Hacker News Reader

Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

Leaking stuff to newspapers is a time-honoured tradition. But with an anonymous upload site it can be done much more easily.

The biggest problem I see is fake leaks. Make up some fake documents to embarrass someone you don't like (or just for the sake of the lulz) and how are they supposed to verify whether they're real or not before publishing 'em?

View on HN

By doing their job. Much of journalism is research.

But that doesn't help. If I have in my hand what is supposedly a top-secret document then how do I confirm whether it's real or not? (Let's assume that the forgers haven't made any obvious mistakes.) I sure as hell can't go knocking on the door and asking whether I can compare this document with the original version.

A great example was the Rather-gate memos from the 2004 election, a supposedly "leaked" memo which got published with great fanfare despite the fact that the forgers did make some obvious errors (ie producing a 1970s document in Microsoft Word using default fonts, spacing and parameters). But if the forgers hadn't been complete dumbasses then how would we have ever known whether they were real?

Unfortunately, unless you can verify them, you don't publish them. That does mean that some things that are genuine will not get published. But it avoids what's worse -- publishing things that aren't true.

Yes, that's the way it should work. It's not the way that they do, though.

Heck, has a single Wikileaks document ever been proven to be genuine?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com