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Comment by r00fus | Hacker News Reader

Who's going to trust the WSJ if they have anything of serious consequence? Rupert Murdoch has been pretty cozy to western governments and large corporations, so why would I as a whistleblower/leaker choose WSJ's outfit given the ideological and conflict of interest issues?

Say what you will about WikiLeaks, but it's pretty much got one purpose and no obvious conflict of interest. In the case of SafeHouse... not so much.

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I don't quite get the vitriol.

People leak things to the WSJ all the time. You may not like their Editorial page, but their business reporting is pretty solid and well-respected.

How could providing better protection for their sources be a bad thing?

> How could providing better protection for their sources be a bad thing?

Why would you assume they would actually provide better protection? Because they said so?

But, then a valid question is "How do we know if Wikileaks provides good enough protection?" and the answer is that we don't know exactly, but we trust it more because of its past willingness to go against the grain and not play along with the govt and corporate entities. Its members are routinely harassed, its head is on some show trial waiting deportation, one of the sources has been locked in isolation for months and months.

I personally wouldn't trust WSF to provide any protection for any important information. I would just assume it would log all the identifying information and when their liason from FBI calls they would be more than happy to provide that info without a court order. That is just my personal attitude towards WSJ.

Well, yeah, of course because they said so. I guess an independent security audit would be nice too, though I'm not sure how much that would actually count for.

If you don't trust the WSJ then you are not going to leak them documents with or without this service, right? I mean, it's a tautology: if you don't trust them... then you don't trust them. But trying to make things safer for people who do want to leak to them is good.

"...one of the sources has been locked in isolation for months and months."

As a potential source, wouldn't this make one less confident in wikileaks' ability to protect their sources? I realize that in this particular case it's abundantly clear that he was fingered by someone outside of wikileaks, but it is not beyond the realm of the possible that a flaw in wikileaks' system could leave sources vulnerable.

> As a potential source, wouldn't this make one less confident in wikileaks' ability to protect their sources?

No because in this particular case, Manning has bragged and got himself caught. It wasn't Wikileaks. But I believe he is persecuted and held in isolation in order to pressure him to implicate Wikileaks. Because of this, one would trust Wikileaks as they clearly do not have a buddy-buddy relationship with the US govt. I wouldn't be able to say the same thing about WSJ.

It's not better protection, it's worse. The fact that they have that clause proves it -- journalists don't tell their sources they'll give them up in the face of a lawsuit, but this clause is saying the paper will to people who leak in this method = less protection.

I agree with you, but unfortunately lots of people trust the WSJ. Many people consider it an unbiased source of business information and would think its a good place to leak information. Many people cannot think beyond the brand.

> Rupert Murdoch has been pretty cozy to western governments and large corporations,

I don't get this criticism. Isn't the point of sending them the information for it to be published and disseminated?

Usually the source wants his identity protected, too. Sometimes from the government.

The concern isn't that he'll release the information you intend to be released — it's that he'll release information about you. If you leak proof that the government is spraying chemtrails to reduce the excess population, you still might not want people knowing you're the one who leaked it. So the question becomes, would you trust Murdoch to keep your identity secret?

Can we use a less offensive example, please?

You can say that Murdoch has been cozy with western governments and corporations, but he's also been pretty successful with his media properties.

If News Corp thinks that there's profit to be made in a Wikileaks style operation, more power to them. I have no doubt Murdoch can flip whenever he feels the winds are in his favor for making future profits- he did in Britain when Labour started became dominant.

>"If News Corp thinks that there's profit to be made in a Wikileaks style operation"

I believe that this totally misses the point of whistle-blowing / disclosure. The mere fact that they're doing it for-profit is, at least to me, a pretty good indication that it won't be unbiased or uncensored.

Is Wikileaks unbiased and uncensored?

Journalistic virtue is a rare thing. Everyone has an agenda, either ideological or commercial. The only thing we can do is take what we can get and consider the source.

I think that's the point — if opportunistic financial success is his only goal, there's no good reason to believe he won't sell you out. It's the same reason we don't offer incentive bonuses to gravediggers.

As for his media companies, again, they're great if you're just measuring money, but they're not all necessarily well-respected by their peers. Fox News is tremendously successful from a financial standpoint, but it doesn't have a great reputation as an actual news source among people who don't agree with Murdoch's politics.

Wouldn't distrust and lack of credibility be a check for this moral hazard?

Surely someone at News Corp understands the value of keeping sources confidential and the the value of a scoop? People might not agree with their prevailing ideology, but there's no evidence that News Corp double crosses sources.

Distrust and widely perceived lack of credibility does not appear to have swayed Fox News very much — only when advertisers started pulling out did Fox can Glenn Beck. And they haven't really been in any situation where revealing their sources would have been advantageous as far as I can recall, so that's neither here nor there.

You don't need to trust 'em. Worst case scenario is that you leak to 'em and they ignore it so you go take your leak somewhere else.

Competition is always good. Whether or not wikileaks has obvious "conflict of interest" they have a certain ideological outlook, and having a competitor with a different ideological outlook might help in cases where wikileaks chooses to sweep something under the rug.

Unless you leak to them, they don't print it, and they leak your contact information to someone you don't want to have it...

Except (and this is the point) it's a site for anonymous uploading. They don't have your contact information.

Most people don't know how to mask their IP address.

How about your IP address?

> They don't have your contact information.

So how to they catch all those "online pirates"? I am sure they don't provide their address, name, and social security number when they download a song for example. However that has not stopped thousands upon thousands of cases to be filed (now whether you think identifying people by IP is right or wrong is besides that point, it is happening and it is part of the system). So "no" you should not leak anything to these people unless you know every well how to hide (chances are you might not, even your browser's identifying info like fonts, OS version etc. can be used to narrow down the search and there are other things as well).

Well if you're going to be that paranoid then you shouldn't leak anything to wikileaks either.

If you're going to be that paranoid, you should consider carefully the credibility of whoever you're leaking things to. Do they have a track record of keeping secrets? How hard are they for The Man to pressure? And so on. Wikileaks does very well by those criteria. The WSJ has less of a track record, and inspires less confidence with their privacy policy and somewhat dubious web site security.

The best thing that could happen is that the WSJ hears criticisms like this, takes them to heart, and turns into a serious competitor to Wikileaks. As it is, though, they've got a lot of catching up to do.

You have to trust their promise that their anonymous submission process is actually reasonably anonymous. Many whistleblowers probably couldn't tell between an anonymous process and a seemingly anonymous process that isn't.

OK, but if you're going to be that paranoid you shouldn't trust Wikileaks either, right?

Right. But in this case trusting WSJ to keep your anonymous submission secure as well as trusting their ability to run a leaks site would be a mistake:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/wall-street-journal...

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