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Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

If I had some important secret documents to leak which provided evidence of wrongdoing on the part of government officials, I'd leak it to the New York Times or other major newspaper. They're the best place to go for stuff like that -- they have a huge readership, a staff who will dig into the surrounding issues, and a heck of a strong reputation (as opposed to ugly-website-run-by-creepy-alleged-rapist).

I'd only leak to wikileaks if I (for some reason) wanted to leak ten gigabytes of randomly selected secret documents of no particular consequence. Wikileaks is the open mic night of leaking -- it's where you find the random crap, not the big stories.

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The NY Times would very likely not run with your leak. That's why WikiLeaks came to being.

No, they frequently run leaks which they think are in the public interest. And they have pretty low standards for what they think is in the public interest -- ultimately they just need to be able to come up with a good justification for believing it might be in the public interest, since their primary purpose is to sell newspapers.

They would refuse to leak random diplomatic cables which don't show any wrongdoing by anybody, though. (Although they're quite happy to publish a story about them if someone else is responsible for the leaking.)

Wikileaks' reputation is impeccable: it does what it says on the package, and has been the source for nearly uncountable major newspaper articles over the past few years because of the complete accuracy of its information. The NYT had Judith Miller.

Actually it doesn't do what it says on the package, because it's not actually a wiki any more, is it?

If I were the wikimedia foundation I'd be complaining about that.

edit: And on the point of accuracy... it would be an interesting prank to leak some fake documents to Wikileaks and see if you can get 'em to make a big fanfare about them. Preferably you'd fake enough documents so that they wouldn't really check them, and it would be several days into the media cycle before folks started to notice that some of the most incriminating memos were sent between parties such as "I. P. Freely" and "Amanda Hugnkiss".

it would be an interesting prank to leak some fake documents to Wikileaks and see if you can get 'em to make a big fanfare about them.

It's interesting that you think that they aren't already constantly being bombarded with false information via intelligence agencies as a tactic to discredit them.

It's interesting that you think that

is an annoying rhetorical tactic. Instead of explicitly suggesting P, which might require you to support the proposition P, you instead sneer at the possibility that someone might think not-P.

Actually in this case my main reason for believing not P is that they haven't been successfully trolled yet. If an intelligence agency did attempt this trick then they'd almost certainly succeed, because the Wikileaks crew are mere mortals and quite capable of being fooled by a clever fake.

If any intelligence agencies are reading this, though, and feel like offering me a job in the wikileaks-trolling department I'd be happy to accept it.

If an intelligence agency did attempt this trick then they'd almost certainly succeed, because the Wikileaks crew are mere mortals

So are the intelligence agencies.

Sure, but the game where Alice inserts random fake information into a stream and Bob tries to pick out that fake information is much harder for Alice than for Bob.

Mostly because Bob needs a 100% success rate while Alice wins with any success rate below 100%.

Oh, one more thing: Assange likes to whine every time he thinks someone is after him. If they'd picked up a bunch of fake CIA-planted information being submitted then they'd be talking about it, wouldn't they?

You're completely missing the point.

You wouldn't leak to The New York Times because they have no secure mechanism of any kind for leaking.

WikiLeaks is not just a two-bit news outlet looking for stories. They continue to maintain one of the most innovative and secure systems in the world for leaking sensitive materials.

It is to laugh! https://p10.secure.hostingprod.com/@spyblog.org.uk/ssl/wikil...

Assange has repeatedly let his SSL certificates and PGP keys expire, had has had a series of completely insecure submission systems that have been disabled most of the time since he started whoring for donations a couple years ago.

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