
Provenence for wikileaks material - prestonbriggs
Why does anyone give credence to material from Wikileaks? Seems trivial to edit&#x2F;create text files purporting to be stolen email than to actually hack someone&#x27;s email account. Does (or can) Wikileaks provide any sort of believable provenance for their material?
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greenyoda
The main things that support the credibility of these mails is that:

\- If they were fake (i.e., not real e-mails that were stolen), the people
involved wouldn't be blaming the hack on the Russians. They'd be saying they
were fake.

\- Hillary Clinton actually addressed some of the issues brought up in one of
the e-mails during the last debate (the excerpt from her Goldman Sachs speech
in which she talked about saying different things in public and private). If
the e-mails were fake, she'd just say so and not feel the need to justify what
she was quoted as saying.

 _" Seems trivial to edit/create text files purporting to be stolen email..."_

It would be a lot of work to create thousands (maybe tens of thousands by now)
of fake e-mails that could plausibly come from John Podesta and the people he
exchanged e-mails with. And unless the fakes were created by a group of
insiders who knew these people and their dealings very well, there would
inevitably be all sorts of errors that would make the fakes easy to disprove.
(Remember that all these e-mails are published on Wikileaks' web site, and
anyone can pick through them if they want to try disproving them.)

