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Comment by keepamovin | Hacker News Reader

Congratulations! I share in the popular jubilation and sense of epoch-making reconciliation, that aligns with the stars, even tho I think Assange acted like an egotistical fool who squandered the great lens of transparency and accountability he had created through misjudged self-importance and vulnerability to manipulation by his sources for their own ends.

Hopefully his Second Act brings good fruits without the thorns and rot of the previous ages. Good luck to him!

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I hope he does something on X where he delivers dead drops given to him by whistleblowers on an episodal basis, and he grows big enough that he become _the_ place to go when you want to blow the whistle, whether it be rushed pharmaceuticals, govt morally dubious black ops, bad NGOs, front orgs, etc.

Is this a joke? If so I don’t get it. You’re describing Wikileaks.

With a personality and context, with guests to discuss. Wikileaks was dry and left up to other journalists to write stories.

Few journalists would do that today because most now toe the main line -or they think it’ll give the “other guy” cover. No one bucks the incumbents these days. See anyone criticizing any western government actions these days? It’s not like there isn’t any fodder.

This is an idiotic statement. The governments I'm most familiar with are criticised daily.

The most recent: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2024/jun...

'When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3.'

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

All of this is petty criticism, it makes headlines one day and it's gone the next. You're allowed to say anything as long as it doesn't threaten to effect real change, you're allowed to protest as long as you do it at a scheduled time and place without seriously inconveniencing anyone, and you're allowed to expose crimes as long as they don't pose a serious threat to the institutions or people in power. It gives us an illusion of freedom of speech for the 99.9% while the heavy hitters are taken care of through persecution, false prosecution, torture, and occasional murder.

That sure was the dream, wasn't it?

As soon as a whistleblower from one of Musk’s companies shows up you can guarantee he would get permabanned

Speech is free unless you are telling people where Elons jet is.

What's particularly silly about all that is it's actually Elons jet telling people where it is.

That's how aviation stays safe: the planes broadcast where they are, to anyone and everyone who tunes in to that public signal.

X covers one spectrum and CNN covers another spectrum.

Agreed. Musk’s free speech is an intuition based on perspective

No one is perfect. But overall his actions were brave and he paid a terrible price. The worst part is probably that what he published ended up making no real difference.

It is difficult to see the difference but very few people are privy to the planning of the programs revealed. Only those who oversaw the entirety of the programs can really grasp the scope due to the compartmented nature of the programs. I think these disclosures helped arrest a rapid decay into a dystopian surveillance state. However the motivations and irrational belief systems behind these programs persist so the fight is not over. Instead the proponents of unchecked surveillance powers are increasingly on the defensive and face more scrutiny than their arguments and results can justify leading to a continued reigning in of their powers that seems likely to continue for the foreseeable future. I’m not satisfied with this state of affairs but I am unsure how to reach a better one with the power systems and officials at hand. If you have any ideas please share.

I don't think there's any way to "fight the system" or w/e without becoming the system, or a part of it, as the system will consume whatever is useful and generates more power for itself. It co-ops everything. It's a useful lesson from the book Gravity's Rainbow. The only thing you can do is to fly under the radar and not participate, or participate as little as possible, and build your communities and relationships outside of it.

While your point is not without merit, some people can work within a system while resenting its existence, covertly rebelling, and fighting for change. I’ve known many to do just that - but they also tend to be intelligent enough to that broadcasting their subversive intentions would be harmful to their livelihood so they don’t. People like this aided in destroying the Nazis.

> The only thing you can do is

I’ll stop you there - reductionist arguments can be dismissed with the same casualness they’re made with.

>to fly under the radar and not participate, or participate as little as possible

So you’ve invented communes and the barter system. Tax time must be interesting.

>build your communities and relationships outside of it.

Pardon? Do you have a spaceship or space station? Wholly independent ship-city in international waters? If not you’re apart the system wholly and completely.

Agree: engagement over activism for maximum effectiveness, thanks GM.

Doubt Assange arrested anything. The forces in league with survey are beyond government

Agree. But that’s the issue with modern discourse: no sense of values. We cannot discuss nuance without feeling desperate to reduce everything to safe binary moral surety

Couldn't have said it any better. People have polarized him and his actions but it is a marbled tapestry of right and wrong - good and bad.

Yes, we should whip him for not having a level head when the entire US government is against him. Someone like you and I would have been sure to keep humble and not be egotistical when seeking asylum and fair justice against an entity that has military bases all over the world

Well you don't know what I would do (except for what I'm saying here where you can see I wouldn't do what he did! haha), but I understand if you're speaking for yourself.

I think precisely in that situation is when you need that kind of ability. But I wouldn't say we should whip him! Again speaking for yourself I suppose hahahahahaha! :)

I don't know there's a teapot on Mars either. But it's an easy guess.

The silence and arrogance of the HN COMMENTARIAT makes this point unwinnable for you.

You miss a key emotional boundary: to cannot know. You dismiss just undermines by revealing lack of empathy

I think the person you're replying to is referring to the accusations against WikiLeaks of just dumping raw documents without at least removing information that could lead to identifying (and thus endangering) people who e.g. assisted the US in Afghanistan or who provided documents to WL in the first place.

Yes, there was a point in getting the information out as fast as possible, but I think it's fair to blame Assange for not putting in the redaction work.

If they removed that, the machinery of the US would come up with another angle to say what he did was very bad. This should be obvious.

If I recall correctly, the endangering information was not originally published by Wikileaks, but by other journalists (the decryption key was written in a book or something, my memory is fuzzy on this); and Wikileaks only published the whole thing once the cat was already out of the bag.

To sum this up, they were putting the redaction work, but someone else failed to, and at that point it was too late.

The material was shared with The Guardian and several other (including prominent US) media outlets, they are the ones that published it unredacted. Never was there any proof provided that those articles caused any harm to any personnel at any point in time.

Those media outlets that are in fact guilty of what Assange/Wikileaks was accused of jumped at the first opportunity to throw Assange under the bus.

Something tangential that I don't think has happened, but that I'd be curious to see the results of: an analysis of the number of people endangered by Wikileaks disclosures versus the number of people endangered by Americans abandoning interpreters and collaborators, or other action expressly consistent with US policy.

With how mad we are about him fcking over our people, surely we haven't fcked them over ourselves at a higher rate.

People are so sure he made the wrong choice when he fled to the Ecuadorian embassy, but I wonder how they can be so sure. At the time, his biggest worry was to get assassinated or get snatched off the street and end up in a secret CIA torture prison. Neither of these fears were unjustified. Add to this the belief that US maximum security prisons are blatant violations of basic human rights and the belief that the UK and Sweden are close allies of the US, and his actions made perfect sense. His notoriety and his choices saved him from either of these fates, albeit at a high price.

Did he make the right choices? Who knows. There is always a lot of counterfactual reasoning involved.

The worst choice he made in this period was to be a terrible guest and eventually be evicted. However he had going through psychological problems and honestly I'm not sure if he wouldn't be evicted regardless (the new president was aligned with the US and wanted him gone)

I’m not sure if I care at all that he was capitalizing on it.

Frankly, I wouldn’t care if this info was dropped by the Kardashians on a very special episode. It was crucial public information and it needed to get out one way or another. If vanity is an incentivizing factor toward someone taking that risk, so be it.

What is it about someone being incentivized to be a whistleblower, in your mind, changes the validation of the act?

That’s not it, but valid point in your domain. It’s what happened to him after fame

53 points and counting

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