Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lancey | Hacker News Reader

You act like WikiLeaks is some sort of guardian angel of the internet. I don't think they have to justify their actions as right or good because that's not the purpose of the site to begin with.

WikiLeaks publishes information. It's not a force for good or bad, but a resource that can be used to change the world. They didn't steal the information, but they collected it. They've done no wrong in presenting it this way. I understand why you're angry - people were deceived and their (believed private) conversations were made public. But blame the hackers, the internet, Sony's infosec team, or the executives that prompted this breach. WikiLeaks had nothing to do with it.

View on HN

They are absolutely complicit in a gross violation of privacy. I've spent some time looking through the emails. There's information about people's health (I found an email where one person informs colleagues that he was recently diagnosed with cancer), personal correspondence, a record of purchases, privileged legal documents, etc.

By using their megaphone to give these documents publicity, by making them easily accessible and searchable, Wikileaks is absolutely complicit and has done wrong.

Well, the majority of the ~300 million US citizens don't seem to be up in arms against this. Is the US populace mostly complicit in this too? Can't we take their inaction as a vote of consent?

In that sense you could say, in the same way that the US populace has allowed for the Fed to steal trillions from Americans over 100+ years, this same US populace sometimes picks "private" individuals and companies for targeting its complicitness. This time they picked Sony. Why do you seem to be more angry about this small choice the US populace made, when the bigger choice they made causes a lot more harm overall?

I don't get the downvotes.

If I complain about business regulations people tell me I'm in the wrong and I should move out of the country, because people here have decided they will be complicit in regulating companies.

Same with Sony, I say. The people have decided to be complicit in leaking company data. Sony was the target this time. If companies don't want to ever have their data leaked they can leave the country.

Don't the people decide the price companies must pay to do business here? We force them to comply with regulations, and now the populace, acting as informal lobbyists, are forcing companies to be OK with leaks once in a while as part of the cost of doing business here.

Actual lobbyists make much worse things happen than to cause some company to leak some data. But when the population lobbies, through tacit, implicit compliance, then everyone is suddenly holier-than-thou. I guess you need a lobbying license to avoid being judged by the HN crowd.

I chose not to look through the archive... thus to me, you are the one who violated Sony employees privacy.

If the front door is unlocked and you walk in, you still chose to walk in.

"If the front door is unlocked and you walk in, you still chose to walk in."

Under this analogy, WikiLeaks is putting up billboards detailing all homes with open doors, as well as providing a full searchable inventory of the contents of all homes.

"We're just providing the information" they say. "Just a middle man!"

EDIT: Instead of silent downvotes, can you respond with why you disagree? WikiLeaks took stolen private documents and made them easily accessible and searchable by people who otherwise would not have accessed them.

Please be respectful and engage in conversation, not downvotes.

Well, "WikiLeaks is putting up billboards detailing all homes with open doors, as well as providing a full searchable inventory of the contents of all homes." - that's completely not an accurate analogy at all.

For WikiLeaks to be doing what your analogy is saying then they would of had to have figured out what systems were vulnerable on the whole of the internet, downloaded all of the contents from those servers, and then made them available.

I agree, but to take it one step closer to the truth, it is as if you had a pin entry at your front door and the updated pin is posted forever by WikiLeaks, for anyone to enter whenever they please.

Billboards are advertisements. Wikileaks is more akin to a giant warehouse full of junk that 95% is useless but you can sift through if you so choose.

No downvote from me however...

If you want email and privacy, you need to encrypt.

Email is as secure like a postcard; at least that is what we use tell the people that wanted to append long email disclaimers.

Well, this is more like "the door is open, people are walking in and looking around... why don't I just take some photos and post them online, so that others won't need to queue to go through the door?".

There are some people who believe this was a hideous violation of privacy who are now going to have to look to see if any of their personal, friends, or family member's emails are among those that were leaked.

Verifying that no intruders are in the house because some num-nuts left the front door open is a pain in the butt.

>>They are absolutely complicit in a gross violation of privacy. I've spent some time looking through the emails.

Did you just claim that Wikileaks committed a "gross violation of privacy" by publishing the emails, and then unironically admit, in the very next sentence, that you looked at them?

if he hadn't of looked at them then he wouldn't be able to know if his statement was true or just blatant speculation. Would you advocate a stance of ignorance based public policy creation too? "The NSA is totally not spying on US citizens or violating anyone's privacy." ... "Oh ok. no need to address that." You've got to verify your claims about other people's actions before you go around proclaiming how bad they are.

Yes. I'm not suggesting that it was right for me to look at them. I am arguing that it was not morally neutral, as the poster I responded to suggested, for Wikileaks to publish and advertise them.

It's possible that I could have obtained these emails when the Sony hack was in the news (I think there were some archives on bittorrent). But that takes a lot of time and effort and at least some skill, and I was never interested. By making these emails findable via a mouse click (not to mention indexed by google) Wikileaks ensured that large numbers of people would look at them.

They are doing the world a favor by showing that nothing is safe.

Reminds me of this:

"This hacker guessed a password for their Unix system. From there, he became super-user by planting an egg in the systems area, then sliding into my computer.

A couple days later the SOB called me. Said his name was Dave. From Australia.

"I broke in to show that your security isn't very good."

"But I don't want to secure my computer," I replied. "I trust other astronomers."

Dave had other reasons for breaking in, too. "You think that hackers are bad. This proves otherwise."

"Huh? You break into my computer to show that hackers are good?"

"Yeah," Dave replied. "We're helping you out by finding your security faults."

Clifford Stoll, The Cuckoo's Egg

Would you consider the NSA to be doing the world a favor as well then?

Likewise asteroids are doing the world a favor by reminding us that an impact event could end life as we know it.

The key point to me is: this information was already stolen and in the hands of god-knows what parties.

Certainly there's an argument to be made on the optimal outcome for the individuals concerned. Which is worse? Their stolen information being traded invisibly on a darknet, or publicly visible on Wikileaks?

However, as a separate argument, I'd hold very strongly to the idea that Wikileak's publication of information is good for society as a whole. (Aka the no-public-release vs full-disclosure security debate of the 90s)

As the Target and Home Depot breaches demonstrated, corporations don't give a damn about their customer's privacy - only the revenue that might be lost by losing goodwill.

And only by keeping these incidents in the news for long enough will it hurt severely enough to be taken seriously.

How about using whatever is in our powers (legally) to punish Sony for their complete apathy towards security? That's why these documents were leaked in the first place.

Security (and privacy as a result) is something hugely important to customers, whether they know it or not, but not so important to corporations except for how it might damage their bottom line from backlash.

If we don't show them how they can also suffer from bad security practices, then nothing will ever be done to fix it. I am 100% certain that Sony and many other large organizations are now spending a hell of a lot more money on their security teams.

So people should be punished because something you deem important was exploitable? What about the other 99999999 items that they view as important and that they're also already spending money on?

If I go to your house and break a window and steal a bunch of stuff, am I justified because you needed to learn a lesson about security? If I go up to you and beat you up, is that ok because you should know how to defend yourself better?

I don't understand this self righteous hacker mindset that if you're able to exploit someone somehow then they deserve it. How about respecting people's boundaries in the first place? Recognize that as a company a&r, finding new talent, marketing existing projects, managing key relationships, etc etc are probably seen as where they should actually put their money rather than security?

The point is that the long-term repercussions of this "punishment" from Wikileaks are beneficial for society, and it's not about vengeance. It's that corporations will be a lot more careful going forward.

It's interesting to juxtapose this over the article HN article below "Chris Dodds email reveals what mpaa really thinks of fair use"

Privacy-rights are quite upside-down in the US right now with personal privacy being almost non-existent and our Government almost totally lacking in transparency. Clearly a discussion about Fair-use should be happening transparently in public - not hidden in emails.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150416/17252230680/chris...

That argument could be made about a site like pastebin that just hosts user content. But they went to a lot of trouble to present journalistic integrity over the Snowden affair. You can't have it both ways. If they were not trying to be "good" there would not be any justification to publish the data at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com