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Comment by thraway2016 | Hacker News Reader

thraway2016

EDIT: This post is no longer relevant.

Meta: 351 points in < 2 hours and it's bouncing between #10 and #16.

Conclusion: HN is flagging this fairly aggressively.

Question: Why? This is not overtly political, and it is definitely in the interest of the community, with the potential to be at least half as interesting as the Snowden documents or the hack of Hacking Team.

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I'd be interested in PG doing a vote analysis on this particular thread to see if comment downvotes are concentrated from a particular source/region or spread evenly.

There are multiple articles for this topic on the front page. This is currently the top post but I think they're having issues merging in other discussions into this one. I keep seeing this flash in the top spot then see it redirect incorrectly/disappear temporarily.

Thanks for this. It has suddenly shot up to position #1, possibly due to resolution of reasons you cite.

I didn't flag it, but I'd imagine a lot of people don't trust the source (any more).

Edit: Why the downvotes? I didn't indicate my position, I pointed out that some people don't trust WikiLeaks any more, which is obvious - go and look at the responses they get on twitter.

Did I miss a memo? Wikileaks has done tireless work in this field and has largely been correct about its claims and the authenticity of its documents.

If not Wikileaks, whom do we trust for this sort of info?

The infosec community has this insane conspiracy theory that Assange is owned by Putin.

Alright, I'll bite. Regardless of the who owns what, I'd be a hell of a lot more confident if some of the old regular PGP sigs started showing up again

I guess the Russians have no FSB hacking programs that Wikileaks could publish.

> Wikileaks has done tireless work in this field and has largely been correct about its claims and the authenticity of its documents

I believe what people don't trust is their motivation. I've seen people argue that motivation doesn't matter; facts are facts. That's incorrect, as anyone who has listened to a skilled dissembler state facts leading to a conclusion at odds with reality knows.

There are other problems, including suspicion that it may be true that WL may be leaking exactly what they're given (modulo redaction and strategic withholding), what they're given may be tailored to the goals of those leaking. Assange's statements don't help dissipate that suspicion.

So in looking at their releases, you have to fact in not only their (Assange's) motivation, but that of the unknown people leaking documents.

Ain't intelligence analysis grand?

Wikileaks' 'analysis', which is what this link is about, has always been fanciful and shoddy. I don't trust them to be doing any kind of 'analysis'.

You missed a pretty big memo.

Why trust any one source? Multiple sources is the way to go. And yes I am aware of what Wikileaks is and it's hard to find an alternative if there even is any. But my point is some day you'll be burned by relying only on a single source.

At best, Wikileaks has a strong political leaning that clouds their whistle-blowing mission and leads some to question their motivation (even several years ago, some commentators saw Wikileaks as less whistle-blower and more anti-United States -- http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/08/16/how-wikileaks-blew-it/). At worst, some charge that Wikileaks is essentially working for Russia at this point. (http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/312964-us-finds-link...)

I've personally become convinced that the best way to release "leaks" of this nature is via the Panama Papers approach -- anonymously.

Getting dumps and sitting on them/grooming/timing releases during the election, their twitter jumping on the Sweden bashing bandwagon [1-3] (because Assange was accused of rape there?), linking back to old Prism dumps after Trump tweets about wiretapping after reading an Infowars "article" [4] and speculating about it [5], etc etc.

I'm not sure if he's buttering up the administration to get out of Ecuador, but regardless, I trusted Wikileaks when they were [input] -> check for mostly pertinent info/responsible leaking -> [output].

The concept of wikileaks is crucial to a democracy, I'm just not sure that Assange's current Wikileaks is that thing anymore.

[1] https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/838287615929499648

[2] https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/837686443329859585

[3] https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/837269295797309441

[4] https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/838298128419852288

[5] https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/838648893436903424

You're missing a strategic consideration. If Wikileaks operates with ulterior motives, it could have an interest in dropping obsolete or even valid information for a variety of other reasons besides wanting people to be informed; to destabilize or distract, for example. Likewise, other parties could exploit Wikileaks to those ends, feeding low-level intelligence to Wikileaks for second-order purposes.

If not Wikileaks, whom do we trust for this sort of info?

Nobody. Open-source espionage means institutional reliability is a chimera. The more credibility you invest something with, the better of an attack vector it becomes.

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