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Comment by yters | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that WL goes after the one nation state that is not going to completely fubar them, and has much better human rights than the other big nation states it could go after. I say that if WL's real goal is to promote human rights, the US is not the highest target on the list. On the other hand, if they want easy publicity with minimal risk to self, the US is probably their best target.

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> I say that if WL's real goal is to promote human rights, the US is not the highest target on the list.

well, I say that constant hopes for transparency and the strides we take towards those goals will keep the United States high on the list of nations with decents human rights.

WL is one of those strides, and I think it's invaluable.

It's 'interesting' that given the muck that WL has raked up about the U.S. that anyone could be upset about their ( the US ) having been a target..

The question is not whether the US should be subject to oversight, the question is "does WikiLeaks intend to push a deliberate agenda with their disproportionate targeting of the US?"

You would be naive to take for granted that WikiLeaks is acting exclusively out of principle.

You are reframing the discussion.

I would disagree. This particular discussion was started by yters' post; aalleavich's point seems to me to be extremely in sync with yters'.

You can only publish what you are given.

But you also do not have to publish everything you are given.

You would rather they not publish what they are given if it's about the US.

>I say that if WL's real goal is to promote human rights,

That's where you're wrong. Wikileaks' mission is "transparency for governments and privacy for people". Perhaps they seem to have affinity for publishing things contrary to the US' interests and you're right that the US isn't uniquely bad at protecting human rights, but the US (and Western European sigint community) violates privacy on a scale that's simply unmatched, it's reasonable for them to treat the Anglosphere's sigint as their primary adversary.

You think that the US violates privacy more than, say, Russia? Or, going back to WL's stated goal, you think that the US government is less transparent than Russia's?

I think the US is much more likely to violate the privacy of a random 3rd party than Russia, absolutely. How many Kenyans have their data sitting in NSA servers? I bet it's more than Kenyans on the FSB's servers.

I don't know, but I would be surprised of Russia even captured 1% of the data that the NSA captures routinely (or was capturing at the height of its excess).

Additionally, Russia seems to keep quiet about what they do which is lying by omission at worse. A lot of US security officials have lied under oath about what the US is doing - I think it's more important to expose active and direct and popular lies than incidental lies.

Fair point. I wasn't looking at it that way, though. I was trying to say that Russia is more likely to violate a Russian's privacy than the US is to violate an American's privacy. Yes, the NSA may well have the American's communications on their servers (though they are not supposed to unless it left the country), but the FSB probably has the Russian's communications, and seems to me considerably more likely to examine them - or to more actively spy on the Russian citizen.

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