Hacker News Reader

Comment by mironathetin | Hacker News Reader

"Government ties, connections to the military industry and support for politicians? How is that a scandal?"

The archive is made public to enable us to find out exactly that.

Edit: so many angry reactions. I was answering to a post that seem to hold the point that it wouldn't be a scandal, if a multinational company buys influence from politics. With this I indeed disagree.

What your comments suggest is that I think it is ok to publish illegally hacked material. I don't and I did not write that.

On the other hand I have some trust in wikileaks that they don't publish the data just for everybody to sneak into private affairs. I expect it to contain proof of illegal action. That's now for journalists and investigators to find out.

But there is still the issue of illegally acquired data. Where I come from, this must not even be used in court and thus would be worthless.

View on HN

This kind of implies that all private company correspondence is "fair game" for us to find out if they're doing anything bad if you're clever enough to obtain it. e.g. via hacking, whistleblowing, crappy security policies, etc.

Yup exactly. I'm assuming GP is anti-NSA eavesdropping (he/she posts on HN) so it makes it even more eye-opening how quickly he/she turned to "if they have nothing to hide..." when the victim is someone else.

One force having all knowledge and controlling it, even using their advantage of information asymmetry to control it, I would say, is different enough from EVERYONE KNOWING THE TRUTH, that yes, perhaps we can have this discussion.

Yeah, I don't understand. If the government hacked a private corporation and published 50,000 internal documents online, there would be a shitstorm. But some group of rogue hackers does it and suddenly it might be ok? What's the difference?

The difference is that the duties of government are clearly spelled in law, and are financed by everyone. You don't get a choice on whether to obey to your government or not, and in a democracy this is balanced by giving everyone a chance to influence such government, so that it can represent everyone's views as closely as possible (well, that's the theory at least).

With a private entity, that's not the case. If you don't like Wikileaks, you're free not to support them, or even fight them in court if you want. Wikileaks works under the umbrella of journalism/free speech laws, if there is a public interest in the matter then they should be left free to continue doing it.

> if there is a public interest in the matter then they should be left free to continue doing it.

But there's not. Public interest is not the same as a public being interested.

>With a private entity, that's not the case.

Ah, so if the government had just contracted out the NSA's services and had them act as a private corporation rather than have the NSA be a government entity, then their actions would have been 100% a-ok.

No, because the money would still come from "everyone", and the government would still be "doing" something.

If the NSA was a completely privately-owned corporation without any ties to the government, yeah, the judgement would be different (likely still negative, since no private actor can legally compromise networks like they do).

> The difference is that the duties of government are clearly spelled in law, and are financed by everyone

So if the government passed a law saying it was ok for them to hack private entities and make their records public, it would be ok?

I think we've already had this conversation. It would be legal, yes; it wouldn't necessarily be "ok" from a moral/ethical/philosophical/whatever point of view, in the same way as cutting a thief's hand is legal in Saudi Arabia.

It doesn't matter anyway, bringing in the NSA on this is a red herring.

All your private correspondences is already fair game to those with the power to silence you, torture you, cage you for life, and worse. Yet there is so much outrage when the general public, which holds little power in comparison, gets a glimpse to the inner workings of the elite (such as mega corporate entities).

Who exactly are you and who exactly gave you authority to examine private correspondence?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com