Le Pen and Putin probably don't write emails and Trump is tweeting :) But I agree, it is hard to follow the ethics of this, to say the least. Also, if I were sent leaked documents, it would be incredibly hard to understand and consider the ethics.
And they don't have aids that write e-mail either? I don't believe they all use letters with some wax to imprint their ring: it's 2017. The parent is right, Wikileaks has a murky agenda.
So because Wikileaks has had a couple of leaks from Hillary's crew and this Macron one among all the other ones [0] means they have a murky agenda?
Or do you mean the recent Vault 7 from CIA etc are also part of this newly found dark agenda, instead of a continuation of earlier leaks such as the Iraq War documents leak?
Assange (let's get rid of pseudo-plurality of Wikileaks) has clearly observable political agenda, and it hasn't changed much. As long as it harms the United States and its allies, it will be disseminated. If it's something that implicates the "anti-imperialists" like Le Pen, Trump, Putin and their petty dictator buddies (e.g. Panama Files) it will be booed and downplayed by him.
Haha, guys, come on. 'It's because Putin doesn't use email', sure, sure. 'Nothing to leak', indeed! Putin, Le Pen, Trump - paragons of ethical behaviour, squeaky clean. /s
Wikileaks publishes whatever the GRU feeds them, with gusto.
Supposedly, they use typewriters over there. At least that's what they want us to think, but why wouldn't they? Computers are inherently untrustable & likely malicious if you don't build the damn thing yourself and by the time you connect to the internet, all bets are off.
Mr. Putin publicly said that he does not use internet at all[0]. In Russia Wikileaks-esque orgs are primarily busy in political elite wars[1]. That's always the same - corruption, dirty money, murders, robberies. Boring.
Wikileaks is an English speaking organization with no Russian speakers on the staff, why would a leaker consider leaking Russian documents there? They can't leak what no one sends them, which also explains the other two.
Assange hosted a show for Russia Today back in 2012, so he knows some Russian speaking journalists who should be able to lend a hand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tomorrow
Assange hosted a show that RT acquired the first broadcast license for, I doubt he had much contact with RT employees for that show. And again, why would a Russian leaker consider Wikileaks over another organization full of Russian speakers?
Good point, but still, consider how simple it would be for them to get Russian speaking help, and how small an effort it is in comparison to the gain in publicity - if they got something, of course.
I see wikileaks as more of a 'balance of powers' organization. It sees all concentration of power, especially state power, as presenting a great danger to people. Thus it tries to "equalize" it. Thus Wikileaks's main focus has been America. Russia's secrets are known to other state actors, including the US, thus one superpower and a few great powers are in a position to stop any atrocity, if they choose to do so.
The USA has also wielded state power internally against its citizens, with the highest rate of incarceration in the developed world, secret internment camps, spying by state agencies, and the suppression of its black citizens by violence and coercion.
US has intelligence and raw power superiority to rest of the world, Wikileaks believes that by creating more transparency about all aspects of government, it can create more awareness and global action. It has partially succeeded.
The above of course does not preclude USA also leading to great alleviation of global suffering - Vaccines, PEPFAR, saving the world @ WWII from Hitler, etc..
Nothing above should be construed as support to Wikileaks, I am merely trying to convey an understanding of an alternative viewpoint.
As Assange has stated repeatedly, he sees no difference between mainstream party politicians: Obama has continued NSA spying and indiscriminate drone bombings. He sees Trump as a genuine outsider to the dominant Washington polity and an alternative power network. He thinks whatever disrupts mainstream neoliberal/neocon world order is a good thing.
Again, please keep in mind I'm not a WikiLeaks supporter.
It's so incredibly annoying that every time there's a news article about wikileaks people start crying about its bias and Russian spies. Even if Satan himself feeds them info, so what? What matters is the truthfulness of their leaks.
It seem to me like a lot of people avoid attacking the verasity of the leaks themselves but focus only on the 'Putin connection', which is of course a much easier thing to do.
Well, hey, it's modern world politics, where it's not the objective truth that really matters or the argumentation, it's a 'who can shout the loudest' contest instead.
I don't know, I think if there is a bias or we only read things released by Russian spies then it seems really important to take that into account
If every single person's emails are at least controversial then it just means you are going to be a mob chasing anyone that was targeted, unrelated to if they are better or worse than everyone else (and it seems like any email is damning, pizzeria-thank-you emails are enough to cause people to think there is a vast child trafficking conspiracy and literally shoot up the place).
If it was an unbiased sample it is fine to catch a random subset and set examples of them, but if you have a biased sample then you might be actually leading to concentration of power in whoever has the least scruples in hacking and leaking opposition emails if you aren't careful to take the sample bias into account.
No, screw that approach. Truth is not just a collection of facts; it's also the point cloud that the facts create. Even if your information is 100% accurate, you can still generate incredibly potent misinformation by selectively releasing some facts and retaining others. It's bias laundering, and it creates propaganda that's substantially more difficult to discredit than the old-school, lie-based kind. We should really know better, but I suppose it plays to our human weaknesses.
I say that every time WikiLeaks comes up, "Assange should not be trusted" needs to be the top comment. No different than a "view at your own discretion" label.
Also, news organizations with transparency and decades-old reputations, e.g. the BBC. But certainly not a secretive <s>anarchist</s> libertarian organization with an egomaniac leader[1] and questionable political connections.
BBC is paid for by the British government, that is, politicians or oversight orgs that report to politicians. For-profit news agencies are simply delivery mechanisms for advertisements run by mostly large conglomerate corps. News happens to be their niche to get eyeballs on the advertisements that pays the bills -- porn tubes and cnn have more in common than we'd like to accept. Additionally to the extent they need licenses for the public airwaves or access to governmental officials, they are influenced by those.
Decades-old reputation matters nothing compared to the current leadership being beholden to those who hold the pursestrings.
The best that can be hoped for is the powers influencing the news somehow balance each other out enough for a modicum of truth to leak through.
Bias does not necessarily follow from "paid for by the... government", "run by mostly large conglomerate corps", and "need licenses for the public airwaves". Most everything good is paid for by someone or some group; journalists don't have the means to do their reporting for free.
Ultimately you have to use your own judgement, but if your preferred news organizations have a history of hiring honest and reputable journalists and providing unbiased coverage (especially if it targets institutions of power) then I think heuristically you can leave them in your "trusted source" folder.
In the worst case scenario, I suppose you can just follow your favorite journalists and rely on personal trust and reputation.
I take issue with wikileaks because Assange has explicitly stated himself that his goal is to inflict the maximum amount of damage through headline manipulation or hyperbole/click-baiting; leave it to the users to actually take a look at the content of the leaks to decide for themselves. Given this, the organization appears to be no better than any other sensational manipulative news organization, so I highly question their methods.
To me the answer is that America's current "Left wing" is more in-line with the American Neoliberal world dominance agenda. Meanwhile Americas conservatives where they promote American dominance do so in public. Republican candidates debated candidly about how much they'd like the "bad guys" to get tortured. Meanwhile the DNCs favoured candidate got big donations from the defence industry and Saudi Arabia whilst talking about how important human rights are.
Wikileaks project is about attacking powerful in-groups deception of voters. All leaks help this cause by increasing the info-sec cost of conspiracy. But if the in-groups private messaging is in line with their publicly stated positions then what's there to leak?
Except Trump/Tillersion just happily approved the biggest arms deal with Saudi, while the previous Obama administration was halting this deal because of human right violations in Yemen. Iran deal was also in the line to reduce Saudi's influence on foreign policy.
> if the in-groups private messaging is in line with their publicly stated positions then what's there to leak?
1. We won't know unless there is a leak
2. I think the fact that there was a leak was as or more damaging to Clinton than the actual leak itself. Anecdotal... My dad: "but the emails!" Me: "what about them?" Dad: "They were hacked". Me: "what did they say?" Dad: "..."
You'd have to assume that a) WL ran such a tight ship you'd never heard a hint of it, which seems unlikely b) the suppliers of the information didn't try anyone else, which also seems unlikely.
There's definitely a bias. That's why the last paragraph of that announcement is there; that's wikileaks denying that they're a front for Russian intelligence, an allegation which is being made a lot these days.
Conservatives score much higher on loyalty and respect for authority as their moral foundations. Wouldn't surprise me if that's enough to explain the gap.
Indeed - language has been co-opted. In the UK we see the same thing "moderate" "centrist" - these now mean big-business friendly policies, to the right of previous right wing governments.
Appologies. I reposted to an ABC piece. Question though... how does this exclude people who are already well informed from commenting on this forum? And how does a clickbait article rectify this?
Anyone working for the gov't, a gov't contractor, the defense industry or other industries requiring a clearance would do well to avoid this stuff. Being able to honestly answer "I've read the third party analysis but haven't seen more than quotes from the docs myself" makes life easier if the person administering your poly decides to ask about that sort of stuff.
Linking directly to wikileaks also means that nobody working in those environments will read your article while at work or using a work device. While you might not get asked about it depending on where you work it's just unprofessional. It's like visiting a link to a tech article published by Pornhub's blog.
By giving those groups a reason to avoid the topic you eliminate a lot of potential for transfer of useful information. Little tidbits like "the author says X but in my experience Y" add up to a large amount of knowledge transfer that we probably don't want to exclude from this site
'This article claims that the first of these, the forged document, was done by Weev (aka Andrew Auernheimer). However, the second of these - the email data dump - has not been attributed to Weev and was likely done by someone else.'
'Weev is a high functioning polydrug abusing sociopath dedicated to short term pleasure. Don't confuse yourself.'
Interesting... wonder if this 'weev' planted some emails in the dump
