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Comment by sonnyp | Hacker News Reader

I believe the reason you are getting down voted isn't because you don't cite your source, but because the reasoning is absurd.

  > You will always find more dirt and problems in public/accessible records than in dictatorships.

Wikileaks isn't some sort Wikipedia of public/accessible records, it's a platform to publish confidential information.

If the US gov is a healthy, democratic, open gov, how and why can Wikileaks be so damaging?

Should we stop newspapers?

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> If the US gov is a healthy, democratic, open gov, how and why can Wikileaks be so damaging?

Because we are still humans and fallible. No matter how healthy, open gov or democratic our governing bodies are I suppose there will always be something going off rails at some points and it's much easier to spot it in transparent governing structures (which usually means democracies) than in non-transparent ones (which usually means dictatorships).

> > You will always find more dirt and problems in public/accessible records than in dictatorships.

> Wikileaks isn't some sort Wikipedia of public/accessible records, it's a platform to publish confidential information.

Yes, yes. But it's easier to feed wikileaks with information from democracies than from dictatorships.

> I believe the reason you are getting down voted isn't because you don't cite your source, but because the reasoning is absurd.

I am okay with downvotes ^^ as long as it's not a flamewar.

> Because we are still humans and fallible.

Did you look at what Wikileaks revealed? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Leaks

I don't think you realize the scale of what is happening. These aren't some cute human mistakes or tax evasion.

We are talking war crimes, environmental disasters, political corruption, ...

And yes - lots of it targets the US gov, maybe time to rethink what the US (and others) gov is and isn't ?

This isn't the work of fallible humans, this is the work of malfunctioning states.

Without Wikileaks, medias and investigation that reveals the wrongdoings ... dictatorship is at the end of the road.

This is why the reasoning that Wikileaks helps dictatorships and hurts democracies is absurd.

> This is why the reasoning that Wikileaks helps dictatorships is absurd.

I never wrote that nor implied it. I wrote and I maintain that wikileaks deals more blows to democracies than dictatorships and that it's because of the very nature of democracies (edit: notwithstanding the whole anti-US bias of Assange).

I don't know how to make my point clearer:

- Wikileaks's leaks are mainly about democracies, not dictatorships.

- It creates tensions in these democracies and it does not in dictatorships.

- This consumes resources and has consequences in democracies (civil unrest, lack of trust from the population, investigations, weakening of governments, tensions in relationships with other nations, etc.)

- Whether it's a good thing or not, it's desirable or not doesn't change the fact that dictatorships are not diminished and are not the target of wikileaks while democracies are.

> We are talking war crimes, environmental disasters, political corruption, ...

And regarding my last point: I do not believe for a second that we should ignore those facts in order to appear strong or clean or whatever.

>wikileaks deals more blows to democracies than dictatorships

I think the central fallacy here is seeing the central operating principle of democracy, which is the informed public feeding their knowledge and judgement back in, as a blow to democracy. It is like a automotive mechanic saying "there's your problem, the fuel air mixture in your engine is exploding." The press reporting on the government is one link in democracy's central cycle.

Your are right about seeing reporting as a blow to dictatorship, of course. In their case the action of an informed public really is a blow to the state, following the fact that the public is not part of the state.

So in that light it's true that journalism does more to help free societies than it does to hurt dictatorships, since there's more of it in freer societies.

>it's a platform to publish confidential information.

Phrasing it like this is misleading as it implies that Wikileaks is a neutral platform, a dumb tool that acts at the leaker's discretion. That isn't what we see when we look at their actual behavior. They do not publish every leak they receive and therefore they have editorial control over their platform. Assange himself has said they have received leaks about the Trump campaign that they wouldn't publish. That shifts Wikileaks from a neutral platform to publish confidential information to a political entity that uses leaked confidential information to achieve political goals.

EDIT: This is being downvoted so here is a source in which Assange talks about having leaked info about Trump and not publishing it.[1]

[1] - https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/2934...

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