Hacker News Reader

Comment by NaturalPhallacy | Hacker News Reader

>Wikileaks claimed to have GOP emails as well but for some reason never released them.

[citation needed]

I haven't heard that claim before either.

The Wikipedia sources for the DNC hack article [0] say the RNC wasn't successfully hacked. "GOP" refers to the entire Republican Party so I suppose there could be emails from a different Republican origin than the RNC.

> intelligence organizations additionally concluded Russia attempted to hack the Republican National Committee (RNC) as well as the DNC but were prevented by security defenses on the RNC network.

Searching for a source for the GOP claim did remind me of internal WikiLeaks messages from 2015 showing at least Assange's preference for the GOP over Hilary Clinton.

  [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Committee_email_leak#United_States_intelligence_conclusions
  [1] https://theintercept.com/2018/02/14/julian-assange-wikileaks-election-clinton-trump/

Emails specifically? I'm not sure if that has ever been confirmed, but this is directly from Assange[1]:

>“We do have some information about the Republican campaign,” he said Friday, according to The Washington Post.

>“I mean, it’s from a point of view of an investigative journalist organization like WikiLeaks, the problem with the Trump campaign is it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day," Assange said.

When it comes to leaks about Democrats, everything is worth publishing. When it comes to leaks about Republicans, it needs to "controversial" to be worth publishing.

[1] - https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/2934...

You took that quote, which simply doesn’t say what you want. Then you slapped your take on the end, which is what you want the quote to say, but it doesn’t. Wrong.

Ok, what does the quote actually say?

It says “we have some information that is not worth publishing.” Your filigree about relative hurdle for publication is your invention entirely.

Guess what? I have some information that is not worth publishing too. I bet you do too. So what would you propose the action be there?

That sounds good in a vacuum, but it is logic that necessitates that everything they do publish is therefore worth publishing. How many of the tens of thousands of emails they leaked from Democrats were worthy of publishing? How many of them had information that had public value in exposing? If the answer is not “all of them” then why would the standard be different for Republicans?

Yes. Wikileaks' statement is a tautology. It is a neutral statement. Your assumptions beg your answer.

You've asked fair questions, but you cannot presume the answers. Maybe you should start a blog and see if you can make such decisions yourself about what's worth publishing. Some people might even harangue you about your decisions and declare that you're a malicious foreign agent.

I'm not making any assumptions, I am simply describing their behavior. They leaked tens of thousands of mundane and uninteresting documents about Democrats, but when it comes to Republicans the documents won't be published unless they are "controversial" to use Assange's exact wording. There is no explanation for that which meshes with the idea that they are a neutral platform.

You assume WL published all Democrat documents. You presume those documents were mundane and uninteresting, and not controversial (most of the world disagrees). You presume they did have Republican documents that would not be mundane and uninteresting.

You simply disagree with their judgment in theory without having information about what you’re disputing, the magnitude, and the quality of your critique. You’ve clearly filled in the blanks with what you want to validate your criticism.

>You presume those documents were mundane and uninteresting, and not controversial (most of the world disagrees).

Once again, I am not assuming or presuming anything. I am judging the documents directly. Have you looked at them? Because it doesn't get any more mundane and uninteresting than people taking office lunch orders[1], people reporting they are at the dentist, or even over a hundred automatic out of office replies[3]. If these emails are worthy of publishing, everything is worthy of publishing.

If anything, these emails have negative public value because they drown out the leaked emails that might have actually interesting content and many of them, especially the out of office emails, end up leaking totally innocent people's contact information.

[1] - https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/21638

[2] - https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/23479

[3] - https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/?q=&title=automatic+reply&c...

WL batch processed sources. You get the boring ones with the salacious ones, possibly useful for context. I listed three assumptions and you denied one. Since you want more disclosure that goes against the judgment of the site owners, why not just start your own site?

Here’s an example of reality that violates your set of assumptions. Wikileaks on Palin in 2008. How does your complaint comport with this reality? It doesn’t.

https://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin_Yahoo_account_200...

The statement from Wikileaks is inarguable given the information available. You have simply extrapolated a talking point that they discriminated against one side. That is simply second-order, non-provable agitation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com