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Comment by JohnTClark | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why I don't trust this Christopher Wylie. They way he is pictured, filmed etc. looks over produced, like he is trying to lie to me. I can't put it in words but something is fishy about him. In one of his interviews I found out that CA has sue him, so he did not care about anything, he did something wrong to CA, they sue, he blows the whistle to save his *. Is not about "oh, I care so much about the data of millions of people and I can't live any more with the guilt", its about his own skin. If its your own skin that you care about please don't picture in a victim/tormented soul, it makes me hate you just for that.

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Agreed. And did you see how he died his hair and changed his look to be more edgy when he got all this media attention? It's like he is playing some role and maximizing his media exposure. This is the behavior of a sociopath.

It really is looking more and more like the real story here is about a guy that tried to usurp his puppet masters with a technique that was likely oversold and probably couldn't really deliver what he claimed it could do, based on his limited understanding of machine learning and statistics.

The next best thing in his twisted mind is to become a "national hero", probably taking a card from Julian Assange and various other whistleblowers. I do think that most whistleblowers have positive intentions and what they do, they are doing for public good, not for notoriety or personal celebrity. However, I don't really feel that to be the case with Christopher Wylie. In his interviews he definitely gives me a strange gut feeling and I'm glad to see I'm not alone in this sentiment. I'm sure we will find out more facts about him as this whole thing continues to unfold, but I'm not holding my breath as to his intentions.

The silver lining in all of this is that Facebook and others will be forced to treat privacy seriously for a change, and its always good to have this conversation front and center for a change.

I think he sees himself more like a Snowden than an Assange. The former being a true whistleblower, the latter, well…

It's just pure coincidence that the former is now living in Moscow under the protection of the Russian government.

And the latter has had his internet access cut off by his gracious hosts for his repeated petulant outbursts...

The smugness in each of the interviews I've watched is pretty hard to ignore.

To be fair, it is wise to think critically about one's own appearance when faced with a large amount of media attention.

I don't think he thought critically.

Or, he thought critically, just not about the stuff we would think a good actor would think about. Which is sort of the problem, and would explain why people are put off.

He worked for a company that flayed people's identities for profit, of course he's a bad person. That doesn't mean he's wrong though.

To his credit, though, he apparently has his limits — in particular, once he saw damage being done to democracy. That’s more than one can say for others involved.

I suspect it is more a case of turning states evidence in hope of clemency or leniency. He was all in on this until the wheels started to come off the cart and then he decided to flip sides.

With all the information he had we can assume he knew about his employers and clients backgrounds and connections and he was cool with that. What I don't understand is how Nix and co were fooled by Channel4 into bragging about their dirty tricks when they have all this information and work with ex-spies

In nature, venomous animals have bright colored fur as a warning of their toxicity.

Like Orangutans?

Or like Brown Snakes?

Parrots

As soon as Wylie opened his mouth in the Guardian interview something cried "spotlight-seeker" inside me. Trying to square his professed left leanings with the right-wing projects he's fronted still doesn't add up. His "guilt" trip was so phoney I nearly threw up.

He states in the Select Committee hearing that despite the nosering he is a right-leaning Eurosceptic

He looks like a cousin of the blue haired guy from American Horror Story.

If you need whistleblowers to be saints, you’re going to have a bad time. The guy who blows the whistle on bad practices has to have a lot of access, which means he’s probably culpable. That doesn’t make their information less accurate or valuable though. The world of informants is a world of compromised people, but still a world worth engaging with.

This makes me think about what someone said in regards to the Black Lives Matter movement, and its relative success. Essentially, if you're waiting for Jesus, or even just Martin Luther King, Jr, to come back, and be the pure, untainted perfect black person to martyr themselves because you think every other victims imperfections are cause of your struggle, then someone else has convinced you to rely on your predjuidices, instead of thinking clearly without emotion.

I feel quite differently. I don’t regard BLM as particilarly successful and at a realpolitik level I believe that no matter how just your cause may be, as a political entity you are only as strong as your leadership and your messaging.

I don't argue that they've been particularly successful, I simply said relatively successful. I mean relative to other recent movements that have never gone anywhere at all. The very fact that you confidently use the acronym BLM, and that its expansion is a common term in the American lexicon in the last several years proves that they have been successful to the point of at least resonating with supporters of the cause.

But I would generally agree, they have generally failed to motivate others to do much of anything outside of basic tolerance or superficial support of their cause.

MLK was a massively flawed individual with the philandering and plagiarism and everything... he is an example of how leaders DON’T need to be perfect.

But those are controversial ideas that are not part of the reverence around Dr King. The conventional wisdom about Dr King is that he inspired an entire movement to universally take the high road and protest with nonviolence. In this sense, he is seen as pure.

The same holds true for Jesus Christ. It's just as likely he was objectively a flawed person in reality, and has been lionized by his supporters.

I don't expect him to be perfect. The part that I don't like about him is that he feels guilty that he manipulated people and at the same time he tries to manipulate me and try to lie. Its like Snowden gives an interview about how bad the NSA is and at the same time my antivirus tells me that Snowden_malaware.exe is trying to install on my computer.

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