Um, I Think It's Time for a Thread on WikiLeaks

The Wikileaks response is here fwiw:

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sp2gj0

this strikes me as indefensible, and draws a sharp line between assange and e.g. snowden

And public spats with would-be allies are not uncommon.

One involves Mr. Assange’s insistence that document troves should be published in their entirety, not curated by journalists who might have agendas.

In his interview with The Times on Wednesday, Mr. Assange criticized the Panama Papers consortium for not making all the documents in its possession public, calling it censorship. “It is not the WikiLeaks model,” he said. “In fact, it is the anti-WikiLeaks model.”

WikiLeaks did collaborate with journalists on the war logs and diplomatic cables. But Mr. Assange’s decision to abandon that approach in the name of total transparency is what led Mr. Snowden to work with Mr. Greenwald and another journalist on the N.S.A. revelations. Mr. Snowden felt openness should be balanced with concern for people’s privacy and safety.

After the release of the Democratic Party documents this summer, Mr. Snowden criticized WikiLeaks on Twitter for not redacting the Social Security numbers and credit card information of private individuals named in the trove.

lol the moment am posted that link i thought how long until SV posted the apologetic

I am critical of Wikileaks - including in this thread - but thought it was worth noting their response given that they challenge a lot of the assertions on factual grounds.

x-post

interesting response. he's right about some of the article's insinuations, but he also seems to have misread the article on some counts. for example the article doesn't say assange "has not produced critical material on the Assad government."

i do agree w/ assange that some of the more dubious reporting in the article involves questions of "timing." there are def. some times when the time of assange's tweets about subjects seems oddly coordinated with the priorities of the russian gov't, but there are times in the NYT article where assange's comments /months/ after some russia-related event are taken as evidence that he's sympathetic to russia. that kind of thing seems like a stretch at best and doesn't help the article's argument, such as it is.

though i don't think assange should be lecturing anyone on what "journalism" is, since he doesn't do it. he refuses to do it on principle.

Lol, the response seriously begins like this The New York Times Editorial Board has endorsed Hillary Clinton, however this is not disclosed in the article. The lead author, Jo Becker last retweeted Hillary Clinton (a smiling and dancing animated Hillary Clinton), on March 3.

Well, that surely proved them wrong, Assange!

yeah that was dumb. but he does make a few criticisms of the article that seem valid to me.

I'll get to them! Once I stop laughing.

But seriously, his response seems to be something like 'the idea that just because the dnc docs were hacked by the russian government, that I would have gotten them from the russian government, is totally circumstantial speculation, and also the journalist tweeted about Hillary proving this is all a conspiracy!'

why don't you actually read them before writing that "his response seems to be something like..."?

his responses are mostly him asserting that he /has/ been critical of things the NYT article implies he hasn't been critical of.

sorry i don't really have a "side" in this argument but it seems like Frederik's last post is textbook jumping to conclusions based on preconceived opinions rather than actually giving something a fair shake. i'm not singling Frederik out -- we all do this. but sometimes the way that people fall immediately into familiar (opposed?) camps in these threads is a little dispiriting.

Ok, 'the first two lines of his response seems to be...'

:)

But quite honestly, at this point, Assange and wikileaks has become so rotten, that I don't feel particularly bad for not giving them 'a fair shake' or something like that.

I'll jump to conclusions on Trump as well, for instance, and won't feel particularly bad about it.

i feel like there's got to be a good sitcom about assange at the ecuadorian embassy.

in principle i don't like wikileaks' carelessness wrt to publishing of sensitive personal information, but...has there ever been any actual reporting on people who have been materially harmed by this? it seems like there's a lot of handwringing and speculation and then...nothing

Yeah, some of the DNC donors were then immediately attacked by identity thieves. Nobody knows what their spreading of personal information has done in Turkey or Saudi Arabia, but from interviews some of the targets sound pretty terrified.

i feel like even if there wasn't a specific report on people being harmed, it's a good principle not to expose non-public-figures to harassment or worse if you can help it

otm. Spreading personal information on almost every Turkish woman for no good reason, in a country where domestic violence and honor killings is still a big problem, is evil on it's face. We don't need to actually count how many murderers got the victims information from their twitter account.

absolutely, the standard has to be strict liability.

how do you enforce those standards and preserve anonymity?

Read the response. I won't say that it challenges the story on 'factual grounds', it just repeatedly says 'It is false'. Some of the 'false' things aren't in the article to begin with, others are refuted by either bad evidence (as in the idea that because wikileaks has leaked 650.000 documents on Russia, it's been critical of Russia. Leaking American diplomatic cables criticizing Russia is not being anti-Russia) or no evidence at all (such as just saying that it's false that Assange considered going to Russia). A couple of the most serious cases, such as the attack on the Panama Papers and the apparent critical leak of Russian documents that was promised but then shelved, isn't mentioned at all.

Really, wikileaks response is weak on the evidence, and is undermined by trying to paint it as a conspiracy. And another thing, the evidence of mischief is that nyt has endorsed Hillary against Trump! So now you can't be anti-Trump if you want to be 'pure'?

Wikileaks also released Russian diplomatic cables. The report doesn't mention why the leaked materials Assange promised about domestic corruption didn't get published extensively - Wikileaks is thought to have sold them to Novaya Gazeta (the same Novaya Gazeta that released some of the Panama papers, is described in glowing terms as "one of the last independent newspapers in Russia", etc, in the article). There's a big question mark over why those materials were never published in their entirety but the question is largely with Novaya Gazeta and not with Wikileaks. NG doesn't dispute having access to the archive.

Assange has become more desperate since 2011 and more reliant on favours and positive exposure so it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that he has an arrangement to publish state-hacked materials but he does remain fairly critical of Russia and has frequently campaigned on the same bill as Pussy Riot, etc.

Lol, so you're saying wikileaks will publish personal information that might lead to murder in a heartbeat, but if they've 'sold' the information, they throw up their hands and say 'nothing we can do'. Come on.

Ultimately, yes. It doesn't reflect well on Assange or Wikileaks and is clearly not intended as a defence of either. Assange appears to regard information in the Wikileaks archive as his personal property to dispose of as he wishes. He is thought to have sold the Russia archives to Alexander Lebedev. It's one of the relatively few cases where there was a willing, slightly unscrupulous and deep-pocketed buyer for his data. I assume that Assange could still release the information but won't because it would compromise his chances of selling similar data in the future. Selling the info to an opposition newspaper doesn't particularly fit the narrative WP is going for though.

Also, been going through the wikileaks section called 'leaks', and no, there is nothing from Russia. Which cables are you talking about?

May be my mistake - i was under the impression that they had released Russian diplomatic communication with the US but that may not be accurate.

i should note that it's one thing for assange to say that he's publicly criticized russia -- as indeed he has. but it's also true that he hasn't been nearly as aggressive in soliciting leaked materials that might damage russia. you can choose to buy his justification that russia just isn't as important (or as damaging) globally as the USA, or not.

it's a familiar response from leftists when they are criticized for focusing their outrage on the US and Europe and not speaking out against the human-rights disasters of other countries. certainly you can't expect someone to express an equal amount of outrage at everything--that strikes me as close to the kind of performative outrage-policing people do on social media, and equally unhelpful. i guess the question is whether there's a /pattern/ to assange's actions that suggests that his choices of what and when to leak, and how to spin it, are echoing putin talking points in ways that are more than coincidental.

I guess they could definitely have released diplomatic communications between Russia and US, but it would be in one of the leaks of US information, I think.

My big issue with Assange's justification of his priorities is that they're just based on his own assumptions. The whole point of leaking organizations was to set information free, but now he act as just another gatekeeper, and this new gatekeeper is also an egomaniacal rapist. That's not progress in my book.

What I am not clear on is the extent to which Wikileaks really does act as a gatekeeper or even solicits hacks. In its current form it looks more like a branded clearing house for stuff other people have leaked. Does Assange set priorities or direct a dedicated hacking team?

Most of the stuff they leak is either against people with a specific set of local actors who don't like them (the AKP stuff, the Saudi leaks, the anti-Assad leaks) or the one universal target every disgruntled individual in the world dislikes (the US).

Actually hacking Russian government servers would require a high degree of proficiency in Russian which narrows the pool considerably. It would be telling if Russian or Ukrainian hackers did release info to them and they refused to publish it but, again, I don't know what would stop them just sticking it all on Pastebin.

I don't know if they actually act as a gatekeeper either, there's a bunch of logistical reasons as to why getting documents from autocratic regimes might be tougher than from pretty open democracies. But Assange speaks as if he's a gatekeeper.

Oh absolutely.

yeah, it's interesting that wikileaks even exists, in a sense. since any hacker could just post a torrent file to an entire terabyte of leaked stuff to pastebin or whatever

i mean, since you don't /need/ wikileaks to post stuff, the whole point of wikileaks is as a kind of amplifier/curator of leaked stuff. which means that assange's judgement is important.

Back in the day wikileaks could help with curation and redaction. But now that they just publish everything, and several other newslets are more than willing to help with the work, they frankly are quite pointless to most whistleblowers. Which is probably why they get their stuff from Putin now :)

@ggreenwald
The NYT partners quite often with a group that today it suggests is a Russian asset. Very suspicious behavior.

glenn greenwald disingenuously accuses another media outlet of being disingenuous

and the painted ponies, they go up and down

http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/wikileaks-syria-files-syria-russia-bank-2-billion/

http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/9/12864328/wikileaks-threat-reporters-syria-russia-emails

good guys

I found good stuff
email messages from Ninja of Die Antwoord

https://wikileaks.org/sony/emails/emailid/19478

I wish that had been in one of the State Department cable batches

for sure

so what's going on?

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/6f997f97c5f140a29f385ea05f1b642c/wikileaks-assanges-internet-link-severed-state-actor

Was he hosting pitchfork.com there?

maybe pamela anderson really did poison him

Idk how this can be any state actor other than Ecuador.

My impressions so far:

- There's a lot of stuff to sift through that hasn't been thoroughly sifted through, so it's premature to say "nothing to see here."
- However to the extent stuff has come out so far, there's no complete shocker/smoking gun stuff. There is however a lot of interesting stuff in terms of insights into how the Clinton campaign operates, what people inside it really think, arguably just how political power works in the US in 2016 and how it interacts with finance and other industries (speaking both to the transcripts and the podesta emails).

I don't like the knee-jerk "we already knew all of this" reactions because (1) it's not always exactly true and (2) it's the kind of stuff that Clinton supporters deny all the time. Nonetheless, if you are looking for bodies, bribes etc, that's not here, at least so far.

Can I just say, it's not okay to hack and leak peoples personal emails to find out how they 'really think'. It's illegal bullshit, and nothing that has come out of the podesta mails so far legitimates what's a gross breach of privacy.

The way certain parts of the hard left has become completely okay with illegal attacks on their 'liberal' opponents is gross and unhealthy.