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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

I suspect when a trove of documents is big enough, newspaper readers lose interest before you run out of documents. I mean, even on this tech forum hardly anyone knows who Cavium are, let alone your average Washington Post reader.

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Maybe the moral of the story is that future snowdens should leak to selected law firms instead of selected journalists? If there's one organization designed to comb through large documents for details and understand the impacts to potential parties, it is law organizations. Put 2-3 in time competition to make cases out of the documents and it will be a scramble race for justice.

Law firms aren't terribly entrepreneurial. Absent somebody paying them their hourly rate, I suspect not a single document would be read. Newspapers regularly take risks deploying humans to investigate issues without any assurance there will be a story at the bottom, but even the newspaper business has less appetite for that these days (as an aside, I suspect it's that margin that the financial investors have exploited -- at the expense of high quality reporting).

>Law firms aren't terribly entrepreneurial.

Personal injury guys are the most entrepreneurial people I know...

And they make money by going after low-hanging fruit. Ever wonder why they advertise 90%+ success rates and work on contingency? Because if your case isn't easy, you aren't their customer.

If you are injured in a car accident and the insurance company is trying to screw you over, they seem like an important advocate

That's why other lawyers call them ambulance chasers. Their ethics are notoriously questionable.

More importantly, there's money out the other end for them. The payoff is more questionable for information from Snowden leaks. Yes, I guess a journalistic outlet can get a big scoop and that drives eyeballs which leads to advertisers... But that's pretty different from the ambulance-chaser payout.

We're such a weird society when it comes to enforcing laws on business. It's all "scummy" behavior.

For examples: Accessibility laws, consumer protection laws, and privacy laws.

It's a trivial matter to determine which websites don't comply with the easy targets of accessibility. Yet the concept of running such a scanner, automatically, and charging for corrections, is seen as predatory behavior.

There was an article about grocery pricing with obvious collusion, dark practices, and misinformation yet nothing is done. Business as usual, people need to understand it and work around it. Problem is, it's clearly outside the realm of the average intellectual ability.

Predatory behavior is everywhere. I don't feel compelled to list even a single example.

If the lawyer chasing the ambulance results in a law being followed instead of ignored, that is a positive thing.

…and patent trolls…

Just Sayin’…

You'd be surprised. Top journalism organizations do this kind of thing with tremendous efficiency. The Pandora Papers were impressive for exactly that reason.

I can't imagine there's any money in it for them

All the big leaks should be done this way

The Ashley Madison leaks should have been one name a week and making it a big spectacle till this very day!

Same for the Snowden leaks

you can also get bigger bidders for the data by drumming up interest and suspense

hackers really suck at marketing, so far.

Then your risk identifying yourself in the Ashley Madison leak. You run the risk of not getting your message out in the Snowden case. The biggest threat is future publishing which is why so many countries broke laws made up charges going after Wikileaks.

A wikileak revival scares the most powerful

It would also be allot of fun

> newspaper readers lose interest before you run out of documents

So.. what's your case here? It would be so expensive to host and publish the documents that they would be unable to recoup their investment based upon lack of interest?

> hardly anyone knows who Cavium are, let alone your average Washington Post reader.

Oh.. I don't know.. maybe that's because no one has reported on it and explained why it would be important?

There's a lot of circular reasoning present to create excuses for an entity that really doesn't need or deserve it.

sounds like something LLMs can help with, sift through huge amounts of documents to summarize and highlight the interesting ones

If only. The biggest problems right now are limited context size and basic security, including having to share such documents with God-knows-how-many third parties.

Tangent, but we use Azure instead of OpenAI due to data-retention concerns. To ensure nobody's inputting anything classified or proprietary, Legal demanded implementation of an "AI safety" tool...so we demoed one that ships all prompts to a third party's regex-retraction API.

So you never know who ends up the recipient of your LLM prompt, where it's getting logged to, who's reviewing those logs, etc. Even some local models require execution of arbitrary code, and Gradio ships telemetry data. Uploading Snowden's docs into a black box is a good way to catch a ride in a black van.

Nowadays even consumer-level hardware can run some decent local LLMs, completely offline.

You might want to browse /r/LocalLLaMA/ if "security" is an issue for you.

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