Comment by vallesmarineris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vallesmarineris | Hacker News Reader

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vallesmarineris

> People like Assange aren't pawns of some dark and evil power

Citation needed. The rest of the world seems to agree that he was in fact a pawn to a "dark and evil power", as you put it.

Here's my citation:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2018/0...

"Assange behaved as an instrument of the Kremlin operation which, in an excruciatingly close election, may have made just enough of a difference to secure Trump’s victory."

...

"Mueller’s investigators have recently questioned at least five witnesses about Assange’s role in the 2016 campaign."

> that the main reason why trump is president is because someone broke some rules.

The evidence shows this pretty clearly. Also, "broke some rules" is a pretty silly way to describe the literal murders that have taken place re: Russia and the election. It's also an obviously biased way to describe the incredible scale and power of electoral propaganda along with bribes and hacked voting systems.

> hacked voting systems do you have evidence that fake votes were cast?

I said absolutely nothing about fake votes being cast. Why did you make that up? What are you talking about? Please elaborate.

Russia hacked voting and electoral systems. Here is a news article about that: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/russians-penetrat...

In related news, you will find constant streams of articles demonstrating the epic quantities of failures of voting systems across the country. You will also find lots of news articles about voters being eliminated from the voting rolls, in mysterious ways.

Which acts are done by the Republican people in charge of the voting systems? Which acts were done by Russians who hacked in? I don't know. None of us do, yet.

But you're here making up ridiculous claims and using logical fallacies to try to insert false 'facts' into your question. You twist my words and ask non-sensical questions. Why?

Russia hacked our voting systems. That is not up for dispute, that is a long-established fact.

That's totally fair and, not to be dismissive, I don't think it's productive to try to have this conversation here. I just want to say I'm not trying to defend or downplay what WikiLeaks got up to under Assange's oversight. I'm simply saying that while his interests may have lined up with Putin/Russian oligarchs he is himself an ideologue and a bad actor who comes from a community of the same and he should be treated as such.

Why is he a bad actor? Why should he be treated differently from other whistleblowers. AFAIK his leaks have had many good outcomes. I think there was a case or two where sensitive information could've been vetted better but to me he definitely looks like a net positive.

Have you watched the documentary "citizen four" about snowden? The way that they went about these releases are worlds apart and each man has his own clear agenda. Snowdens behavior set a good precedent for future leaking. For example, he was careful to do diligence to make sure no one agents would be harmed. This is important because much of the legal case against this sort of action claims (wrongly) that leaking is somehow treasonous no matter what because it endangers IC field agents.

All of this said, broadly, the world Assange wants to build is bad and the world Snowden wants to build is good. This matters and is part of why I call Assange a bad actor: it's not the act of releasing sensitive data its what he intended to do with it. (And to be clear, i'm no fan of Clinton.)

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