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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

“hostile intelligence service” here being used as a euphemism for “a journalist publishing secrets we don’t want published”.

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Wikileaks are not journalists and they do not follow e.g. journalistic ethics. They've done unprofessional things like posting anti-semitic statements[1] and bizarre things like doxing most of the women in Turkey[2] or posting sensitive information about people who've been victims of rape, suffer from mental illnesses, or are gay in countries where that's a big risk. That's all politically neutral and completely outside of what real journalists would sanction.

They may not be officially part of the Russian intelligence apparatus but they definitely don't seem to act contrary to Russian interests, they actively ignored leaks about the Russian government[4], and their public tweets about the Panama Papers were a lot more consistent with protecting Russian interests rather than the purported belief in exposing secrets[5]. They also didn't ask whether they were being used by sources like Guccifer 2 which was later revealed to be a Russian front.

Other governments have come to the same conclusion – e.g. here's a German report which alleges British and French agreement:

http://www.focus.de/politik/ausland/merkel-vorgefuehrt-russi...

1. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/07/25/what_wikil...

2. http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/07/why-did-wikileaks-help-do...

3. https://apnews.com/b70da83fd111496dbdf015acbb7987fb/private-...

4. http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/08/17/wikileaks-turned-down-le...

5. https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7174580643249643... and https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7176700566505308...

“actively ignored” is a high burden of proof for an accusation against someone who is in prison.

Wikileaks has been openly critical of Russia and its administrators for some time.

Most of what you’re positing is simply your opinion about their (possible) motives, not an issue with their actual actions.

Expecting full editorial capability (eg PII redaction) from someone imprisoned indefinitely without trial (inb4 “but he could walk out and face the same unfair trial and torture that Manning did!”) is complete lunacy.

You don’t personally get to decide who does or does not qualify as a journalist, thankfully. As someone who dislikes the warmongering and totalitarian democratic party exactly as much as the warmongering and totalitarian republican party, I found their releases to be a tremendous public service, as did millions of others.

“These people that I don’t like aren’t releasing enough factual data about the other people I don’t like whilst releasing factual data about these people I do like” is not a condemnation. It is a (relatively unimportant) opinion.

If we define a set of criteria by which that tweet can be deemed “antisemitic”, then applying that same criteria to comments about white people made by countless progressive-minded journalists would deem those journalists fanatically anti-white.

I read through your first link, and I don't see how I could take it seriously. Here is a link to the original tweet from Wikileaks, as shown on archive.is. https://archive.is/5g8LF

The link you posted to slate relies upon ((( and ))) around people's names being some nefarious anti-jew meaning. When, in reality, this was the actual tweet: "Tribalist symbol for establishment climbers? Most of our critics have 3 (((brackets around their names))) & have black-rim glasses. Bizarre."

Relying upon that sort of cruft just isn't convincing.

Oh my god, you can't possibly be that sheltered.

I must hang with a different crowd that doesn't add a specific # of parentheses to send dog-whistle messages. You should ask yourself, was the tweet wrong? Did the people who it referenced all have their names surrounded by ((( and )))? That would in fact be bizarre.

Let me spell it out for you. It's fine to be unaware of a particular trend, but it's not fine to continue to be unaware and to disbelieve it when you read an article that directly points it out.

* Neo-Nazis invented the "echoes" meme, where when saying the name of a Jewish person in a podcast they would add a sinister echo effect, or in text they would add three parentheses around it.

* Jewish people and others on Twitter reclaimed the parentheses in a positive sense.

* WikiLeaks is referring to the fact that people that complain about them are Jewish, not a random bizarre coincidence about punctuation.

The echoes meme comes from a neonazi podcast who would play an echo sound effect behind every single mention of a Jewish sounding name. When people on Twitter put the (()) around their own names, they are intentionally marking themselves as Jewish so as to raise a middle finger to the neonazis who started the meme. So if someone references "people with (()) around their name", they're talking about Jews. That's who puts (()) around their own names on Twitter.

Thank you!

It's actually more complicated than that. At the time (2016), most of the people who used the brackets for their own names were pro-establishment political types who wanted to make a public stand against the neo-Nazis. This included many people who were not Jews, in fact my own perception in 2016 was that most of the people who chose to use the brackets at the time were not in fact Jewish. As part of the daily conversation, WikiLeaks understood this! This totally changes the intent of the WikiLeaks tweet. My impression of the tweet has always been that they were skewering the mainstream political commentator class, who they perceive as being both virtue signaling (hence the brackets) and fashionably "intellectual" (hence the glasses).

Was it a stupid tweet, prone to misunderstanding? Absolutely. But one vague tweet does not justify labeling a person or organization as anti-Semitic.

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