
Wikileaks: Police Arrested Movie Pirate As “A Personal Favor” To Movie Official - there
http://torrentfreak.com/wikileaks-police-arrested-movie-pirate-as-a-personal-favor-to-movie-official-110430/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Torrentfreak+%28Torrentfreak%29
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grandalf
I hope by now those on HN skeptical of Wikileaks have been sufficiently won
over.

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pyre
How so? Those that have argued against Wikileaks on here have argued against
the 'shotgun' approach to releasing all of the cables regardless of whether or
not they contain incriminating evidence.

How is finding bad things within the deluge of cables going to win someone
with that opinion over?

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grandalf
I think the reason Wikileaks has not filtered the cables (aside from some
minor redacting to avoid putting lives at risk) is to retain credibility as an
unbiased reporting organization.

We have learned that (in the case of the Iraq/Afghanistan releases), much of
what was deemed "secret" was done so simply to prevent embarrassing info from
entering the public domain. In other words, for propaganda reasons. There was
not any national security or safety reason to keep the information secret.

Filtering the cables to reflect what one group deems "incriminating" would be
just another form of propaganda, something Wikileaks does not wish to engage
in.

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defroost
> Filtering the cables to reflect what one group deems "incriminating" would
> be just another form of propaganda, something Wikileaks does not wish to
> engage in.

Exactly. And it is certainly news to me that anyone here on HN is critical of
WikiLeaks as they have done what any journalists do: by shining a light on the
worlds most powerful for the benefit of all of us. There is no real difference
between how WikiLeaks or The NY Times achieve their goals, except WikiLeaks is
not beholden to anyone, so the have more credibility. Unlike Bill Keller and
the NYTimes, they don't work with the White House to see if it is OK to print
something. Because they are a stateless entity, they are able to break more
stories than any news agency, and this year have broken more than all of them
combined. But they have done so at great personal sacrifice. Julian Assange
(and WikiLeaks) whatever your personal feeling are about them, have made an
enormous personal sacrifices so that we may all benefit. Aside from the usual
arguments that have been soundly debunked about the dangers of mass dumping
un-redacted documents, what fault could anyone at HN possibly have with WL?

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grandalf
Well said. Bill Keller has really lost a lot of credibility as a journalist
with his ad hominem attacks against Assanage and tabloidesque coverage of many
matters relating to Wikileaks.

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killerswan
I have heard unverifiable stories of similar "personal favors" in San
Francisco, too. Not to mention the legal wild-west that is China and India...

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rprasad
He committed the crime,and was successfully prosecuted for it. The personal
favor was not the arrest, it was assigning an agent or two to investigate the
case.

This is not much different from asking your cop friend to give a ticket to
your neighbor for parking too far out into the street, or asking the zoning
board to investigate a neighbor's unapproved addition.

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rbanffy
> He committed the crime

Unless I misread the article, camming was not a crime where he lived at the
time he was arrested. What the article describes is the police harassing
someone because someone with lots of resources asked politely for an illegal
favor. Or, to put it more bluntly, the police decided it was OK to break the
law because the MPAA asked for it.

