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Comment by Nitrolo | Hacker News Reader

I have to admit I don't know a lot about the history of Wikileaks (I was still in school when they started going after Assange), but how did it hurt democratic movements in developing countries?

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They never seem to publish any serious leaks pertaining to other countries with imperialist ambitions. For example, what bothered me, is that there wasn't anything on Russia. For example, the leaked Surkov emails (which among other things exposed Russian plans for the separatists in Ukraine) had to go through 4chan and other ad hoc channels, but not through Wikileaks. Couple that with the fact that the person responsible for CIS-country leaks at the time at Wikileaks was a well known anti-semite and conspiracy theorist, who left USSR sometime in the 60s or 70s and you start to build a picture of conscious bias, at the very least.

This allowed to build a bleak narrative in the former Soviet space, that "look, the West is corrupt as well, so you shouldn't try to fight corruption as it is hopeless". Which, by the way, is a classical FUD passive measure tactic.

Why would anyone in Russia with access to classified information send it to Wikileaks, an organization with zero Russian speakers and extremely limited influence in Eastern Europe. They would have far better options available to them.

This criticism comes up often, but it assumes a conspiracy is necessary for the expected behavior. How many Russian language news stories does your local paper cover? Assange does not need Russian ties to be antisemitic either.

Since Russian is my native language, I read enough Russian papers. And I can tell when a western outlet overlaps with the official Russian party line a bit too much for comfort.

So, I guess you admit that WL has a western bias?

Also, they don’t really have any better options. Just FYI.

Wikileaks unquestionably has a bias towards English speaking nations. That is why their leaks primarily are about America.

If your criticism is that they didn't build a strong enough international team, remember that Assange spent most of their history unable to leave the Ecuadorian embassy. Those years treated as an enemy also likely led to him sympathizing with countries that aren't calling for his head. That isn't why they don't publish Russian leaks though.

WL tried to discredit the Panama Papers (which feature some prominent Russian officials). That doesn’t look like just a factor of not having an international team.

I fail to see how focusing on the americas "it hurt democratic movements in third world countries". Are you saying that it would have been better if they never published anything?

I would certainly like it if the published absolutely everything that they had (in fact, I would argue that not publishing them would be unethical unless if they use said information as an insurance in order to make sure that for example Assange gets free) but I would not go as far as to claim that they did any harm.

The Diplomatic Cables releases ended up on the internet unredacted, leading US officials to say it caused great damage to our worldwide democracy spreading commitment.

How much damage it caused is unclear, and it's hard to look at the releases and determine "spreading democracy" is actually a US ambition.

Yeah, but how credible is it when institution that commits and covers war crimes cries about not being able to spread democracy because someone showed soldiers shooting brown ppl for fun.

> How much damage it caused is unclear

Its unclear because there is no examples of it. Same as claim that leaks cause deaths, yet no names of fields of dead undercover agents, operatives, informers etc. So who do you trust?

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