Hacker News Reader

Comment by RoyTyrell | Hacker News Reader

Would it be any better if it was sent to Wikileaks and published there?

Huh? Wikileaks is where people go to publish evidence of government crimes, not Granddad's chats with his friends.

Wikileaks leaked John Podesta's emails, including such criminal activity as his recipe for risotto.

It's generally a good idea for leakers to be selective about their releases (Snowden did a better job than Manning in that area IMO). I guess Wikileaks is between a rock and a hard place, because if they started editorializing then that would lead to political bias.

Political bias? Like when Wikileaks supported researching the Pizzagate conspiracy during the 2016 US election and posted links to /r/The_Donald "investigation" threads?

They sided against the US government (and with Russia) years ago.

Has anyone leaked something about Russia that was then denied by Wikileaks? It could be that the US has a more active community of investigative journalists.

Apparently, yes: https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-l...

Except the over 70,000 documents and leaks about the Russian government on Wikileaks right now. This argument is absolute nonsense given that fact.

Well, since it was years ago, it's possible that they have reversed course since then. They disappointed me a lot, and I didn't keep up with them after that...

And that was widely criticized as improper behavior.

Parler is not good, but stealing and publishing this information is also not traditionally ethical.

At this point, we've become so polarized that good and bad as abstract principles are irrelevant. What's good is what's bad for the "other side".

Both widely criticized and widely lauded. Similar to what's happening here.

If the data was public, is it stealing?

(Not 100% sure if private data was released.)

CFAA doesn't care about that. There's problems with that law, but I really wouldn't want to push on it here.

The point is that finding a vuln and investigating it to the extent required to prove it works is security researcher behavior. Actually exploiting it and dumping all of a site's user data is malicious. If he had leaked stuff relevant to the capitol riots or something, maybe understandable, though using the vuln to do so would still have been wrong.

Just as a friendly heads up, @donk_enby used she/her pronouns.

Wow. Downvoted to negative for politely correcting pronoun usage.

Not sure what I should've expected given the average user of HN.

FWIW my guess is there probably wouldn't be any downvotes if you just wrote "is a girl/woman".

Personally I don't care about the difference but just mentioning "pronouns" seems to be enough to trigger the downvote reflex - "pronouns" has been abused to create so much drama the last few years that I can kind of see why people react even if I don't do.

Here's the recipe for risotto:

https://thetab.com/us/bucknell/2016/10/18/john-podestas-crea...

Wikileaks would never publish anything that hurts authoritarian cause, so it's highly hypothetical.

> Would it be any better if it was sent to Wikileaks and published there?

Not really. If they had sent it to a journalistic organisation à la the Panama Papers, where e.g. curious peoples’ government IDs could be stripped and criminal activity highlighted, that would have be been different.

Yes, because WikiLeaks is very diligent in scrubbing sensitive private information from leaks.

They aren't, or did they get much better at it in recent years?

Didn't WikiLeaks publish the decryption key for the Manning leaks and all the unredacted messages got into the wild?

IIRC, that was the Guardian, who was provided the key in trust in order to help publish the data.

> Didn't WikiLeaks publish the decryption key for the Manning leaks and all the unredacted messages got into the wild?

No.

> WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange phoned the White House to warn lives would be put at risk by the publication of cables online, a court has heard.

> On 25 August, 2011, German news outlet Der Freitag revealed that it was possible to access the unredacted database of cables by using a mirror site and a 58-key password that had been published in a book by The Guardian earlier in the year.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/wikileaks-...

https://wikileaks.org/Guardian-journalist-negligently.html

No. Wikileaks did indeed accidentally give out the decryption key to the encrypted trove they published from the Manning leaks. There is probably still a torrent available of the full, unredacted scrape of Secret data from the SIPR network.

Only if it the data was government / private sector data, not citizen messages

What exactly the difference between "private sector data" and "citizen messages"? Wikileaks published a ton of data from personal sources. Famously, the Podesta leak was from a private account and absolutely contained personal communication (about, again famously, a favored pizza joint).

>What exactly the difference between "private sector data" and "citizen messages"?

That "fuck businesses", while "leave actual people ok".

I think where most people would reasonably draw the line is in the level of political power a person has over matters which impact the public interest. While I personally disagree with the leaking of Podesta's emails, the amount of political power and relevance he has makes him somewhat of a public figure. He is not in anyway comparable to your average person.

I do see a public good in providing this data to law enforcement, so that they can obtain evidence to build a case against the people who were involved. I however can not see any public good in potentially exposing random people to identity theft and criminal harassment for simply registering an account on a website.

While people could make the argument that the site has culpability for what happened so this data must be exposed, to hold that position in good faith you would then also have to say that a leak of Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube users is also justifiable. Seeing as those platforms have held worse calls for violence than any other platforms.

Parler isn't a website where all the users who register are guilty of espousing harmful rhetoric. I would agree that there are some websites that exist like Stormfront where that would definitely be the case, but ultimately Parler is simply an alternative social media site with more lax moderation than Twitter. That lax moderation unfortunately will attract a large number of bad actors who have been banned from other sites. However this still doesn't change that this site isn't anything but a social media site with a different philosophical opinion on how moderated speech on their platform should be. Which means a lot of innocent people with no political power will be harmed.

I can think of one benefit of going through Wikileaks (or WaPo): there would be a review by experts of what is legal/responsible to share, redacting for example driver's license uploads.

Wikileaks doesn't vet anything, their policy is to publish whatever they're given. That's why Snowden specifically didn't take the NSA leaks to them.

One of the interesting things to come out in Dec 2020 is evidence that Wikileaks offered the State Department advance warning when the encryption keys for the Iraq War Logs were about to be published by their collaborators at the Guardian. Prior to that, publication of the Iraq War Logs had been piecemeal as they redacted PII.

https://news.antiwar.com/2020/12/16/recording-proves-assange...

https://www.britannica.com/topic/WikiLeaks

>> WikiLeaks had originally followed a policy of redacting personal or sensitive information from documents prior to release,...

If you hack a source and send it to Wikileaks, do you qualify as "security researcher"? This is what we're taking about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com