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Comment by nikcub | Hacker News Reader

> governments will become incapable of keeping anything a secret.

That isn't the goal, not for privacy advocates nor for Wikileaks or Julian Assange, who said:

"The goal is justice, the method is transparency. It's important not to confuse the goal and the method."

Advocates of individual privacy rely on the government, as a service provider, to keep secrets in order to protect the rights of individuals.

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I find it amazing how often supposedly substantive discussions about Wikileaks and Julian Assange go on without any explicit mention or acknowledgment of what I've always considered his central thesis:

----

"The non linear effects of leaks on unjust systems of governance

[...]

The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive "secrecy tax") and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption."

http://web.archive.org/web/20071020051936id_/http://iq.org#T...

http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf

Yeah, I had always hoped this was the goal. It's not the leak that has the most effect, but the reaction to the leak.

That may have been Assange (and WikiLeaks) goal when it was founded. It's hard to claim that's currently their goal, given that their push for "transparency" is limited to the USA (and occasionally the UK) ever since their site switchover back 5-6 years ago.

Have you been to the Wikileaks site? There are plenty of documents/leaks on other countries. Why are you expecting to hear about them on US/UK media?

Yes I've been, and those leaks substantially date back to before the switchover I just described. In fact that was my point. They used to be about transparency and now they have a different political agenda.

Did WikiLeaks ever leak the documents describing Ecuadorian network surveillance equipment they were trying to buy? It was leaked to WikiLeaks first but they, for some strange and surely innocuous reason didn't publish it. It was eventually leaked by BuzzFeed instead.

How about the promised massive leaks regarding Russia? [1] Not only have those leaks never panned out, but Assange now has his own TV show on the RT channel run by the Russian state, which is a far cry from how Russia described him in 2010, as a "petty thief running around on the Internet." [2]

If transparency, and transparency alone were the goal, I wouldn't be able to ask about these. But transparency alone isn't the goal. Assange has his own political agenda to push, Wikileaks is his instrument to do it (especially after he pushed out DDB). It should then not be surprising that when Assange's political ends were altered, that the focus of Wikileaks shifted as well.

[1] http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2028283,00... [2] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/11/30/moscows-bid...

I've seen stuff about Canada that I'd say is completely about transparency. As for other material, the organization vets and authenticates documents and has always taken some time to do so. It doesn't surprise me that non-English language stuff is slower.

> It doesn't surprise me that non-English language stuff is slower.

You don't have to read the stories I linked. You might want to at least glance at the URL though. E.g. [2] was posted in 2010. Still waiting...

You're free to send them some North Korean secrets to publish.

No need, I'll just wait until they publish the Ecuadorian and Russian secrets that they're documented to be sitting on.

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