Comment by mithaler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mithaler | Hacker News Reader

Wikileaks should not be editorializing.

Feeding us a party line about a "mass surveillance industry" and "Orwell's World" and "Selling Surveillance to Dictators" is not going to bring people to their cause. All it does is make them look like someone with an agenda to push, and I'm not in the habit of going to people with an obvious agenda for a primary source about someone they don't like.

What I want is the old Wikileaks back. Anyone else remember the days when they were actually a wiki? Whistleblowers would approach them with documents from all manner of sources from governments to corporations to religious institutions, they would be subjected to source verification, and then they would be published and indexed for the world to see with minimum fanfare. Back then, I at least got the sense that they were devoted to aiding whistleblowers, not some silly and ineffectual crusade against the US government, no matter how right that cause may be. Can anyone really say that that's gotten us anywhere useful?

Let us see the documents and judge for ourselves what they mean.

So sad to see this as the top comment. This has been dealth with at length - it's just not the way the modern (media) world works anymore.

Honestly, no one would even care if there were the greatest intel of all time, the most incriminating information, published on a free-for-all wiki without any editorializing. This is the model Wikileaks had at the beginning - and no one cared and things didn't change.

Many reasons, just the most important one: No media organization is going to cover your whistleblowing (and researching and verifying and spending hundreds of manhours before publishing it) if they cannot be sure they have an exclusive. If there is a slight chance they'll get beat to it, they won't touch it (with serious effort).

So: Either you editorialize and embargo stuff and work together with media organizations. Or you don't - and no whistleblower will ever give you stuff anymore, because it's just not going to change anything.

Actually, IMHO, Wikileaks has an obligation to whisteblowers to get the most bang for the buck and that's just not going to happen in the old ways.

There's a reason no one in the real world knows what cryptome even is.

So if that is the way the world works, what of note have they accomplished, aside from drawing the ire of the US government and getting a leader martyred, their finances blockaded, and a barrage of at-best ambivalent media attention?

The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. Change doesn't happen because a few activists angrily demand it; it happens because of huge cultural shifts in the minds of millions.

This is the model Wikileaks had at the beginning - and no one cared and things didn't change.

That just isn't true. Read through this list, up to 2010.[0] WL can get things done more subtly. It may not attract huge mainstream headlines that way, but that's fine. It should be amassing influence over years or decades, because that's the way real successful institutions start out. Not everyone is on Internet time--certainly not governments.

So: Either you editorialize and embargo stuff and work together with media organizations. Or you don't - and no whistleblower will ever give you stuff anymore, because it's just not going to change anything.

I believe there's a happy medium here, but if WL is your model of media cooperation, you may want to look elsewhere, since WL has not exactly been a good citizen from their perspectives.[1]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_published_by_WikiLe...

[1] http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2011/12/wikileaks-stil...

So if that is the way the world works, what of note have they accomplished, aside from drawing the ire of the US government and getting a leader martyred, their finances blockaded, and a barrage of at-best ambivalent media attention?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_public_opinion_on...

Mar. 19-21, 2010 - 48% favor, 49% oppose, 3% unsure

April 2010: "Collateral Murder" released, showing footage of a U.S. helicopter killing unarmed civilians. Youtube sensation. Lots of media coverage.

May 21–23, 2010 - 42% favor, 56% oppose, 2% unsure

(June 2010: Obama announces a faster withdrawal schedule from Afghanistan than previously planned.)

July 2010: "Afghan War Diary" released, containing evidence of widespread ineptitude and corruption. Lots of media coverage.

Aug. 6-10, 2010 - 37% favor, 62% oppose, 1% unsure

I'm not saying that Wikileaks is responsible for that whole swing, but it sure as hell is responsible for some of it. How many dollars saved will that translate to? How many lives saved? We can quibble about whether the answer is "a lot" or just "a few" but it's more than it would have been if these leaks were not discussed in many major newspapers and on every cable news station.

They have accomplished getting widespread coverage of the findings. If they hadn't played the game, they would have reached less than 1% of their current audience. The facts wouldn't even have reached the internet-savvy, interested-in-the-world here, because they would only have noted an interesting organisation, but not payed attention to all their subsequent publishings.

One of the contributing factors behind the US withdrawal from Iraq are some of the disclosures from Wikileaks. See http://www.salon.com/2011/10/23/wikileaks_cables_and_the_ira...

OT, but Salon. Man. Putting "/singleton" on the end of the URL for a 1-page is truly the most widely-distributed codesmell I have ever seen.

> Honestly, no one would even care if there were the greatest intel of all time, the most incriminating information, published on a free-for-all wiki without any editorializing.

Here is a concrete example of exactly that : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking which more or less means "The money we private banks lend you at interest, is in fact created out of thin air." Note that most central banks are not allowed to do the same, so states must pay interest to the private banks as well (even though states are thought to print that bloody money). If I recall correctly, there is more debt than money, which may explain (I'm not sure) our desperate need for Economic Growth™.

I'm oversimplifying, of course, but if the people actually knew that stuff, they wouldn't have permitted it. But laying out the schematics of the System publicly is not enough.

A while ago people were accusing them of not being journalists, and therefore shouldn´t be protected under whatever law journalists are protected.

Now they´re being more about journalism, but that doesn´t imply that the facts and the cables with the actual information don´t get through.

I´m ok with them editorializing and providing a point of view on the material released. It´s still 100x better than public newspapers, where you get the editorializing, without the material.

Yes, I'll take editorializing with some interesting source material over the straw-man sensationalism that passes for journalism in many news sources.

While you are right, wikileaks shouldn't be 'editorializing' and if in fact much of this information is old, it's still vital that we hear this again and again, because the changes to our informational autonomy appear to manifesting at an accelerating rate.

That said, the Montag Press Transmedia Collective just put a call out for submissions based upon "Orwell's World", if any authors are interested in partnering for publishing.

See: http://montagpress.com/call/

Maybe since there are now strategies being used by the powerful to minimize WL's effect that it makes sense for them to change their strategy as well.

C'mon, it doesn't matter if there is fanfare or not. The material is there to read, you can ignore the foreword if you wish. Let's concentrate on what matters and not some details which might or might not be good idea but doesn't matter in grand scheme of things.

While I sort of agree with your point, back in the old days, Wikileaks lost the PR war against itself. WL has learned (the hard way) that in order to get the message out it has to set the message using deliberate PR strategy. Otherwise someone else will just do so.

The realization (for the cynic) is that everything (even leaked whistleblower info) involves some degree of deliberate spin. I don't think it's fair to say that WL is anti-USG btw.

in order to get the message out it has to set the message using deliberate PR strategy

As soon as you start talking about "the message" instead of "the truth", you've lost me. That's the domain of proselytizers, advertisers, propagandists, and attention thieves. The world is thick with them as it is, more noise than signal.

There is no truth, only messages. I mean, sure, there are facts about the physical world, but as soon as you bring in people, there are only perceptions.

I'd argue that the credibility of any institution comes not from its refusal to shape its message but from the openness and verifiability of any claims that are made and/or focused on. WL is part of a new kind of journalistic movement, it's not an anthropological organization.

The credibility of WL depends on it's willingness to be transparent about its processes and to let anyone who reads the fine print determine that the PR headline was fundamentally accurate. The need to even write headlines presupposes that 5-7 words can offer the gist of what the full document states. It's absurd to think that an unbiased headline could possibly exist, it's just a question of what the headline writer thinks is important.

Incidentally, this is the same credibility metric that I'd apply to governments, which WL is helping to usher in by offering a way to measure government claims with a BS-o-meter to reveal what was propaganda and artifice intended to make people draw specific conclusions.

It's up to the reader to figure out the truth, but the pretense of 100% neutrality is overrated. Think about it, lots of people believe that major newspapers are neutral. The key is that WL provides the raw data so that over time it can earn credibility. This is something that even the most respected newspapers refuse to do.

Even though I'm generally a supporter of WL, I'm the first to admit that its PR approach began as naive and has progressed to what I'd call "emotional". But WL is also very much a startup and will gain experience that lets it earn deeper credibility over time (or not).

It's bad when a monopoly editorializes. Wikileaks clearly doesn't have the editorial neutrality and respectability of Wikipedia. So you can hope that Wikileaks changes, or hope that other organizations start liberating secret documents.

Wikileaks' execution is less than awesome. You, humble reader, might be able to do better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com