Wikileaks: Police Arrested Movie Pirate As “A Personal Favor” To Movie Official | Hacker News Reader

Wikileaks: Police Arrested Movie Pirate As “A Personal Favor” To Movie Official

torrentfreak.com

197 pointsthere41 comments

I hope by now those on HN skeptical of Wikileaks have been sufficiently won over.

How so? Those that have argued against Wikileaks on here have argued against the 'shotgun' approach to releasing all of the cables regardless of whether or not they contain incriminating evidence.

How is finding bad things within the deluge of cables going to win someone with that opinion over?

I think the reason Wikileaks has not filtered the cables (aside from some minor redacting to avoid putting lives at risk) is to retain credibility as an unbiased reporting organization.

We have learned that (in the case of the Iraq/Afghanistan releases), much of what was deemed "secret" was done so simply to prevent embarrassing info from entering the public domain. In other words, for propaganda reasons. There was not any national security or safety reason to keep the information secret.

Filtering the cables to reflect what one group deems "incriminating" would be just another form of propaganda, something Wikileaks does not wish to engage in.

> Filtering the cables to reflect what one group deems "incriminating" would be just another form of propaganda, something Wikileaks does not wish to engage in.

Exactly. And it is certainly news to me that anyone here on HN is critical of WikiLeaks as they have done what any journalists do: by shining a light on the worlds most powerful for the benefit of all of us. There is no real difference between how WikiLeaks or The NY Times achieve their goals, except WikiLeaks is not beholden to anyone, so the have more credibility. Unlike Bill Keller and the NYTimes, they don't work with the White House to see if it is OK to print something. Because they are a stateless entity, they are able to break more stories than any news agency, and this year have broken more than all of them combined. But they have done so at great personal sacrifice. Julian Assange (and WikiLeaks) whatever your personal feeling are about them, have made an enormous personal sacrifices so that we may all benefit. Aside from the usual arguments that have been soundly debunked about the dangers of mass dumping un-redacted documents, what fault could anyone at HN possibly have with WL?

Well said. Bill Keller has really lost a lot of credibility as a journalist with his ad hominem attacks against Assanage and tabloidesque coverage of many matters relating to Wikileaks.

How about the ambassador to Mexico's report that the Mexican officials were incompetent in their attempts to deal with organized crime? By not filtering that, the end result was that high Mexican officials were annoyed and the ambassador had to resign.

I don't see how any good whatsoever comes of trying to create an environment where diplomats and other government employees have to worry that by given an honest opinion in a report they put their jobs at risk, and hence see no reason whatsoever for Wikileaks to have published that cable.

It's the responsibility of the government to use their powers of secrecy only for legitimate purposes, like diplomacy, and not abuse those powers to deceive its own citizens. The responsibility of the journalist is to expose such deception.

If the government compromises their own secrecy by abusing it, that is the government's own fault. How many bones the journos throw them is far aside from the point.

Exactly. This is part of the "checks and balances" created by the first amendment, every bit as legitimate and deliberately engineered as the separation of powers between the three branches of government.

I don't quite follow this line of thinking.

The unstated but obvious leaning of wikileaks, Assange, and a large portion of the hacker community is towards anarchy be it anarcho-capitalism, crypto-anarchy, some variant.

To find wikileaks dangerous and counter productive simply requires being opposed to anarchy. You can obfuscate and spin the issue all you want but the most parsimonious explanation is that the motivation, to put massive amounts private information out in the public's view, is political.

The clear intention is disruption not reform of the establishment. Now one can agree or disagree with the political goals of the organization or players involved (and these are quite well known btw) but that's irrelevant to the discussion.

Be political, advocate for anti-establishment causes, spread anarchy if you believe in it, but be honest about it. I can respect that even if I disagree.

I don't think you have understood properly what the mission of Assange is.

The point is not the create anarchy but to make the system leak. His point (and I tend to agree) is that technology can be used by those in power to conspire against their population. The better the technology the bigger the conspirations.

So the goal of Assange is to make sure that there is soo much leak in the system that it slows it down and thus make it harder for those with bad intentions to conspire.

You really should spend some time actually reading about what he want's instead of fighting strawmen.

There is nothing anarchistic about the legal ways in which the press is protected from prosecution if a source reveals classified materials.

The person who had security clearance and violated it to leak the materials has committed a crime, and sometimes such crimes are committed by people who discover an abhorrent practice and decide that revealing it is worth the price (possible prosecution).

Any organization will have rules that prevent insiders from leaking certain information, but ultimately every employee must be guided by his/her own moral compass. Loyalty to the institution would ideally result in the employee pursuing things internally within the organization first. But in some cases the crimes are so deeply rooted or so broadly ignored that the employee faces the tough decision of whether to blow the whistle or to become complicit in the abhorrent acts.

No legitimate organization would wish to commit abhorrent acts, and so we must recognize such acts as an artifact of bureaucracy and corruption. Thus, like lymphocytes in an organism's immune system, whistle blowers benefit the organization by helping rid it of such toxins.

US law protects the press b/c this phenomenon is understood to effect organizations of all sizes, including governments. Individual whistle blowers are often viewed as heroes because of the personal risks they endure to save their beloved organizations from corruption and malice.

What self-respecting member of the military would countenance such abuses as Bradley Manning learned of when he viewed the war logs when he decided to release them? Loyalty is perhaps a virtue, but it comes below a person's own individual integrity and sense of right and wrong.

I don't believe that Assange has advocated anarchy, and to equate the release of government information as such is at best poor reasoning. Particularly in the case of the United States because Assange is neither a resident or a citizen of the US.

> The unstated but obvious leaning of wikileaks, Assange, and a large portion of the hacker community is towards anarchy be it anarcho-capitalism, crypto-anarchy, some variant.

Is it? I'm not 100% sure on Assange, but I've always seen the leanings of the (large portion of the) hacker community as more towards libertarianism than towards pure anarchy.

> The clear intention is disruption not reform of the establishment.

I will give you this, but I'm not sure if there are many effective ways to achieve reform. You can write about idealist reforms all you want, but people won't be convinced without something big happening.

How does one achieve reform without disruption?

Getting diplomats fired for being honest is not the kind of reform we need, is it?

You can cure cancer by killing the patient, but it is a lot better to try to treat just the problem, not kill the whole organism.

Getting diplomats fired was not the general intention. It was a rare but unfortunate side-effect which is ultimately not for the press to worry about. Fairness and job security are not things you can expect from a career in politics.

> releasing all of the cables regardless of whether or not they contain incriminating evidence.

Except that's not remotely true.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/07...

"Currently released so far... 11214/251,287"

That would be less than 5%. Not "all".

http://wikileaks.ch/cablegate.html

Every time I think about donating to Wikilieaks, I give to the ACLU [1] and EFF [2] instead. ;D For the sake of the future, fixing the law in the USA _matters_, and I trust them.

[1] https://www.eff.org/ [2] https://www.eff.org/

I do not expect it is possible to fix the law in the USA under its current political system.

If citizens give up, they win.

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

And that's why you'll never see me skipping an election ;-)

(of course, this means a lot less in Brazil, because it's a major hassle to do it)

If you actually think that going to elections is "doing something", then they have you right where they want you.

If you think skipping one helps, they have you where they want you.

From where did you get that voting is the only thing I do?

Choosing to abstain from voting neither helps nor hinders this government. Since we don't have a minimum required turnout, it is an inherently neutral act. On the other hand, choosing to vote does help it by lending it credibility.

If you think voting "works" then you are in their fingers. If you abstain from voting, they simply don't give a shit.

Stop wasting your time, and do something that will make a difference.

> Stop wasting your time, and do something that will make a difference.

Any suggestions?

I see your problem appears not to be with the candidates you can vote on themselves, but with the process of electing them by vote. I agree some parts of the system can be broken, but I don't think representative democracies are so bad, specially when compared to the alternatives in current use.

Any suggestions?

Hire lobbyists.

Bah. You give up too easily.

Those are both good orgs to donate to. However when you consider just how much callous loss of life and suffering is being caused by the stuff that Wikileaks is revealing about the US, it really is enough to give any reasonable person pause.

You are just counting cables released on Wikileaks' site. All of the cables have been given to several newspapers directly by Wikileaks, and have passed on from there to other newspapers.

Assange said he would release incriminating information about some banks by a couple months ago. Has he done it yet?

Anonymous did instead, I think. (Not sure if that was the same documents though...)

They weren't, if memory serves. I think Applebaum (ioerror) confirmed it, but I'm not sure.

I can imagine the release coming after sufficient interest in the current legal proceedings against Assange die down, such that the leak obtains full attention.

I agree. WL has been way smarter about PR lately... They are actually defining the message now rather than letting the rest of the media define them.

You've got to be joking. This continues to show how Wikileaks uses the timing of its information for PR. They probably want more hacker sympathy for some soon to be revealed target.

I have heard unverifiable stories of similar "personal favors" in San Francisco, too. Not to mention the legal wild-west that is China and India...

He committed the crime,and was successfully prosecuted for it. The personal favor was not the arrest, it was assigning an agent or two to investigate the case.

This is not much different from asking your cop friend to give a ticket to your neighbor for parking too far out into the street, or asking the zoning board to investigate a neighbor's unapproved addition.

> He committed the crime

Unless I misread the article, camming was not a crime where he lived at the time he was arrested. What the article describes is the police harassing someone because someone with lots of resources asked politely for an illegal favor. Or, to put it more bluntly, the police decided it was OK to break the law because the MPAA asked for it.

He committed no crime in Canada. If a US Citizen was jailed for making statements against the Chinese Communist party, he also would have "committed a crime" but the idea that anyone should be jailed if they commit something that is considered a crime somewhere is obviously fallacious.

I have little to add beyond pointing out that this is discussed in the comment-section by more commenters than the one I am linking to now:

edit: Replaced with better link: http://torrentfreak.com/wikileaks-police-arrested-movie-pira...

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