The NSA story reinforces why an entity like WikiLeaks is important

http://gigaom.com/2013/06/06/the-nsa-surveillance-story-reinforces-why-an-entity-like-wikileaks-is-so-important/

by cdooh • 13 years ago

683 65 13 years ago

the article is full of links, but they're all to newspapers, not the actual sites discussed?! and it won't let me comment without digging up some ancient wordpress account. but the org referred to is "freedom of the press foundation" whose site is https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/

GabrielF005• 13 years ago

I don't agree. The traditional news outlet that broke this story (The Guardian) has a lot of advantages over WikiLeaks. It has experienced reporters who understand the issues involved. It has a well-known and respected editorial process that can weigh the consequences of a leak versus the potential value to the public. It has a process through which the public can contact the organization and correct errors. When WikiLeaks put out the cables I noticed that there was one cable where they redacted the names of people who had met with US diplomats from the body of the document but not from the title of the document. I looked very hard for any way to contact WikiLeaks to get the matter fixed and found nothing - their website suggested that people interested in providing feedback contact human rights organizations or a couple of law firms in the UK. On the other hand, traditional journalists typically post their email addresses and twitter handles and will often respond to queries.

Yes, the administration is aggressively challenging leakers, but newspapers have a long, successful history of defending their first amendment rights in the courts. Nor is it clear that a UK-based newspaper such as The Guardian would be subject to Justice Department subpoena's or prosecution.

WikiLeaks, particularly under Julian Assange, has demonstrated a complete lack of transparency and biased reporting (c.f. the Collateral Murder video). I have a lot more confidence in, say, The New York Times or The Guardian than Wikileaks.

ThomPete• 13 years ago

Wikileaks is not interested in confidence nor is it trying to compete with "the media".

It's interested in obstructing the ability of governments and organisations in power to "conspire" against it's populations through technology.

It should be judged on that, not on the aesthetics of it's delivery.

Sven7• 13 years ago

It is not black and white. Both models have their flaws.

By and large most reporters of The New York Times towed the line before the Iraq invasion and the Wall Street melt down. When you get called into a room by very important people, and are told do it for the sake of the country, few people are going to push back. That's where overly paranoid folk like Assange have a role to play. They force the system to reevaluate the status quo.

foobarqux6• 13 years ago

> and are told do it for the sake of the country

Or for the sake of advertisers. And they usually don't need to be told.

enraged_camel• 13 years ago

>>It has experienced reporters who understand the issues involved.

You mean it has experienced reporters who editorialize the leaks. Because that's one of the many benefits of Wikileaks: you get the data in its raw form and can reach your own, independent conclusions if you choose to do so.

>>It has a process through which the public can contact the organization and correct errors.

This is well and good, but the process is not efficient enough to deal with the sheer volume of leaks in a timely manner. Just as an example, Wikileaks released 400,000 leaked documents in October 2010. How much time would it have taken for The Guardian to process them, and would the information still be relevant by the time they were released?

cobrausn• 13 years ago

OP pointed out the editorializing on the 'Collateral Murder' video as evidence that you can't avoid this.

quaunaut• 13 years ago

>> You mean it has experienced reporters who editorialize the leaks.

You mean like @wikileaks, the official Wikileaks twitter?

andrewfong• 13 years ago

>> you get the data in its raw form

The Guardian provided raw information as well. You can download the FISA court decision here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/veri...

EDIT: And by download, I mean view the decision in a silly embedded thing-of-a-bob.

hackinthebochs• 13 years ago

This is well and good, but the process is not efficient enough to deal with the sheer volume of leaks in a timely manner.

You seem to imply that anything that can be leaked should be leaked. There is no morality in haphazardly leaking any and all classified information. This is precisely why established news organizations are effective. They have the will to actually vet classified information for things that would count as whistleblowing. Wikileaks has no such motivation.

zwegner• 13 years ago

Well, FWIW, Glenn Greenwald, the reporter who broke this story, has been a staunch supporter of WikiLeaks.

See: http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/4/29/glenn_greenwald_o...

baddox• 13 years ago

Well, the article says "an entity like WikiLeaks," and appears to be referring to its statelessness and ability (or at least willingness) to stay online despite governmental efforts to take the service down. You may be right that WikiLeaks itself is a low-quality or irresponsible example of such an entity, but I still think it's a valid point that these types of entities are beneficial.

commandar6• 13 years ago

Absolutely. I'm completely on board with the concept of an organization acting as an information clearing house for leakers; I just feel that Wikileaks is the wrong organization to be doing the job.

Whether it's intentionally making releases dripping with spin or the inability to function internally (e.g., resulting in the destruction of the Citibank documents), it's clear to me that Wikileaks just isn't up to the job of serving as that sort of clearing house in a credible manner.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be anyone else stepping up to the plate to take up that challenge at the moment.

btilly3• 13 years ago

FYI the redactions of the cables as originally published were done with the assistance of several established news organizations. One of which was The Guardian. Therefore the result you criticize was the result of the same editorial process that you extol.

(As for Wikileaks itself, they eventually released all of the cables without redaction.)

GabrielF005• 13 years ago

One difference is that I can email or call the Times and they are generally responsive. I couldn't contact Wikileaks.

Yes, at first journalists from reputable publications guided the redaction process. However, Wikileaks also gave access to unredacted documents to some very dodgy people, including Israel Shamir, who may have shared documents with the Belarusian dictatorship, leading to arrests of activists (c.f. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/02/why-i-had-to-lea...)

Of course the unredacted documents were ultimately released. This was done, as I understand it, by a combination of a Guardian journalist revealing the password to a file that he thought was not public and WikiLeaks putting that same file on a server.

To quote from The Guardian: >>The newly published archive contains more than 1,000 cables identifying individual activists; several thousand labelled with a tag used by the US to mark sources it believes could be placed in danger; and more than 150 specifically mentioning whistleblowers. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/02/julian-assange-a...

I'm not suggesting that The New York Times or The Guardian are perfect - they aren't - but they have decades of experience balancing the costs and benefits of leaks and overall they do a good job (from the Pentagon Papers to today's report). By comparison, what have we learned from the leaks of the diplomatic cables that was worth people getting arrested by dictatorial regimes or getting killed?

foobarqux6• 13 years ago

> It has a well-known and respected editorial process that can weigh the consequences of a leak versus the potential value to the public.

It is neither well known nor respected. The process is not public and there is a great deal of self-censorship that has nothing to do with public safety. There were examples of this even in the publication of the Wikileaks cables.

GabrielF005• 13 years ago

The New York Times and other media organizations have an independent public editor whose job is to examine and explain how the paper has handled a particular issue and to provide criticism if they feel it is appropriate. They also publish letters to the editor and op-eds by people who disagree.

Again, I'm not saying that the New York Times is perfect, but its a lot better than Wikileaks.

znowi• 13 years ago

> I have a lot more confidence in, say, The New York Times or The Guardian than Wikileaks

So do governments. It's much easier to deal with a newspaper :)

AnthonyMouse3• 13 years ago

>newspapers have a long, successful history of defending their first amendment rights in the courts.

They are also dying. Newspapers make their money from advertising. The price you pay for the paper barely covers the cost of printing and delivering it. But print advertising has fallen off a cliff in the face of the web. You can hear all the old hands complaining about how it's all Google's fault (or whatever), but it isn't anybody's fault, it's just a fact. It's a fact that leaves newspapers without the level of resources they had thirty years ago to fight against government overreach.

And it's another fact that most of those "missing" advertising dollars have gone to the tech sector. Which means we have a responsibility to pick up the slack, one way or another.

lotharbot• 13 years ago

I'm with you. The article assumed that making leaks easier is a good thing. I contend that it should be hard to leak stuff -- you should, at the very least, have to convince an editor whose own credibility (and potentially their job) could be on the line. That sort of process makes it less likely that you'll recklessly endanger people over minor issues.

analog2• 13 years ago

Ironically the unredacted release of the diplomatic cables was caused by the Guardian journalist David Leigh, when he published the password as a chapter heading for his book about Wikileaks.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/09/unredacted_us_...

http://www.amazon.com/WikiLeaks-Inside-Julian-Assanges-Secre...

weland• 13 years ago

> It has a well-known and respected editorial process that can weigh the consequences of a leak versus the potential value to the public.

Unfortunately, the well-known and respected editorial process isn't transparent to the public. I'm not implying this is bad; just that it is vulnerable to being used for hushing up stuff, dusting important (but inconvenient) information under the "not important" carpet.

rdl• 13 years ago

Keeping the data available once someone leaks it has never been the problem (at least, not since the early 1990s). The only value of something like Wikileaks is in sourcing leaks, either by socializing the "whistleblower" values to make leaking more likely, or providing anonymous communications channels and scrubbers to make leaking safer.

In reality, Wikileaks actually set back government accountability -- PFC Manning going to get life, the whole drama related to Julian Assange, rape, and hiding in an embassy, the internal political strife within the organization, etc.

foobarqux6• 13 years ago

Besides security the "value" is primarily distribution and media attention which depends on branding and is difficult to create.

Neither victim alleges rape.

And I'm not sure how, in the same breath, you manage to implicitly criticize what is happening to Manning and Assange trying to avoid the same fate.

sigzero• 13 years ago

I don't agree with that statement at all.

vixen99• 13 years ago

I do not doubt you have good reasons for saying that. But can you share them with us? I contend that isolated opinion from almost anyone is not worth a bag of nuts unless supported by an observation, reason or argument.

surferbayarea2• 13 years ago

Lets look at the issue more deeply. Consider the other end of the spectrum: Say the govt collects no data, no surveillence at airports, no wiretaps, no monitoring of any online channels. Are we ok having our 'privacy' at the cost of security? The sad reality of our world is that there are terrorists, and they need/use things like email/chat/online forums/regular phones for communication.

So the question is where do you draw the line on what is acceptable/not.

The question needs to be looked at a deeper level. Sure, collecting data and having machines do data mining on it is not an invasion of privacy. Thats what these companies do anyway! What defines invasion is the usage. The Fourth Amendment needs a revision to account for the new reality.

Only acceptable use of data should be for detecting patterns that correspond to national/international terror threats.

Unacceptable uses of private data: - if you are evading tax and the government finds out, this data cannot be permissible as evidence in court and/or used to prosecute. - if you committed/planning to commit a crime, this data cannot be used as evidence or to prevent it - the data in general cannot be used as evidence in a court of law or for taking any form of civilian action against an individual

So there is a need to look past the blind 'down with big brother' attitude and decide as a society where to draw the line!

AnthonyMouse3• 13 years ago

>Are we ok having our 'privacy' at the cost of security?

Yes. Security is fiction, the government cannot make you secure. All the government is doing is to make empty promises and spend your money on security theater and surveillance programs that make you less secure by drastically increasing your exposure against malicious governments, which have killed orders of magnitude more innocent people than any terrorists.

Your argument is a straw man. No one is suggesting that the government should be unable to conduct lawful surveillance subject to a warrant based on probable cause "and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." What people are suggesting is that we not have totally unchecked government surveillance power or be forced to design our technological infrastructure with dangerous security vulnerabilities.

542458• 13 years ago

Yes. Security is fiction, the government cannot make you secure. All the government is doing is to make empty promises and spend your money on security theater and surveillance programs that make you less secure [...]

I really can't remember the last time I had to worry about pirates, smallpox, or a nazi invasion. The government cannot make me 100% secure, but they can certainly make me more secure than I would be on my own.

Don't get me wrong, what the NSA is doing is over the line in my opinion, but rhetoric saying that the government is incapable of any sort of security for it's citizens is a bit much.

fosk• 13 years ago

I don't understand why this has been downvoted as it doesn't violate any rule on HN. Even if I personally disagree with the comment, it explores a different point of view and it's a contribution to the discussion.

Downvoting to express disagreement is a plague that must be eradicated.

surferbayarea2• 13 years ago

We are the Borg. Your differing viewpoint will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

dpearson• 13 years ago

Whenever I see someone downvoted for an unpopular (on HN, anyway) opinion, I always upvote the comment, even if I don't believe that the comment otherwise merits an upvote. It's my way of striking back at the practice.

flyinRyan2• 13 years ago

It's being downvoted because it's ignorant, a disgusting view point and doesn't contribute anything useful.

flyinRyan2• 13 years ago

Are we ok having our 'privacy' at the cost of security?

Yes!

The sad reality of our world is that there are terrorists,

Not very many of them. Your chance of being injured by a terrorist are basically zero.

and they need/use things like email/chat/online forums/regular phones for communication.

They can also use things like coffee shops to talk in. We better get mics in there to record every conversation!

So the question is where do you draw the line on what is acceptable/not.

I draw the line on none of it is acceptable. We're fighting a practically non-existent enemy. The government abusing this power is a vastly bigger threat and has already been happening for years.

The US government is simply too corrupt to be trusted with anything that avoids strict checks and balances. Why do you imagine the founding fathers put that stuff in there in the first place?

if you are evading tax and the government finds out, this data cannot be permissible as evidence in court and/or used to prosecute.

For now. But that data will be there forever and attitudes on such things may change. And before you scream "ex post facto" I say look at the case of the guy accessing open AT&T links. That wasn't illegal when he did it, it became a crime well after the fact.

np422• 13 years ago

The "slippery slope" is a real danger when collecting data.

Once we have it piled up in nice data center it would be a shame just to leave it there, and soon everyone and their cousin will be lined up to get a share .. IRS, DEA, FBI and the rest of the alfabet soup. It has pretty much happened already with every government register and I don't see why it wont happen in the future.

And once we start to analyze the data we will see patterns. The guy who stops at the same local pub every day on his way home from work will most probably be scrutinized by both the police and DMV sine driving under the influence of alcohol is considered to be serious matter.

The fact that the pub he visits have the best hamburgers on this side of the Atlantic can't be seen in the gps-location log of his cellphone.

Once people who doesn't follow the ordinary patterns starts to get extra attention from them - the guys with guns and uniforms who have the authority to put you in jail - we will start to self-censor what we say, where we go and in general try to avoid sticking out.

This will hurt our economy, the entrepreneurs who wants to do things in other, better ways isn't there any more - they are buzzy trying to conform. You didn't find to many entrepreneurs in the former eastern block - nor will you find them in your future "balanced" surveillance state.

We will also effectively stop the any development of our society. Not so many years ago homosexuality was a criminal offence, how can the future version of the LGBT-activists possibly assemble, discuss and debate when the rulers of the country knows who and where they are and what they are doing. No more progress and humanism reforms.

We survived the cold war against the Soviet union without having to sacrifice our personal integrity or legal security, and they had spies, infiltrators, actively supported terrorist organizations across Europe and a military with thermonuclear weapons.

Our "enemy" today are a bunch of imbeciles with large beards dressed in nightshirts running around waving with a book that contains as much truth as something written by Brothers Grimm.

And you fear them enough to make the wet dream of stasi a reality?

"First a reasonable suspicion , then limited surveillance" is a principle that have served us well so far, and I hope it will continue to do so.

Unlimited surveillance will lead to unreasonable suspicion, how many honest people should get on the no-fly list of have their job/visa applications turned down for no obvious reason so you can "feel" safe?

Gentlemen don't read each others mail!

adamconroy• 13 years ago

I agree but I'm not sure I want to post that on a public forum (I assume the NSA is parsing HN).

Doh!

webXL• 13 years ago

Or, the NSA story reinforces why limited government is important.

pinaceae• 13 years ago

Doesn't anyone wonder HOW the Guardian got access to those documents? Not only classified, but also to not be shared with foreign allies.

Conspiracy theory: If I were a Chinese official whose team obtained a truckload of these docs - and given the recent rhetoric coming out of Washington, wouldn't that be the perfect punch in the nuts?

tn13• 13 years ago

Things could go either way. Wikileaks just a hipster. It opposes for sake of opposing and it embarrass for the sake of embarrassment.

For all you know wikileaks might be assisted by China.

wr1472• 13 years ago

So what if it is assisted by China? What you imply is that You would rather be fed news and information from just one side of the coin?

I would rather receive my news from multiple sources (who'll have multiple agendas), plus the raw data, and draw my own conclusions.

NIL82• 13 years ago

Curious....

I saw a BBC story about Assange that mentioned his mysterious original programmer. It stated that the original programmer and Assange's co-founders left him to create another Wikileaks-like site.

Does anyone have a URL for this new site?

insteadof• 13 years ago

Might be thinking of OpenLeaks which should be at openleaks.at

NIL82• 13 years ago

Thanks.

washedup• 13 years ago

Agreed. If this surveillance is going to happen, it needs to be a two way street. We should be allowed to know how it is being used and when we are individually being tracked.

The NSA story reinforces why an entity like WikiLeaks is important

Related Stories