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Comment by ptoo | Hacker News Reader

Exactly.

>Share everything to the world, and let everyone make their own judgement based on what they see?

What's the alternative to this? They don't share all the information with the world and we're expected to believe their evaluation of the evidence?

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We have to believe their evaluation no matter what, they're only releasing what they decide to release and can redact along the way.

Only certain redactions are allowed under this law, so it’s not so cut and dry. There is an enforcement mechanism, tbd if it actually gets used.

The public in this case is effectively a defense attorney waiting for discovery - we only get what the other side determined to be worth providing and catching them breaking the law is extremely difficult.

Very true - the one caveat being that certain people know of the existence of things that should be published - lots of way to trip yourself up and get caught if you’re trying to conceal things or otherwise improperly redact information.

I certainly don't believe their evaluation.

The law specifies which redactions are legal. The enforcement mechanism, IIRC, comes through obstruction.

There's the police and the criminal justice system for that.

I suggest you post your e-mail login details and here and a dump of the contents of your phone, then all of HN can all check through and see what crimes you're guilty of.

I'm sure you'll say you haven't committed any crimes, but why should we be expected to believe you if you don't share all your information with the world?

> There's the police and the criminal justice system for that.

Well yes, however there was an orchestrated effort to convince people that the system is not working. That effort was successful enough to generate public interest we observe now. Beyond morbid curiosity, there is a belief that the exposure may force the system to do now what it was supposed to do in the first place

This is all supposedly Epstein's property. Dead people have a very short list of rights or things that resemble rights that belong to their estate. Privacy and protection from slander aren't among those rights. You could argue that digging him up and gratuitously posting pictures of a postmortem would violate the right to dignity for corporeal remains. But apart from that, if you emailed Jeffrey, he has no power to keep that correspondence private.

When you sue someone, you can subpoena for evidence. Any evidence from that presented to the court is then public record. The police and criminal justice system doesn’t usually enforce privacy like that in criminal proceedings.

Are you trying to say that these documents shouldn’t be public because it violates someone’s right to privacy?

But there's no reasonable indication that the person you're replying to has committed any crime, while there is evidence that some of the people on Epstein's list, including Trump, have committed crimes. In fact, Trump made a big deal of asserting this, back when he didn't expect this to blow back on him.

It's not the same to ask for public disclosure for people likely to be involved in a crime, for which there is at least some initial (albeit inconclusive) evidence than it is to ask the same of a random person for which there is no evidence at all.

I would agree that anyone who is specifically named in an Act of Congress requiring that to happen, which Act is then duly signed into law[1], should release their information. That doesn't currently apply to anyone other than the late Jeffrey Epstein, so we are all good.

1 - https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4405

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