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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but wikileaks has stopped being a force for good and instead is a destructive PR vehicle for Assange.

I fully support the leaking of data -- far too many things are classified -- up and until it reaches the point where the leaks directly get folks killed. At that point the leakers become criminals and should be prosecuted. It's especially egregious when they act as if they are saviors of mankind.

From the recent news involving rape and now this, it appears that Assange has some personal issues he is working through. They need to get rid of him and put somebody else in charge.

You can lose credibility in two ways: you can publish lies or you can recklessly publish harmful things. There is a fine line to walk for wikileaks, and they are straying from the path. I could tolerate the messiah complex if the editorial quality remained high. But it has not.

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See, that's exactly why mud-slinging is so successful. People have no clue if there was ever an iota of truth in the rape accusations, still Assange's image is now forever tainted by it. It's 'How to destroy your enemies 101'.

Reminds me of an old political joke, "They framed a guilty man!"

Conspiracies and poor behavior are not mutually exclusive.

I know how much you want to believe, but wanting to believe is not going to make it so. At the end of the day, Wikileaks has to be about more than personalities if it is going to succeed, conspiracies or not.

Put differently, you can only frame a person who has made himself the image of the organization. Wikileaks should have never allowed Assange in this position.

So fix the error and move on. No harm, no foul. The only damage to Wikileaks occurs if they sit around and do nothing except for form a circular firing squad.

In today's media environment you probably need a singular spokesperson as a front for interviews etc. You won't get the same amount of attention by just being an anonymous "hivemind".

Also, it's very interesting how the media has turned on wikileaks in the recent past. It's not about how many Pakistanis or Afghans the CIA drones are killing per day, it's about whether wikileaks endangers any sources.

It's kind of like saying "US Intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1192677) and then blaming the subsequent erosion of your credibility on US intelligence. It doesn't matter if it was ever true or if you have any actual evidence, so long as you have good story that appeals to your audience. Insinuation and paranoiac fantasy (wherein absence of evidence can be cited as evidence) take over from there.

I disagree, it hasn't stopped being a force for good.

Where is the evidence that his leaks have directly got people killed?

When I see something like this, my first reaction is, who benefits? Who is better off with Wikileaks discredited?

There's another way to lose credibility you didn't mention, have someone big and powerful with vested interests attack you relentlessly. The Pentagon's primary (and I think leaked) tactic was to turn people against Wikileaks by equating them with the direct loss of life. Sadly, it seems to be working.

They directly leaked the names of informants in a country where such information is an obvious danger. This is reckless, irresponsible, and unforgivable now that we know that Assange was aware of the poor quality of redactions prior to the documents' release.

Their poor editorialization of the Collateral Murder video also put a large dent in their credibility for me. Much effort was spent pointing out the journalists shot, but it was not even mentioned in a glancing note that they were in fact with armed insurgents, and that the group was armed.

If they want to be a credible whistleblower organization they need to be objective and impartial. Right now they reek of fame whoring and partisan bias.

This is starting to smell like bullshit. I agreed at the time that failing to redact these names seemed to be a poor decision that could put people in danger. However, now we're a month or two on, and nobody has cited an instance where anyone has actually been targeted as a result, even though the government would have considerable incentive to be able to point at such an instance.

If a thousand people, or a hundred people had died because of that leak, I would be receptive to the idea that Wikileaks was actually doing harm. If a dozen had died, I would be sharply critical of Wikileaks for not taking more care and redacting their names. But as best we can tell, none have died. It seems pretty clear to me that Wikileaks erred on the right side of "get the documents out as soon as possible" vs. "keep working on them."

"As best you can tell" is not a good measure.

An example of what is seemingly innocuous data that was classified for a reason and puts our guys in danger.

A battle report with times in it can be used to basically figure out response time for air support to a given location in Iraq/Afghanistan.

That basically tells the enemy how long they have for their ambush before they should break off.

If they know that time is 20 minutes instead of 5 minutes, they may be more inclined to stick around and put our troops in more danger. If they know the time is 5 minutes when they had thought it was 20 minutes, they bail sooner than they would have otherwise and now we can't kill as many as we would have otherwise, again reducing the effectivness of our troops.

Can you quantify that? How do you know if the insurgents are just getting smarter or if it is from the leak? We can't say for sure but it is very plausible that the wikileaks information was damaging to our troops in the field, even if it didn't have a roadmap to the informants house.

That's all true, and no, you can't quantify that, or at least it's very hard to quantify. Here's what I can quantify:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/141716/new-high-call-afghanistan-...

I personally believe that the expected value of -5% public approval for the Afghan war is very, very positive; on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars and many lives. I also assign a high, but hard-to-quantify value to generally decreasing the public's trust in government, which leaks like this tend to do.

I just don't believe that scenarios similar to the one you describe can be having a similar degree of impact. I think your description is plausible, but to imagine that it's happening frequently sounds like an overestimation of the technical capacity and manpower of the Taliban and insurgent groups.

I am very ready to condemn avoidable harm caused by bad practices surrounding leaked information, things that Wikileaks can clearly control, like redacting names. However, the sorts of situations you describe are inevitable with any leak of meaningful classified information, and since I think that these type of leaks are a big net positive (after taking your scenario into account) I'm not inclined to consider them damning in any way.

(I understand that you might disagree strongly with me about the utility of the war in general, so I don't expect to convince you if that's the case.)

The 'enemy' would have a very hard time figuring out which parts of the leaked documents were not leaked on purpose.

Distrust alone of any and all information would significantly limit any direct risk due to being named in a document helpfully supplied by your adversary, or at least people in the same general geographical area. And for all we know that's exactly what happened.

> From the recent news involving rape and now this, it appears that Assange has some personal issues he is working through.

It rather sounds like his only personal issue is that people are making up news about him.

I don't think it is quite that simple.

I wished it was because we dearly need wikileaks but we need it to be run by someone that is both stable and squeaky clean, Assange appears to be neither.

He definitely is driven though, you have to hand him that.

"both stable and squeaky clean"

where by 'squeaky clean' you mean 'has not been accused of any crime by anyone? is that a state of being outside of the control of the person being accused?

No, by squeaky clean I mean someone that can see the difference between having your own agenda and passing on information in as neutral a way as possible.

By taking sides he's lost the advantage that he had.

Everybody has an agenda or opinion. Even yourself. Nothing is completely neutral. And if you want to convince people yours is the right way you make sure to speak in a persuasive way. Isn't this just a fact of life nowadays?

I agree that nothing is completely neutral, there always is a bias. But if you allow your bias to get in the way of serving your primary goal (the transparent release of information that was otherwise hidden from the general public) then you could do a lot worse than to try not to let your bias get in the way of the reporting.

Julian Assange has failed that test in a very bad way, the 'collateral damage' release claimed at least one unexpected victim, which was the image of integrity of wikileaks.

The weird thing is that I find myself agreeing with Assagnes agenda but I strongly disagree with the way he went about releasing that information.

Wikileaks is about leaking data - what happens after isn't their problem.

And if it harms the war effort of the US, then again it is not their problem.

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