Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I was such a massive and uncritical supporter of Julian Assange for his breathtakingly ballsy attempt to free information... right up until the moment he threw his chips in with the FSB, the ultimate disinformation crew who believe all information is only a set of lies waiting to be discovered and people waiting to be manipulated. Since then, fuck that dude. He didn't live up to the promise. Whether out of cowardice or greed, he betrayed his own beliefs under pressure, and it has unfortunately tainted everything he ever touched. The world of distributed whistleblowing could have been better with any avatar besides him, but then again almost anyone in that position would have been assassinated in character. My main beef with him is that he pawned himself to Putin when the 2016 election was on the line, and it's entirely unclear why he did that.

At least I understand why Snowden eats and spews Russian crap all day. Poor guy got stuck in the wrong airport. Assange is much more insidious.

I am sorry for my (honest) ignorance, but: What did Assange (or WikiLeaks) leak that was not the (verified?) truth?

I understand that some people are upset for it being "one-sided" but it's an absolute honest question:

Did they ever leak something that turned out to be a lie?

Or (and please don't take this as an attack, it's not meant to be one) was it just that the leak hit "the wrong guys" so to speak?

> Did they ever leak something that turned out to be a lie?

Steve Jobs died of Aids not cancer "leak" looks a pretty dubious revelation.

When you are a "journalist" dumping every document that a high school kid could photoshop in seconds that comes your way there is bound to be a bunch of lies, defamation and disinformation

The main three things Assange/Wikileaks did that lost my assumption of good faith:

* Innuendo regarding Seth Rich (Assange clearly had no information on this subject and should have been honest about it); * Falsely presenting a leaked cable about Robert Mueller bringing a sample of uranium to Russia as part of an investigation as related to the supposed Uranium One scandal; * Privately corresponding with Donald Trump, Jr. to support the campaign and ask for favors.

No. Not that it hit the wrong guys. He (Assange) was fed a ton of arbitrary/meaningless email which had no major significance, stolen from Hillary Clinton a few days before an election - literally fed to his organization by Russian intelligence - and chose to publish it as if it would incriminate her, to create the appearance of leaking something important and so stain her and help the Russians tilt the election toward their ally Trump.

There was no purpose of free information served by that act of burning Assange and WikiLeaks years of trust. It was the most useless waste of public goodwill in the history of whistleblowing and only came about because he was pressured into it. It was a pure one time self-immolation of every good he'd ever accomplished in the service of Putin.

The very fact that the mails were kept on a private server in a basement installed, breaking compliance, is very valuable information to me regarding the ability of HC to be a good US president.

In the same way as Ursula von der Leyen wiped her Blackberry, which the result that legal evidence was destroyed that had been requested, to give a second example.

Or Sarah Palin, who used her Yahoo! email account for (some) business, to give a third example.

Even if most emails in all of these cases are harmless, the fact that people work around transparency rules itself is telling.

Neither of the major email leaks in 2016 were from the Clinton private server. One was from the DNC and the other was from John Podesta's gmail account. There were also (legal, redacted) releases of emails from Secretary Clinton's time in office that were obtained via FOIA. The fact that these completely distinct categories of "emails" are still regularly conflated and mistakenly identified as being from "the server" on a technical forum 6 years later should be more evidence than anyone requires that the propaganda campaign was wildly successful.

This entire premise is false, the hacked emails didn't come from her personal server at all. As of November 23, 2022 there's no evidence that her personal email machine was ever compromised.

1) those emails didn't come from hilary's server, and the fact that you don't know the difference is telling.

2) The unfortunate truth is that while it is against the rules for high level politicians to have their own separate email server without extra stuff around security, it is unfortunately the norm. Hell, Trumps entire admin/family ran private email servers, as did plenty of people in Obamas admin, as does most of congress, let alone the other stuff like not using the secured government phone and using their personal phone for convenience sake.

Old fart politicians are almost never a security analyst and spy, so they tend to not understand what security means.

add 2) Well, from an outsider perspective (not a US-citizen):

If A commits a crime (or does something forbidden, not sure if it's a crime in the US) and B does the same, B cannot say that "Well, I did it, but so did A!"... well, they can, but in general the expectation would be that both get punished if there is evidence for both "crimes"

Saying "but everybody does it" should either lead to a change in the law or an execution of said law, meaning persecution.

If we should "lock her up" for having an unsecured email server, than shouldn't Trump have turned himself in?

The point is not that Hilary is innocent (of, like, anything), but that nobody in the republican party gave a rats ass about election integrity or actual rule of law. Every single day of Trump's presidency was evidence of not giving a flying shit about the email server, they were just throwing shit at the wall and hoping it stuck.

>expectation would be that both get punished if there is evidence for both "crimes" I freaking wish. Instead I get to watch the pot call the kettle black, and my brother, father, friends, and other relatives enthusiastically nod their heads.

Hell, the exact same guy that said "lock her up" about an insecure email server put one in his basement, right next to the giant pile of classified documents that he assured the DOJ several times he didn't have.

I want them both in front of a judge.

Also this isn't a "both sides are the same" argument because they fucking are not at all. If all politicians were murderers, but some also wanted to put my friend in jail for being gay, I'm not voting for those ones.

I wholeheartedly agree with both of your paragraphs, but that is a morale vs law question and I think morale is very subjective (sadly)

But if those mails were arbitrary and meaningless why would the media ("mainstream media" without any kind of conspiracy vibe) make such a big deal out of it?

Because of the timeframe?

Other than that I feel a democracy includes duties by the voters.

If, for whatever reason, they can't decide what to make of some information, it's a systematic problem.

This is the same media that pilloried Obama for wearing a tan suit, and ran a day long expose on Trump wanting an extra scoop of ice cream. Making a big deal out of meaningless stuff in politics is sort of their bread and butter.

So then this is the actual problem, yet Wikileaks was criticized for telling (part of) the truth?

The US media absolutely is A problem, but telling partial truths doesn't actually count as telling the truth. Assange openly stated he judged leaks on "impact" and obviously timed things near the end of his tenure in order to stir more shit. I don't consider that airing dirty laundry, I consider that attempting to influence things.

There is a difference between "look at this bad thing a person did, and consider it over a course of time so you can make reasoned decisions about it" and "THE ELECTION IS TOMORROW HERE'S STUFF THAT YOU CAN'T EVEN BE SURE IS TRUE NO TIME TO THINK JUST ACT ON IMPULSE".

Meaningless? We learned that Hillary Clinton's team was responsible for promoting Donald Trump as the republican nominee. Their "pied piper" candidate.

It began as mostly anti-Bush Jr. admin leaks because that's who was in charge. But once the leaks became ubiquitous over time, yeah the leaks began hitting "the wrong guys", eh "gal".

So you were a massive supporter of Julian Assange, but at the same time you believe the US Government's story about him to be 100% truth? There's not much overlap between people who support Julian Assange and people who trust the government.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com