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Comment by rottyguy | Hacker News Reader

A bit of an interesting dilemma in the spirit of transparency. Given an N-way race, do you just reveal secrets pertaining to one participant (since this may be all you have) or do you with-hold until you can reveal secrets from all participants?

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Maybe they have no secrets?

I mean, the point of the DNC leaks is that they (the party) helped a specific candidate (Hillary) - even before she was elected a nominee - so they in essence acted undemocratically.

Unless you're speculating that the GOP was secretly sheming for Trump - something which I find extremely unlikely - then it's more than possible that any GOP leaks would in fact help Trump, as well!

The GOP may be divided on Trump but am sure there is private information that could help the HRC team. It doesn't have to be incriminating as planned strategy could be of value. Unsure how this is different from, say, an (american) football team playbook being revealed to the opponent.

Wikileaks is NOT helping Trump. They're merely releasing information that would make impact in the election. Assange doesn't even support Trump. He supports Jill Stein.

They'd be more than happy to release any information on Trump. Unfortunately, they don't hack the information themselves. Someone else has to send it to them.

Here is what Assange had to say about Trump: "I mean, it’s from a point of view of an investigative journalist organization like WikiLeaks, the problem with the Trump campaign is it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day". Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2016/08/26/assange-trumps-ever...

I've been struggling with this a lot. Granted it's pretty much all speculation, but if it is a state actor that is giving Wikileaks this information, and if said state actor was trying to influence the election, I question the responsibility of Wikileaks. It could also be (and I'm aware of this) simply that they're exposing information on "my" candidate, in which case maybe I'd feel differently if was the other way around.

I'm glad this was posted on HN, because I'm looking forward to a (hopefully) more informed discourse than I found on Reddit.

Given that most of the leaks are emails from a single party, when said party was known to use a weak email server, which was known to have been hacked at one point, my guess is that it could be anyone, and doesn't need to be a 'state actor'.

PS. Have you seen the Podesta emails? They range from hilarious to pretty disturbing.

I'm definitely grateful for his risotto tips.

I've poked a bit at the Wikileaks emails. My conclusion is that the email release is designed not to understand the emails in any sort of context but rather to be selectively quote-mined. The use of Courier can obscure the fact that the message is a quadruple-forwarded quote, as well as hide what was highlighted in the original HTML versions of emails. The lack of any attempt to reconstruct threading makes this worse than even the new IETF mailing list archive for trying to read email archives--and that is a bar I didn't think could be cleared.

What choice do you have? You can only release what you have and you have no way of knowing what you don't have. He's not trying to reveal all of the facts in the world. He's trying to reveal the facts that he has.

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