Comment by timsally | Hacker News Reader

Comment by timsally | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for chiming in. I would also add that he put aid workers and activists at risk [1] and caused potential harm, torture, and death to dissidents in Afghanistan and Iraq [2].

Indiscriminate doxing to accomplish a radical agenda is not journalism. My view-- which I admit is broader than the point you made-- is that he is a criminal and should be tried and convicted. It makes me sick to my stomach that he cloaks his actions in the hard work and bravery of our free press.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37165230 "Human rights groups have asked Wikileaks many times to do more to censor information found in documents. They fear reprisals against aid workers, activists and civilians named in the leaked data."

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-51616077 "Mr Lewis said the dissemination of specific classified documents unredacted put dissidents in Afghanistan and Iraq at 'risk of serious harm, torture or even death". The US identified hundreds of "at risk and potentially at risk people' around the world, he said, and made efforts to warn them."

"The burden of proof is on state power to justify itself." It seems very plausible that WL/Assange disclosed information irresponsibly, and if so, he should be held to account. The real concern is that I think we all know he isn't going to get anything resembling a fair trial; The Powers That Be are looking to send a message to any other would-be leakers and journalists with the audacity to challenge unaccountable state violence.

Many of the things he's charged with have nothing to do with whether Assange disclosed information "irresponsibly". On a message board, the entire debate is over whether WL is a good thing or not. But that's not at all the matter that is put before the court.

Your comment is well taken. However, I would point out that with respect to the disclosure counts there is some legal relevance to the frequent message board debate about whether he is a "journalist" or not. The false claim that he is one is made due to the belief it will provide him with a modicum of legal protection against some of the disclosure counts. It wont help him at all when it comes to the computer intrusion count and I also don't think it helps with the conspiracy to obtain NDI (though I am less sure on that one). Either way I would expect to see the journalism issue discussed and ultimately debunked at trail.

There's an awfully tough hill to climb for any argument suggesting that any kind of intentionality, journalistic or humanitarian or otherwise, might immunize someone for literally dispatching Lulzsec with a list of targets. The law will see the winged monkeys and draw the obvious conclusion about what kind of person dispatches those.

Of course, we're working solely from the indictment, and Assange will make his own case rebutting those claims. But if the DOJ's informant holds up, I'm not sure what the persuasive argument is going to be. Maybe he'll hold out for nullification.

I agree, as I mentioned the debate about "journalism" has no relevance when it comes to computer intrusion and some of the other crimes in the indictment. It is a good point that it could bear some relevance on jury nullification or one juror causing a mistrial. In the end though I think we are of the same mind that it holds no water.

By far the most likely outcome is that he will receive a fair trial, be convicted, and then justice will be done.

> he cloaks his actions in the hard work and bravery of our free press.

What specifically are you invoking here as the "free press" ? There is very little free press in the United States. The overwhelming majority of what is called the press consists of mouthpieces for the ruling power structure, analogous to state media in the USSR.

I agree it would have been better for documents to be reviewed before publication rather than dumped. But I just don't see how that was possible given the limited resources of the non-corrupt press, and the tendency of the government to go after anyone in possession of leaks. Assange being considered a journalist has much to do with the rot of the institution itself.

The WSJ, WaPo, and NYT are not analogous to the state media of Russia or the Soviet Union, however fun that might be to say on a message board.

Unsubstantiated rebuttals are fun to say on message boards too, I guess.

It certainly seems like when the de facto government has an agenda (eg attacking Iraq), they all broadcast that message simultaneously. It certainly seems like they choose which presidential candidates are "electable" and then downplay the others (Sanders, Paul, Dean). It certainly seems like they suppress narratives that are unfavorable to the shared business interests of their owners. It certainly seems like they all cooperate with the government to get easy access (embedded reporters, etc) rather than doing the hard work of adversarial investigation.

There are differences of course, like how we get to hear two similar options and pick between them. And how this simple act of choosing makes the population absorb the propaganda better. But I'd call those internal differences in structure, with the overall result being similar.

If you're happy within the Overton window, then of course it looks like Wikileaks is some crazy actor that came out of nowhere. But if you see mainstream media repeatedly acting in concert, then Wikileaks is a predictable reaction.

The bar for how good an argument needs to be before it demands substantiation on HN is low, but it does not in fact touch the ground. Sometimes, it's worth pointing out that a piece of hyperbolic rhetoric is just that, just so we can keep our premises clear. "I don't trust the WSJ or NYT" is a colorable argument we could debate. But "The WSJ and NYT are analogous to state-run media" is not; if you believe that, there's little point in continuing to debate.

You wrote just minutes before this post that wikileaks "literally dispatching Lulzsec". Seems quite hyperbolic to claim that they had any power to control lulzsec and dispatch them as if Lulzsec was their underlings.

So maybe we should all just tone down the colorful language a bit and use a bit less extreme rhetoric to make our points.

This would be a better mic drop if several pages of the indictment weren't dedicated to establishing that fact pattern.

Obviously, you can dispute the indictment --- the veracity of the indictment isn't my point. But I contend: any argument you make about my summary of that portion of the indictment is going to illustrate exactly what I mean by the difference between a colorable argument and the mind 'mindslight made upthread.

"In 2012, Assange communicated directly with a leader of the hacking group LulzSec (who by then was cooperating with the FBI), and provided a list of targets for LulzSec to hack. With respect to one target, Assange asked the LulzSec leader to look for (and provide to WikiLeaks) mail and documents, databases and pdfs. In another communication, Assange told the LulzSec leader that the most impactful release of hacked materials would be from the CIA, NSA, or the New York Times. WikiLeaks obtained and published emails from a data breach committed against an American intelligence consulting company by an “Anonymous” and LulzSec-affiliated hacker. According to that hacker, Assange indirectly asked him to spam that victim company again."

The language used by the justice department uses less harsh rhetoric to describe its own indictment than your summery. The difference between providing a list of targets in a communication with a group leader, and literally dispatching a group against a list of targets, is two different statements. The later is more colorful and implies relationships which is not found. Asking and dispatching also have a very different implied tone, one being a request and the later being an order.

I'm now working from memory on this, and you can correct me and I'll listen, but what I read in that indictment was:

* Assange had direct contact with some Lulzsec members.

* Assange recruited "Teenager" to liaise with the computer underground.

* "Teenager" represented themselves as an agent of Wikileaks reporting directly to Assange.

* "Teenager" arranged for Lulzsec to take target lists from Wikileaks.

* The transactions in which those target lists were communicated were overseen by Julian Assange; in at least one case, there's video evidence of that occurring.

If your argument is that members of Lulzsec were free to disregard Wikileaks directives, that's a distinction without a difference, at least legally. The same fact pattern is true of most criminal conspiracies.

I used the term "winged monkeys" to describe Lulzsec, which might have been part of what set you off, because, like, Topiary was not literally a simian thrall to Assange. My point there was simply that the law, and the DOJ, and, probably, juries will look at Lulzsec as an purely criminal element of the case; there will be no regard to any larger political goals Lulzsec might have had.

I feel at this point like, unless I got the indictment completely, dramatically wrong, my point about "colorable argument" versus "bullshit rhetoric" has been made.

Okay then, your comments have been hyperbolic viewpoint-dismissing rhetoric, along with the one I responded to - "It makes me sick to my stomach that he cloaks his actions in the hard work and bravery of our free press."

Sure, my original comment was too general. I've come to that pattern over many specific occurrences, and it keeps my headspace clear by tying mainstream media to a powerful other. But I understand that stating it head-on won't convince anyone.

Narrowing down that heuristic to what is pertinent here:

The mainstream reporting on Iraq from 2003-2007 by (NYT, WSJ, WaPO, FOX, CNN, etc) all overwhelmingly marketed the war to the population. Referring to an alternative of some noble vibrant "free press" is ridiculous when they all were pushing the same government-friendly narrative. Wikileaks was an inevitable response to the lack of investigative journalism opposing the unilateral war, and thus had to function independently with much fewer resources. If anybody from the traditional institution had been doing their purported job, they would have easily scooped Wikileaks and could have spent effort scrubbing the sources. In fact, we saw a lot less of Wikileaks when the mainstream media actually bothered to report on the Snowden revelations.

I don't know that we even need to reach the question of whether the NYT, WaPo, and CNN uniformly marketed the Iraq war to dispose of this argument. Consider: the NYT, WaPo, and CNN are unanimously pushing the same narrative about combating the pandemic, and, with one very notable exception, that narrative is the same as the public health establishment. The pandemic will kill far more Americans than the Iraq war did; it's a generation-defining story. Is the press "un-free" because they're warmly reporting on lockdown, social distancing, and mask-wearing measures by the government? Or can the press sometimes simply agree organically about things?

If the press needs to function like a series of warring contrarian subreddits to validate itself for you, we're operating from incompatible premises.

You're comparing sensible response to a shared public health issue, with an elective war for economic empire? Mainstream media also agrees that you should brush your teeth every day, but I don't attribute that to business relationships with P&G/Unilever. Continuing your argument, you're implying that invading other countries is just common sense, or at least was at the time. Maybe it seemed that way to you, but most everyone I knew was ardently against the war.

The press certainly can agree organically about things. We generally talk in terms of causality, but feedback cycles mean that things act mutually on each other - including the population being preached to (eg choosing to promote those fucking yellow ribbons). But exploring this way leads us deeper into handwaving territory, which is a lot easier to shoot down with a dismissive blunt response, as you did to my initial comment.

For the Iraq war specifically, I do agree that many journalists were likely in agreement to begin with. But the ones that were not were filtered out by management and ownership (cf Clear Channel's list of songs to censor), resulting in the unified presentation. I'm not claiming grand conspiracy, but rather emergent behavior with the net effect of squashing big-business-inconvenient narratives.

Also, I'd be thankful to anybody who leaked information that punched holes in the COVID-19 narrative. I don't think that will happen, because I think it is a very real crisis, but I would welcome being wrong. That's another huge difference between your points of comparison - COVID-19 analysis survives open discussion, while the pro-war camp relied on silencing dissent.

Where by "filtering out by management", you mean "ran front-page stories condemning their own coverage", as early as 2004, in the cases of both the NYT and WaPo. Just like state-run media from the Soviet Union.

You'll try, of course, to recover the irretrievably bad position of your argument comparing the NYT to Pravda by trying to get me to defend the NYT, WSJ, and WaPo's 2003 Iraq coverage. But of course, I don't have to do that. My case is not that journalism is faultless; it's called the "first draft" of history for a reason. Rather, the burden is on you to support the extraordinary claim that the NYT, WSJ, and WaPo are effectively equivalent to state-run media, the claim you stated plainly upthread.

I already admitted my assertion is a heuristic - I find it more useful than not. The standards I used my preceding comments were "analogous", "overall result being similar" and "overwhelmingly marketed the war".

So no, I have not been arguing that the two are "effectively equivalent" or "just like", nor that the government (whatever that may be) has an iron grip on the press - just that the press successfully propagandizes the people with the desires of the ruling power structure. Stating it a different way, one cannot rely on mainstream news outlets and consider themselves informed.

FWIW there is a more direct mechanism of action put forth by Moldbug, but I figure you'll be even less receptive to something of the opposite political flavor.

(Although at this point in our present catastrophe I admit I'm missing the days of competent leadership, even if it was somewhat exploitative of the plebs)

You're right about one thing: I'm not generally going to be receptive to the arguments of people who believe in genetic intellectual superiority of white people over black people, not to mention, for this discussion, people who believe that democracy itself is a mistake, and with it the free press. I'm surprised to see you warmly referencing an authoritarian white supremacist, and won't forget you did. Unlike Yarvin, I don't think you're a white supremacist, not for citing him. Rather, I've concluded that this is all a joke to you.

No doubt Yarvin himself could contribute a pointless 5,000 words to this already pointless thread explaining how I've summarized his beliefs poorly. I'm happy to tie it off here, though.

meh. Truth can be found anywhere, and it's foolish to close your mind based on who is speaking.

FWIW reading Moldbug's analysis of left versus right is what made me return to self-identifying as liberal.

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