Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

I agree with half of it. Criticizing Assange for his hygiene or bringing into focus Manning's gender identity are obviously attempts at character assassination as the article points out but:

>for calling Hillary Clinton a war hawk

his political affiliations and motivates as well as intent matter. The public has a legitimate interest to figure out if whistleblowers act on behalf of foreign powers, cooperate with domestic political parties or are in some other way potentially influenced. It can determine what they decide to leak, who they aim to attack, and so on. If it turns out that someone who leaks documents that concern national security has ties to a foreign power the situation becomes immediately much more suspect and it becomes much more likely that leaks are chosen in such a way as to deflect or confuse.

If Russia or China exposes some crime that my government hid from me I will thank those governments and act to remove the corrupt officials from my own government. You are implicitly arguing Americans should allow corrupt government officials be above the law.

no, what I'm arguing is that you may not know if you get selective information, potentially taken out of context, to advocate some cause that's actually harming the national interest.

Pretty trivial example, create a leak or scandal about a relatively minor issue that discredits a candidate that would have threatened the interests of China or Russia.

> what I'm arguing is that you may not know if you get selective information, potentially taken out of context, to advocate some cause that's actually harming the national interest.

Of course you can know: you _always_ get out of context, selective information. But the thing to do for a good faith government when this happens is to provide context, not to silence the people that provided the information.

Anyone who leaks national security will of course in the end of the day have links to or formed such with foreign powers, otherwise, they won't be able to sustain themselves in the most fundamental way possible.

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