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Comment by stevengg | Hacker News Reader

http://pando.com/2014/10/28/taibbi-takes-time-out-from-first...

Thanks for this.

I already had my suspicions about Firstlook Media, and this just reiterates them.

Secondly, I am not too impressed with the way Greenwald has been guarding the leaks and his organisation is the sole benefactor of their contents as he trickles them selectively to the public. The documents should be accessible to all. Having said that I am an admirer of his work, but would love to have seen the documents given to Wikileaks

Greenwald is not the only journalist with access to the documents: this has been explained and mentioned several times. Several news organizations had access to the cache including The Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post and others. The idea was that the professional journalists would be better at figuring out what was both news-worthy and ethical to release. There are already people claiming Snowden personally gave an autographed copy to Putin and then we have folks on the other side like you who are misinformed and . Obviously, taking people like you and the people acting like Snowden forwarded everything to the FSB/Chi-Coms into consideration, there is absolutely nothing anyone can do to release this material in a fashion that some uninformed person won't complain about.

Wikileaks have claimed that they have Russian diplomatic cables just as explosive as the "Pentagon Cables" but it's been years without any release which leads me to think that they either: a) don't have them and are lying b) have them and are not releasing them for some political reason which would be even worse. I wouldn't trust them at all to release any important information in a thoughtful manner.

I guess I phrased my comment incorrectly. I am aware that other organization have the documents, but my problems is questioning journalist/news organizations as the gate keepers to what the public should know/should not know.

>"The idea was that the professional journalists would be better at figuring out what was both news-worthy and ethical to release"

I completely disagree with this.

Can you provide some a source for the claims about wikileaks?

As the others have said, and they have also given to the Washington Post, too. But they seem to have stopped writing about it. Perhaps too focused on trying to support Comey in his war on encryption, these days.

One another thing - I wouldn't trust Pando with these sort of things. Look at another ridiculous thing they've written a few months ago, as if it wasn't already know that Tor was made by the government and part of the funding still comes from it (more than half), now:

http://pando.com/2014/07/16/tor-spooks/

But Tor is open source and can be verified. I believe almost all of Dan Berstein's protocols are also funded "by the government". Does that mean we shouldn't trust his curves and protocols anymore?

I think we should all have a healthy dose of skepticism regarding these issues, but when it makes sense to do so.

> Does that mean we shouldn't trust his curves and protocols anymore?

A tough question - what is the general consent on it?

Greenwald is not the sole possessor of the documents. The Guardian also has a copy. The reason the documents have not been given to Wikileaks is specifically because of a request Snowden made regarding the way the documents would be handled. He asked Greenwald and Poitras to be cautious about disclosures and to not just give away the whole cache to the entire world.

What kind of suspicions do you have?

That there will be some restrictions on 'editorial independence' and the fact that Matt Taibbi has left the organization kind of supports this.

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