the 2016 insurance file that was never cracked, ...

> Right - it seemed like they supported "the people" in the early days. They exposed Bush and Obama when they had things worth exposing.

Well they're still supporting "the people", just not the ones you align with. Which of course means they've lost all credibility and we should ignore them now, right?

That's a really dishonest argument.

How are they supporting the people? How does this benefit society? All this does is attempt to take away the spotlight from other shit happening in our country. Every major country develops hacking software. This isn't news. This isn't even surprising or ground-breaking. It's not even that invasive, it requires physical access AND an admin account!

This is just a distraction. Society is no better off with this information being public.

Hah no, they lost credibility with the Turkey emails. They hoard secrets yet dumped those without even checking to see what they were - what is that about?

plus it's really only American/+hegemony "leaks" they traffic in these days. I'm sure there's much more juicy Russian/Putin-esca malware and intelligence tools, policies, etc. Granted, those are often obscured in black market, or other 3rd parties, at least based on what we know of, but Brian Krebs is doing a much better job in "exposing" things than Assange at this point.

There is a strong circumstantial case for WikiLeaks being either compromised or having caved to threats from someone. Most of the evidence points to Russia but in the intelligence world you can never be sure. Could just as easily be someone who wants us to think it is Russia. Welcome to the puzzle palace.

I think WikiLeaks started with noble intent but it's really the depths of naivete to think a small volunteer org can play spy games with the big boys.

What we need is a fully decentralized WikiLeaks type platform that is easy enough to use that regular non crypto nerds can use it. No identifiable centralized organization can really be trusted to be objective or impartial or to be resistant to compromise.

A lot of the problems seem to be connected to Assange's leadership. That was the big reason for the 2010 exodus of Wikileaks members, and it seems like the organization has steadily declined since then (and now they're doing bizarre things like pushing the Seth Rich conspiracy).

It's also a shame that whenever I see comments like this I'm thinking why is a HN user trying to divert attention to a whole different topic?

There is so much agenda driven propaganda on social media now.

hard to think of a better medium for psyops... other than TV/news which is already covered and becoming more and more limited in effectiveness

Yes. From all sides. It's sad thing to witness because my naive young self viewed social media as the promise of free information flow, honest interaction and entertainment. I guess that was wishful thinking.

I remember when we thought internet was the new printing invention, and that it will bring direct democracy everywhere :)

But hey, nothing grows at a regular speed and in straight line, this may still happen.

I think we may be in the "empire strikes back" phase.

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