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Comment by Avamander | Hacker News Reader

Why would or should their privacy be a concern of theirs in the first place? It's a leak.

Because the leakers might have ethical standards? Same as with snowden not dumping everything directly and letting journalists scrub it first. None of this actually applies though because everything (supposedly) got leaked in the torrent.

Also maybe somebody learned a lesson after burning Reality Winner for dumping the raw material directly? Am I being naive that is a possibility?

the leak is much more then emails, e.g. it includes a lot of donations, members in certain regional groups etc.

it also dates back to the funding times of the AfD at which point the AfD had not yet been clearly right radical, but a side publishing it might very well be scanned by bots and then someone decent who was shortly a member during the early days and left due realizing this is going in a very bad direction might "permanently" be described as AfD member or similar in search, agent questions, e.g. done when they look for a new job

but I think the more relevant point here is probably the reduction of legal consequences and I wouldn't be surprised if whoever provided the site and the hacker are two different entities

lastly this seem to have been an exceedingly trivial but AI supported hack, so there is some chance the was done by a young and very inexperienced person who got more then they bargained for and try to somehow balance personal risk with the hope that this helps with convincing more people how bad the AfD is or similar

either-way multiple new sites and other sources have downloaded the sources and verified random samples where possible and it seem the dump is actually fully authentic

Shady politicians are some of the quickest individuals to jump to lawsuit threats.

So the leakers may have already been under some pressure to not end up in jail for doing the right thing.

I don't think there is much difference in the crime committed.

But intend can matter if you are caught can influence where in the possible range of penalties the judge will judge you.

There is also a chance the site provider and actual hacker/torrent provider are not the same person, in which case if they go after the site provider they could argue they just did automatized journalistic work with reasonable journalistic standards (not sure if that will work, but it would be worth a try; also only relevant if they are two different people).

Lastly the hacker might be very inexperienced/didn't really expect much success which also could explain the current outcome.

There is also the point that a website might be indexed by bots/search engines, the torrent might not and this could cause some problems. E.g. very very early one the AfD was not yet clear right radical and the mails date back to this time. If someone hat interactions with them only then but now get indexed by some search/ai which lets say an employer uses to screen hires this could have very bad consequences for that person without them having done anything wrong (if their connection to it really was only during the very very early days).

That's a weird take? It's entirely plausible to think that some of the info should be in the public (illegal stuff, prove of bad character, what's their strategy etc.) but not every PII in it? Like bank accounts, private addresses, private photos.

Probably because the leaker is actually the state, and in case the fact is discovered, they want to be protected against privacy violation lawsuits.

Because that's their concern, a civil case in addition to a criminal one? Not really.

Why would "the state" be concerned by that?

Why do you think the state is the leaker?

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