Hacker News Reader

Comment by sailingparrot | Hacker News Reader

> "[...] support of Julian Assange and Wikileaks became a partisan issue purely because they exposed corruption in your favorite political party"

Wikileaks released all of Clinton's/DNC/Podesta email at a timing chosen specifically to inflict damage on the campaign of one party, and in concordance with the other party.

Wikileaks became partisan, not the public.

View on HN

The public is partisan if it dislikes damnatory but true information when the timing of it is inconvenient to a political party.

It's sort of similar to the Brett Kavanaugh ordeal. Going from memory, the first accuser told her story in private to a Congresswoman in the summer of 2018, I believe it was in July. That politician sat on the information for the rest of July, the entirety of August, and the first few weeks of September. Only when it was closer to the midterm elections and the confirmation process did the Democrats launch their attack against Kavanaugh's character. They urged Congress to delay the vote until after the midterms, which they were hoping to win in a landslide, so that they could deny Kavanaugh a seat.

In either case, we have politically-minded people deliberately timing the release of information. As regular voters, we have to decide what's more important: what the information reveals, or how it is being weaponized.

The point is that journalists are not supposed to be "politically minded", especially when they're leaking damaging confidential information. Revealing information that hurts one party, but deliberately withholding information that hurts the other, is lying by omission and downgrades you from "brave whistleblower who needs protection" to "low-life partisan information warrior who deserves to have the book thrown at them".

I've read lots about the charges filed against Assange, and "timing his release" was not among them. If you want that to be a law, contact your legislators.

The first comment on this thread was lamenting that the issue became partisan. The rest explained why. The partisanship is precisely what makes discussing the fairness of the charges and laws difficult.

In other words, he isn’t on trial for the timing. But he’s friendless because of it.

Thanks for explaining this distinction. Of course Assange isn't "friendless" in general, but I would agree that he is with respect to the sorts of people who have any effect on who does and who does not face USA federal charges. That indicts the entire federal judicial system. As if we needed additional proofs of their evil.

I have no sympathy for Assange. There are legitimate avenues for whistleblowers. Trying to hack into protected government systems in order to leak information to the public while pushing conspiracies about Seth Rich in conjunction with Kim Dotcom is not one of them.

The point of the article is precisely that the hacking allegations against Assange were made up by Icelander "Siggi the Hacker", a sociopath, liar, con-man, pedophile. One of the crimes was stealing funds from wikileaks.

The FBI knew it and gave him protection from prosecution for a lot of his crimes if he witnessed to the alleged hacking. He continued committing crimes without stopping afterwards. They are still protecting him to this day.

Why do you suggest Assange is a pedophile? The primary reference I can find for this is when Wikileaks threatened to sue CNN for defamation and CNN apologized. [1]

[1] https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/artic...

I didn't suggest he was a pedophile. I know my syntax is not perfect, but still... Please re-read it.

The false "witness" alleging Assange hacked, "Siggi the Hacker" was a pedophile, con-man and thief, not Assange. That guy is Icelandic, while Assange is Australian. "Siggi" has just been interviewed in Studin.is saying he invented everything, FBI knew, still gave him immunity, etc. Here are the sources [1] [2]

As for rape charge, you fell prey to propaganda. There was no "condom stealthing" accusation, full stop. There was no rape accusation, full stop. It is all a proven lie, fabricated by the police and prosecutor, which were caught red-handed later on, and documented in a subsequent judicial procedure.

Here's my own TLDR here to somebody else a couple days ago [3]. If you got 20 minute, I suggest the full, sordid story, as told in excruciating detail by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. He gave a long form interview giving all the details of the fabrication, showing the documents, outlining all of lies and judicial misdeeds of both Sweden and the UK [4].

[1] https://stundin.is/grein/13627/key-witness-in-assange-case-a...

[2] https://grapevine.is/news/2020/06/25/wikileaks-doj-witness-i...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27653029

[4] https://www.republik.ch/2020/01/31/nils-melzer-about-wikilea...

Hm seems to have been syntax confusion, I agree with you haha.

Yes, as another reader pointed out, it actually wasn't good syntax |-)

Anyways, "FREE ASSANGE" !

You might want to edit this comment to be more clear. While I see you mentioned the Islandic person who obviously isn’t the Australian born Assange, people seem to be getting tripped up.

Done

They weren't made up, there were the reason Chelsea Manning was jailed because they had evidence believing that Assange had tried helping her decrypt confidential information. This wasn't information provided to them by Sigurdur. Sigurdur was never a major part of the investigation. People are falling again for propaganda.

If the doorbell does not work, ring the bell and complain, we will fix it. We never had a issue with the doorbell. Blowing the whistle using the designated pathways is basically useless suicide, as to the socially useful suicide that is blowing the whistle on the outside.

Far be it from me to defend the nature of the charges against Assange. The US government has some pretty wildly unconstitutional tools, and in this instance it chose to wield them. That should not stop us from having a reasoned discussion about the merits of the actions that drew such negative attention.

Also, I didn't say anything about timing. Selective and partisan release alone is highly dubious, timing notwithstanding.

What's selective or partisan about it? Did Assange have some damaging information about Trump that he refused to release?

Telling the truth doesn't become partisan simply because the truth hurts one party.

I don't think anyone's alleging it's against the law to time news releases. But both countries (both US and UK) have violated their own laws time and again in the persecution of Julian Assange. They have thrown all pretense of due process (e.g. access to attorney) and human rights (denial of medical care) out the window, just to punish him.

There were 10+ violations that would have been more than enough to let a murderer go free.

The problem, in other words, with Assange is that he didn't really commit a crime, or more to the point, that's not why the US is after him. And clearly, as a country, the US is perfectly willing to violate it's own constitution to punish this person. The allegation is that this is, among other things, due to the timing of the releases. And because of the danger that it would make Hillary Clinton lose the election.

It would be funny if it wasn't both such a sad, sad failure for the US state and an enormous crime, committed by the state.

The Kremlin would have probably poisoned him with Novichok nerve agent or jailed him under fabricated charges. The only difference is that the US and the UK haven't generalised usage of nerve agents on dissidents and that they also have to fabricate evidence, instead of charges only. What a waste of legal resources.

If you define yourself in contrast to what Russia might have done and use it as an excuse, you are still justifying political prosecution. I think that might be why people dislike either party in the US. And they maybe should.

The fact that the media constantly does this let's me assume that this argument is partisan itself and projection. It sound hurt because the hand was caught in the cookie jar.

If you are rotting in a room in an embassy on made-up false accusations, everything you do to the people who put you there is a fair game. Timing the release of information is the least worrisome thing he could have done.

> The point is that journalists are not supposed to be "politically minded"

Where are you finding journalists that aren’t politically minded?

I can't figure out if you are arguing for- or against- Assange, but just in case people are interpreting it as the against-...

The email leak was exposing corruption in the DNC handling of Bernie Sanders' campaign. Particularly when the corruption being exposed was related to an ongoing election, it is easy to believe Wikileaks just released what they had ASAP without waiting for any particular time.

The emails didn't exist before the election and waiting until later is, from a neutral leakers point of view, kinda silly. It is not at all obvious Wikileaks acted partisanly.

I think "low-life partisan information warrior who deserves to have the book thrown at them" is way too strong. You might think it's slimy, sure, but it's still journalism and the information is still important to the public. It passes Kant's test: if everybody did it, it would be a net positive. If we had a bunch of partisan information warriors that leaked information at the most inconvenient time to the party that they disliked, that would keep all parties honest (as long as they all had enemies).

Also, you don't necessarily have to be partisan to want to release a story at time that's inconvenient to a party. It's natural for a journalist to want to break a big story, and it's also more beneficial if an important story reaches more people. If you want some important information to be shared widely, one of the best times to drop it is when it will cause a nation-wide sensation.

To be clear, the thing I object to isn't leaking damaging information at the worst possible time. It's withholding information because it hurts the "wrong" people.

Kant's test implicitly relies on the idea of some sort of deviation from the norm. If the norm is that everyone punches each other in the face, and I decide to merely slap you, that's an improvement; if everyone did that it would be a net good. But if the norm is a polite handshake, then a slap is worse. Kant's test is always relative to expectations.

Expectations are what distinguish "honest whistleblower with a love for truth" and "propaganda merchant". Leaking information hurts people. The ethical defense of it is "public interest" - that it's a net good when truth is more widely known. If you're prepared to leak information, I expect you to leak all of it. When you selectively release information, you cannot expect me to believe that public interest is really the principle you are abiding by, and any beliefs about the world derived from that information come under suspicion, as they have been engineered.

Kant objected pretty strongly to lies, and so do I - even lies by omission.

You are correct, that it is not ok in principle. The personal grudge of Assange against Clinton is understandable, but shouldn't have influenced releases. But I also think the US democrats basically played themselves and had it coming, especially since the media was partisan in favor of democrats. And that isn't an understatement.

The accusation of partisan hack from anyone supporting either party of the US rings a bit hollow to be honest. To a degree also because they are just unlikable. As if the info uncovered would make them victims. Perhaps they are, they pretty much look like it.

> we have to decide what's more important: what the information reveals, or how it is being weaponized.

False choice. They are both important -- you don't have to choose. Selective and timed use of facts is often a way to hide behind "truth" while being completely biased.

> Only when it was closer to the midterm elections and the confirmation process did the Democrats launch their attack

Well, but that was also when Kavanaugh became a supreme court nominee. He wasn't a nominee in the summer of 2018.

And getting nominated to the Supreme Court is what made the accuser want to go public. She didn't want to initially, which makes it hard to do anything with the information.

She didn't want to go public at all. She was outed by Ryan Grim at the Intercept as part of an attack article he wrote on Diane Fenstein.

> The public is partisan if it dislikes damnatory but true information when the timing of it is inconvenient to a political party.

Unless the source of the information is a foreign government, trying to wreak havoc in an enemy country and profit from it, possibly putting some poor folk's life in grave danger.

Journalists shouldn't side with dictators and/or agitprop, IMO, no matter what. They shouldn't also meddle with a country they are not citizens of national security.

that's what secret services are for.

Assange clearly stated his purpose for starting Wikileaks [0, 1]: to make people in government fear that their corruption and incompetence will be exposed and therefore encourage them to act properly and carefully. Consistent with that purpose, Wikileaks timed the information release for maximum negative impact on the offender.

[0] https://www.wired.com/2016/10/want-know-julian-assanges-endg...

[1] https://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf

He might have had those reasons at the beginning, but by the time the 2016 elections came around, he was, wittingly or not, a stooge with a grudge. He exposed himself as the corrupt, incompetent political hack when he went spouting conspiracy theories abuot Seth Rich.

I don't think you actually refuted the parents suggestion that timing the release alongside an election would have maximum negative consequences, and that that would be in line with their stated objectives. Further I think this is what the root post was alluding to about attacking "your favorite political party."

>when he went spouting conspiracy theories abuot Seth Rich.

I have noticed that the people who support Assange never want to talk about how Assange implied that Seth Rich was a Wikileaks source which resulted in repeated harassment of the family of a murder victim. Assange knew Rich wasn't the source of the DNC leaks because Assange was still in contact with the source after Rich was murdered. There is no journalistic justification for that behavior.

Your comment seems to imply that I support Assange. Please read my comment again, carefully. You will notice that I said nothing about whether Assange or his actions are good or not. I tried only to refute the parent's claim that Wikileaks acted with partisanship when it released the emails.

"Simple people talk about people. Common people talk about events. Highly intelligent people talk about ideas."

Government transparency is necessary to prevent a never-ending dark age of fascism and suffering. Organizations like Wikileaks support democracy and thereby support human progress.

Assange is not a nice person and that doesn't matter. Julian Assange started and ran Wikileaks, and thereby contributed massively to the welfare of humanity.

How has anything from Wikileaks massively improved the lot of collective humanity? I genuinely don’t know - it seems like he released a bunch of stuff that revealed bad behavior, but how has that improved anyone’s welfare in a material sense?

So you are implying that the information about bad behaviour should not be released because there was no act upon it?

No, I was asking if anyone had insight into the results of the leaks. Has it affected change?

People are much more aware of privacy and how their innocuous private life details can be used against them. Thank you Wikileaks for helping Snowden find a safe harbor.

The Collateral Damage leaks greatly reduced the credibility of the US military as a worldwide humanist agent.

The alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime was used as a justification for a full blown invasion of Syria; yet the political push back was too strong and the attacks were reduced to air strikes. Thank you Wikileaks for publishing the cables showing how US had plans in motion to topple Assad since a very long time.

But more importantly people are beginning to question their government and that is a good thing.

People have long questioned their government; it’s almost written into the US culture. That same distrust, stoked by Reagan, is part Of the reason we haven’t reached here immunity.

I agree with some of what you said, directionally - some people are more aware of their privacy. Some people have also tuned out the arguments because they appear to be noise. It’s also hard to judge something when we don’t know effect size, or even if it was causal, however.

Many of your points are good examples and I appreciate you posting them.

No, but it's not the act he's being prosecuted for. Assange is a shitty person, but he's being punished for his journalistic acts.

The idea that journalism shouldn't be "partisan" is a bizarre American fantasy, not an international standard.

From day one, Wikileaks had a stated policy of trying to achieve "maximum impact" for their publications. For instance, the same claim is also made at the release of the Afghan War logs in 2011: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/wikileaks-file...

Certainly not a US ideal. The only place I have ever seen this talking point echoed is by Democrats explaining why they want Assange to be extrajudicially persecuted by secret intelligence agencies. Wouldn’t at all be surprising if the idea of Wikileaks as a partisan organization started as an CIA/FBI plant in the WaPo.

I think it's fair to imagine that had Wikileaks not published the emails they would have been accused of favoring the democrats. In a highly ideologically polarized climate you can't win.

Considering they had and did not publish Republican emails, I'm not sure that would apply.

Then, they'd be treating both republicans and Democrats equally. Bad for the libertarians or the greens though

Didn't they release things against Republicans when they were in power I remember a bomb dropping video that made Republicans against Assange.

Not sure what type of equality you need == or ===

> Wikileaks released all of Clinton's/DNC/Podesta email at a timing chosen specifically to inflict damage on the campaign of one party

Do you mean the emails concerning attempts to steal/fix the Democrats primary? Why would wikileaks sit on those emails? Would you prefer they waited to release them until the primary was over?

> Why would wikileaks sit on those emails?

They did sit on them, until a timed moment.

> They did sit on them, until a timed moment.

I looked it up, and apprently this could be true, assuming that wikileaks were given the emails ahead of time. Some of those emails were first posted to a DCLeaks website, then Wikileaks announced they'd be posting some, then DCLeaks posted more a few weeks later, then Wikileaks posted some, then Wikileaks posted more just before the election.

It makes sense to time these things for impact, assuming you want to punish corruption, and that's the motivation behind these kinds of leaks, right? People seem to focus on the part Assange and the Russians played in this instead of the actual corruption - how Bernie Sanders and millions of his supporters were screwed by Clinton and the DNC.

I don't think it's partisan to expose the truth. To do otherwise serves those in power at the expense of the general public.

> I looked it up, and apprently this could be true

It is true. One of the findings from the Mueller report identified the very day that the emails were sent from Russian intelligence to WikiLeaks

I believe it. I just don't see the big deal, given the fact that Clinton and the DNC were exposed trying to steal an election. That's why this happened. Assange and the Russians didn't screw Bernie Sanders. Truth is truth, right?

The delegates were exposed as disliking Bernie Sanders. That's it. There's nothing illegal or immoral about that, which is why there were no criminal charges or lawsuits even after Republicans won the election and both houses of Congress.

It was a smear campaign targeted at democrats, nothing more.

This is textbook whataboutism. "Stealing a hundred thousand confidential emails from political rivals is fine because look at all the bad things they said about Bernie Sanders"

Look at the even more outrageous event of Trump magically getting the laptop of his rival's son and parading it around in 2020. It's organized crime trying to corrupt politics that you're rooting for. The kind of thing that happens in Russia or deeply corrupt banana republics

I don't think it's whataboutism. We were discussing if exposed corruption should be dismissed as being partisan.

There was more than just a DNC dislike of Bernie Sanders. There were financial, policy, and hiring decisions involved, arranged between Clinton and the DNC, contrary to a free and fair election. From wikipedia [0]:

> The leaks resulted in allegations of bias against Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, in apparent contradiction with the DNC leadership's publicly stated neutrality, as several DNC operatives seemed to deride Sanders' campaign and discussed ways to advance Hillary Clinton's nomination. Later reveals included controversial DNC–Clinton agreements dated before the primary, regarding financial arrangements and control over policy and hiring decisions. The revelations prompted the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz before the 2016 Democratic National Convention. The DNC issued a formal apology to Bernie Sanders and his supporters "for the inexcusable remarks made over email" that did not reflect the DNC's "steadfast commitment to neutrality during the nominating process." After the convention, DNC CEO Amy Dacey, CFO Brad Marshall, and Communications Director Luis Miranda also resigned in the wake of the controversy.

I'm rooting for the exposure of political corruption on all sides. I think it is an important thing for the people to know the truth, no matter the messenger.

Are you rooting for something different?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Commi...

Truth or not, it is evidence that WikiLeaks was motivated by something other than pure transparency.

They released them at time of production. During the campaign. Input > Output? To hallucinate into that a partisan-ship, is intellectual dishonest.

Imagine how partisan it would look the other way if they waited until _after_ the election.

Just imagine that Clinton won in a landslide and then right afterwards WikiLeaks comes out with the podesta emails saying they waited until after the election to share it so they wouldn't hurt her chances.

In a democracy the people have the right to decide which information they care about, it shouldn't be decided for them by the media.

WikiLeaks expressly says that they time their releases to get the most coverage. It's why a whistleblower might choose them over other outlets that may publish their story to get minimal coverage of it would hurt the powers that be.

Releasing information about a political candidate during an election is exactly the right time to release it. People should have as much information as possible when trying to make an informed decision when voting. Trying to make this into a partisan issue is just shifting the goal posts.

Disagree. Releasing unverified slog about your opponent days before an election when there's no time to find out if the claims are even true is the definition of a smear campaign.

The emails contain DKIM keys, you can verify them yourself if you like

They're also completely out of context and dumped on the media so close to election that nobody had a chance to go through them.

When they did, they found nothing wrong. But it didn't stop the pure FUD cloud around them from affecting Hillary's reputation.

When something is leaked, people automatically assume it's bad. Republicans rode that high through election day.

The emails got dumped the same day extremely damaging "grab em by the pussy" video evidence of Trump was release. The whole thing screams political hitjob.

It's like when Trump's lawyer magically got his political rival's son's laptop and paraded it around, even though nothing damaging was on it. Republicans are resorting to banana republic style hacking and theft against their political enemies, which should terrify everyone

Completely out of context? It is not Wikileaks job to provide context.

Is it their job to protect Trump? Because they happened to release the emails on the same day as the most damaging info about Trump came out during entire campaign.

If journalists that timed their articles for maximum effect or didn’t willingly impact both parties the same way are to be thrown at the lions, I think we’ll all end in a bad place.

A way to look at this is that we should have more Assange and Wikileaks, and get leaks of problematic facts from all over the boards. If you feel Wikileaks was biased, it means we need different shades of it, and to get there we first need at least one shade of it. And currently we’re not even there.

This is the same problem that Comey had after writing the letter to Congress on October 28th. Like it or not it would have looked a LOT worse if either of them had waited until after the election.

The RNC was also hacked by the same people as the DNC, yet we're supposed to believe the Democrats emails which ultimately proved to contain nothing of major importance were the ones that needed releasing? Come wasn't writing a press release, he has doing his job and keeping Congress informed and a Republican congressman then chose to misrepresent the content and meaning of Comey's letter for the political gain of his own party.

These two situations are only the same in that they both benefitted the Republican party by misrepresenting the facts in order to make the public think the Democrats were guilty of a major political scandal.

The difference is that Comey didn't know that Congressman would do what he did, where as there is convincing evidence that Assange knew about the RNC hack and emails, possibly even had access to them and said nothing. Comey got used, but Assange knowingly helped Russians spread disinformation.

If Republicans had done anything like the DNC's kneecapping of Bernie during the 2016 campaign, it would have come out by now, emails or not.

How exactly did the DNC "kneecap" Bernie's campaign?

The following list of links literally took one minute on DDG. However, you should know this already, since these reports about her anti-democratic shenanigans were the only reason that Clinton lost to Trump. [EDIT:] The whole premise of this thread is that there must have been RNC emails that would have harmed Trump's campaign as much as the DNC emails harmed Clinton's. One could simultaneously feel that the DNC emails shouldn't have harmed Clinton's campaign, but one can't simultaneously feel that the emails did and did not harm it.

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

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/23/487179496...

https://time.com/4422715/bernie-sanders-dnc-apology-leaked-e...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wikileaks-dnc-bernie-sanders_...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/25/debbie-wasse...

https://www.newsweek.com/clinton-robbed-sanders-dnc-brazile-...

Nothing in here supports the claim that the DNC kneecapped Bernie. All it shows is that Democrats heavily favored HRC, who also happened to receive many more votes than Bernie (who I voted for) in the primary.

This gives more insight into the nuance lacking from statements insinuating the only reason Bernie lost to HRC was because the DNC made it happen: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/11/0...

The biggest issue with wikileaks release is that the media failed to report on it properly.

I'm not going to peruse that list because I know how the Dems kneecapped Bernie: with super delegates. During Clinton's primary run against Obama the super delegates kept their mouths shut until the convention. Which is how it was intended to work when the super delegates were set up in the 70s. In 2016 however, the super delegates for Clinton were very vocal early on, giving Clinton an insurmountable lead right out of the gate. Several states voted for Bernie and he won the "regular" delegates but ended up losing the state because of the super delegates. When the DNC was sued for defrauding the Bernie supporters lawyers for the DNC argued in open court that they didn't have to run a fair primary because they're a private corporation. It's beyond me why anyone would have anything to do with the Democratic party at this point. They are corrupt and they don't care that you know it.

I had actually forgotten about that, but you're totally right that was an additional outrage. The media was even more to blame for that one. If they had reported results comprehensively, the super delegates would have been embarrassed into silence.

Remove the super delegates and look at the raw vote totals, HRC had millions more votes from individuals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2016_Democratic...

16,917,853 13,210,550

This is the big "conspiracy":

>'Wondering if there's a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Bernie never had his act together, that his campaign was a mess,' Paustenbach wrote. Miranda spurned the idea, although he agreed with Paustenbach's take: 'True, but the Chair has been advised not to engage. So we'll have to leave it alone.' "

lmao

You shouldn't argue for prosecution of a biased reporter then, but for a similar good reporter biased on your side, a 2nd wikileaks.

You mean like how they just happened to announce the vaccine the day after the election?

The election was on Tuesday November 3rd, and Pfizer announced their results on Monday November 9th. They were only notified of the results the previous day.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/health/covid-vaccine-pfiz...

> Dr. Jansen said she learned of the results from the outside panel of experts shortly after 1 p.m. on Sunday, and that the timing was not influenced by the election. “We have always said that science is driving how we conduct ourselves — no politics,” she said.

Edit: It would be nice if the people downvoting this could explain why you disagree.

The best thing to do would have been to hold onto this information (to not affect the sacred election), and release it when it lacked any relevance whatsoever.

... Or perhaps your perspective is partisan.

The idea that this was partisan because it hurt the Democratic party is bizarre.

Releasing information will hurt either side without discrimination. You can’t applaud it when it hurts republicans and boo it when it hurts democrats and still claim you support releasing the truth to the public.

Food for thought... Obama literally ran on a platform of transparency and whistleblower protection. What did he actually do in office? The exact opposite.

Did Assange lash out at the Democrats? Yes. Did he throw the first stone? Not even close.

The only opportunity to keep elected officials accountable from a normal citizen point of view is to vote them out; and very damning stories get memory holed from corporate news organizations all the time. Otherwise, as we have seen with multiple hearings and official inquiries, elected and non-elected government officials are immune from consequences.

Wikileaks did the right thing timing their release right before people are making their final decision when casting the ballot.

are you suggesting that corruption should have been ignored and such people should be in power?

Wikileaks did the right thing, else imagine what they would be doing now.

Also, who killed Epstein?

Assange has also stated that he had documents related to the Trump campaign that he wouldn't publish because they were no "more controversial... than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day"[1]. Meanwhile they posted thousands of totally mundane emails from Democrats that included things like office lunch orders and automatic out of office replies that were not controversial and served no public good. Wikileaks clearly had a different standard for publishing documents that hurt Democrats and documents that hurt Republicans.

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

We saw this same idea earlier as though it merits analysis. It doesn't. You being right or not has no bearing on the story at hand.

I'm not sure what you consider "the story at hand", but this conversation was kicked off with "One of the most unfortunate things in the past 6 years is that support of Julian Assange and Wikileaks became a partisan issue". The explanation for why support of Assange became partisan is because Assange's actions started having partisan bias. That is extremely relevant to the conversation at hand in my book.

This meme you keep trying to make happen is a logical fallacy called “begging the question.” petitio principii. It is not explanatory. Why don’t you just outright say, “I think they are partisan because I suspect there are things they could have published that they chose not to because of partisanship.” Instead you’re trying this dance about evidence that you cannot see and reasoning on others’ behalf that you cannot know.

>“I think they are partisan because I suspect there are things they could have published that they chose not to because of partisanship.”

I don't "suspect" their are things they could have published. I know there are things they could have published because Assange has said exactly that.

Either Wikileaks works for complete transparency or they don't. They either have editorial control over what they publish or they don't. Once they admit that some documents aren't worth putting on their site, they need to justify why the documents they do have on their site are worth being there. What documents about the Trump campaign could Assange be referring to which would be worth mentioning but would also be less worthy of publishing than these[1]? What reason can exist for that disparity besides bias?

[1] - https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/?q=&title=automatic+reply&c...

Documents about Trump were and are irrelevant because we have ironclad proof, in volume, that no amount of what would for others be damning information has any effect on Trump support.

The only way we have discovered to counter him is to get more of the people not committed to him to come to the polls, or to vote by mail.

Thus, we see efforts in numerous states to curb access to polls. Successful efforts.

1) Assange did not say that. You misinterpret what he said. 2) Your contrived absolutism about publishing everything is a strawman. Wikileaks never committed to publishing everything, couldn’t, not even a sensible or practical idea. 3) Literally any reason at all invalidates this claim. Not enough time. Someone asked not to. Boring. Hard to contextualize. Literally anything.

The Free Press is about the ability to publish, not a requirement to publish.

“We are free press activists. It’s not about saving the whales. It’s about giving people the information they need to support whaling or not support whaling. Why? That is the raw ingredients necessary to make adjustments to society and without that we’re just sailing in the dark.”

>1) Assange did not say that. You misinterpret what he said.

When we talked about this last week you said the quote meant "we have some information that is not worth publishing."[1] The documents I linked in the previous post are obviously on the site so they by definition are "worth publishing" according to Wikileaks. What documents can possibly have less value than emails saying something like "I'll get the Caesar salad for lunch"?

>2) Your contrived absolutism about publishing everything is a strawman. Wikileaks never committed to publishing everything, couldn’t, not even a sensible or practical idea.

Those absolutist statements were made to show that Wikileaks obviously isn't absolutist in their mission. It shows that they do make editorial decisions about what they post. Once that is accepted as fact, it is completely fair to compare these decisions to each other. That is what I am doing, comparing the decision to leak certain documents with no public value to the refusal to leak other documents which Assange has stated Wikileaks possesses. I am then judging their decision making process based off that comparison.

>3) Literally any reason at all invalidates this claim. Not enough time.

I am not sure what you mean by "not enough time"? Are you suggesting that they didn't have enough time to vet all the DNC docs leaked or that there wasn't enough time to leak the Trump docs?

If they didn't have enough time to vet the value of the individual DNC docs, how did they have the time to vet the authenticity of the individual DNC docs?

That Assange quote was from 2016. They had 4+ years to get those Trump docs vetted so no time constraint there.

>Someone asked not to.

Who is this "someone" that Wikileaks would defer to on this decision? What are this person's biases? Why isn't Wikileaks transparent about who is making these decisions for them?

>Boring.

Yes, those previously linked DNC autoreplies were very exciting.

>Hard to contextualize.

Throwing a bunch of emails into a search engine on the site isn't contextualizing them. The lack of context on the DNC leaks is how we got things like Pizzagate from these emails.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27654533

Reply on news.ycombinator.com