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Comment by projectant | Hacker News Reader

This is the type of crime, that by definition, nobody who has the power to investigate wants to investigate.

This most likely was payback for exposing someone's offshore holdings, and the response was chosen to send a message: "Do not expose", and was done in such a bald-faced way that this crime's occurrence presupposes the existence of the very corruption needed to facilitate getting away with it, that any investigation would need to uncover.

TL;DR - that a crime like this, which requires corruption to execute and get away with, can happen, presupposes the investigative apparatus is unable to investigate it, with high probability.

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This'll be the last we ever hear of this story. The half-hearted investigation will fizzle away to nothing, and everything stays the way it is.

Isn't the message more like "expose, but anonymously"? Well, I mean, hopefully that's how people would understand it.

Anonymous exposure doesn't carry the same weight and can easily get lost in shuffle. No one cares about a random page buried in Wikileaks until some journalist highlights its existence and starts making a lot of noise about it. I mean, from what I understand, this journalist was 'just' reporting on information that was already readily available to anyone willing to go through all the Panama Papers.

And yet somehow we have Fake Steve Jobs, The Grugq, and the Shadow Brokers.

Pretty sure pseudonymity is just as effective for investigative reporting bylines as using an identifier tied to the address at which your family sleeps.

Pretty sure pseudonymity is just as effective for investigative reporting bylines as using an identifier tied to the address at which your family sleeps.

I'm just not sure I believe that. Do you think the Snowden leaks, for example, would have had the same spread and impact if it was just an pseudonymous data dump and without someone like Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian adding a 'face' and legitimacy to the information?

The face doesn’t need to be his face.

pseudonymity != anonymity.

Most pseudonyms give away plenty of information to be able to be tracked by an assassin or other kind of "influencer".

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