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Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

It's not clear to me that intelligence agencies would have ever needed to compromise WikiLeaks-the-organization. WikiLeaks' whole methodology was to publish, unedited and unredacted, any documents anyone handed them. Any intelligence agency that wanted a clean way to get some illicitly-obtained documents out into public view could therefore do so just by handing them to WikiLeaks, without needing to subvert the organization in any way. WikiLeaks made a perfect front just by working the way it was designed to work.

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We can tell that wikileaks is now a front precisely because they have stopped operating in the way you describe.

They no longer publish everything they have been given (Assange once claimed to have documents embarassing to Russia but they are as yet unpublished).

They no longer publish documents indiscriminately (Podesta emails trickled out over the course of October 2016 for maximum political effect on the election)

If that wasn't enough, everyone should've been convinced that wikileaks is compromised when Assange refused to demonstrate that he held the wikileaks signing private key during his reddit AMA

This lie that Wikileaks never published that stuff needs to die.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-cabl...

I just assumed it was a false flag put out by Wikileaks, but what is their motive?

What is Assange’s motivation for not releasing proof of the signing key, because he can’t, but keeping that a secret?

"It is false and defamatory to suggest that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have not published critical information on Russia, Syria or Donald Trump [in fact, WikiLeaks has published hundreds of thousands of documents on Russia, millions on Syria, and thousands on Donald Trump, see https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/russia/, https://search.wikileaks.org/?query=russia%7Cputin%7Cmoscow#..., https://wikileaks.org/syria-files/ & https://search.wikileaks.org/?query=trump#results]."

Not one trump release since he announced his candidacy. Hmmm.

isn't that a different statement?

releasing some doesn't mean he released everything, or stuff Russia wasn't okay with him releasing.

ooooOOOOOOooooOOOO is Julian going to sue me for defamation now?

Allow me to amend: Wikileaks now publishes Russia and putin related material long after they aquire them and only after they are called out on it.

They sat on the "spy files" for a full year, and only published them after their source went around telling other publications about them. https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-l...

Are you suggesting Wikileaks may have had a hidden agenda? Say it ain't so! </sarcasm>

I did not interpret the parent comment to be arguing against you, rather, I thought it was supporting your case -- Wikileaks is fully aware of their hypocrisy and is trying to stifle internal (and external) discussion about it.

No... but your argument was defamed of its basis.

That's all Assange's doing, though. He's doing the political equivalent of s--tposting, same as the foreign "trolls" you hear and read about, because he's independently pursuing very similar goals.

So if he is just "shitposting", why pursue him?

If wikileaks treated all documents handed to them equally, maybe that would be the case.

WikiLeaks' whole methodology was to publish, unedited and unredacted, any documents anyone handed them.

Based on this statement, you don’t seem to be familiar with WikiLeaks and didn’t read the linked article that specifically addresses this claim.

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