
WikiLeaks plans to release documents on US election and Google - Tomte
http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/4/13159914/wikileaks-hillary-clinton-julian-assange-google
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6stringmerc
Assange says he plans to release amazing, controversial, perception shattering
documents, yes? Well, I plan to make a fortune in screenwriting and music, buy
a white Lamborghini Countach, a house on Maui next door to Willie Nelson, and
get a pet Wallaby. In this context I'm pretty certain the odds are about
equal. Please pardon my tongue-in-cheek cynicism regarding the significance of
Wikileaks releases vs. the seeming pathological need for attention by its
founder.

~~~
colordrops
It always blows my mind how much people like Assange and Snowden and Musk get
attacked for trying to make the world better while the countless number of
corrupt cowards that are in power come off relatively unscathed by these types
of criticisms, at least on Hacker News. Why? Why would you attack someone who
is trying to democratize power and uncover corruption? Even if the person in
question has character flaws, that is by far low on the priority list for
reasons to go after someone.

~~~
crystaln
Can you really look at the circus Assange is creating, and the way he plans to
dribble out documents starting a month before an election, and conclude he is
acting ethically and altruistically? No.

Yes wikileaks has done very good things for the world. No, Assange is not the
moral actor he claims to be.

~~~
eikenberry
Why would the timing indicate him not acting ethically? He might just realize
that information leaks are time sensitive, that when you release them is
almost as important as what they contain.

~~~
kbenson
If your objective is to _inform_ the public, you get the information out with
time to spare so it can be investigated and objectively assessed. If your
objective is to _sway_ the public, you release at a time of greatest impact
where people's reaction to the accusations and implications will drive their
actions, instead of the _complete_ facts of the matter, which it would be
silly to assume Wikileaks could provide (there's always context that can be
added).

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Mc_Big_G
Why not just release it? Maybe because you're massaging it to match your
agenda? Assange and Wikileaks have failed in transparency and in being
impartial bearers of facts. They seem to be in the same league as tabloids
now. What a shame.

~~~
mladenkovacevic
Massaging what? Which agenda? Don't they just usually release a dump of
whatever information they have which is as close to transparent and impartial
facts as you can get, but it's also exactly what most people criticize about
them.

Generally, people prefer the leaker-journalist relationship, where the
journalist is careful not to release info that would be damaging to
individuals, or not relevant to whatever story they're trying to cover.

Your particular criticism doesn't apply here and it seems like you just don't
like Wikileaks for one reason or another so you wanted to write a disparaging
sentence about them.

~~~
wfo
Assange has explicitly stated a goal for the organization is to harm Hillary
Clinton, out of revenge for her coming after him during her time as Secretary
of State. And obviously here, they are trying to plan their info dump to
maximize the damage it does to her political campaign.

They do not just blindly dump information to the ether, they sit and wait and
dump information that is the most damaging at the most opportune time.

Whether or not you think they're doing public good probably depends on your
perception of Hillary Clinton and how much you care about the collateral
damage they cause but don't pretend they don't have an agenda.

~~~
sqeaky
> Whether or not you think they're doing public good probably depends on your
> perception of Hillary Clinton

This implies that one builds a perception, then evaluates information in that
context. Many people do this and it is sad.

We should be using information to evaluate, and not our preconceived notions.

The only way Assange has "damaging" information for either candidate is if
those candidate did something wrong and covered it up. Shouldn't we the
information (once vetted) to evaluate our next president?

~~~
sushisource
Oh, ok, so if we just pretend that all humans are perfectly objective then
it's not an issue?

Ridiculous.

~~~
sqeaky
I never said that we pretend I said that we should try to be.

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randomgyatwork
I bet the October surprise is that no one cares.

~~~
Jtsummers
So far it's less interesting than that. I get the idea of stretching the
release out to maintain interest and let, perhaps, a topic be a focus for a
week at a time.

But this is getting tiresome. The talk about this has been going on for months
now. And now it's October and the only thing we've got is that something's
going to be released.

They're going to lose any interest very quickly because of this unless it's
truly damning material.

~~~
ubernostrum
Plus WikiLeaks' own reputation took a pretty nasty hit with the Turkish email
release; it didn't contain any kind of deep state secrets, but did open up a
treasure trove of information that could be used to persecute already-
disadvantaged people:

 _Journalists and anti-censorship activists who I am in touch with in Turkey
have been combing through the leaked documents, and I am not aware of anything
“newsworthy” being uncovered. According to the collective searching capacity
of long-term activists and journalists in Turkey, none of the “Erdogan emails”
appear to be emails actually from Erdogan or his inner circle. Nobody seems to
be able to find a smoking gun exposing people in positions of power and
responsibility. This doesn’t rule out something eventually emerging, but there
have been several days of extensive searching._

 _However, WikiLeaks also posted links on social media to its millions of
followers via multiple channels to a set of leaked massive databases
containing sensitive and private information of millions of ordinary people,
including a special database of almost all adult women in Turkey._

 _Yes — this “leak” actually contains spreadsheets of private, sensitive
information of what appears to be every female voter in 79 out of 81 provinces
in Turkey, including their home addresses and other private information,
sometimes including their cellphone numbers._

Source: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zeynep-tufekci/wikileaks-
erdog...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zeynep-tufekci/wikileaks-erdogan-
emails_b_11158792.html)

Plus the DNC leak created a strong impression in many peoples' minds that it
was a deliberate attempt by a foreign power (guess who...) to try to tip the
US election to the candidate they favored (hint: name rhymes with "Ronald
Rump"). So there's some irony if WikiLeaks is now going to publish allegations
of someone else influencing the election.

~~~
makomk
_WikiLeaks also posted links on social media to its millions of followers via
multiple channels to a set of leaked massive databases containing sensitive
and private information of millions of ordinary people, including a special
database of almost all adult women in Turkey._

The remarkable thing about this is that, almost universally, the media
organisations who claim this condemns Wikileaks support the person who
actually uploaded all that personal information and gave everyone the link,
claiming it was something else. Some of them, like Wired, have even argued he
did absolutely nothing wrong. It's almost like no-one actually cares about
that sensitive information being exposed to the world, just attacking
Wikileaks.

~~~
ubernostrum
The guy who uploaded it (IIRC) also later took down the original upload and
said he regretted what he'd done.

WL... not so much with the regrets. That can make a big difference in how
people react; "I realize I did a bad thing and now feel bad about it" gets
sympathy while doubling down doesn't.

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moduspwnens14
Wasn't a major search engine making changes to affect an election a
significant plot point in the last season of House of Cards?

~~~
jfoster
As I recall, the search engine was using data about search behaviour to inform
the campaign of one of the candidates. Such data would be useful for deciding
on policy stances as well as measuring campaign effectiveness.

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clydethefrog
Google and the US election? My bet is on someone leaked internal files of Eric
Schmidt-backed startup The Groundwork [1]. Although it's now working under the
name of Timshel [2], my previous link redirects to that website now. They were
hiring here with that link here a year ago. [3]

[1] [http://thegroundwork.com/jobs/](http://thegroundwork.com/jobs/) [2]
[https://timshel.com/](https://timshel.com/) [3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=loomin-
arty](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=loomin-arty)

~~~
Jtsummers
I find that user name (loomin-arty) rather amusing in the context of the
replies discussing the role of the company in elections and collecting voter
(and other) information. Just needs an "i" in front of it.

~~~
eropple
(Don't explain the joke, man.)

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daveguy
Wait. So the big press conference today was to announce that they would be
releasing information weekly for the next 10 weeks?

Well, that's underwhelming.

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castis
I agree that Hillary needs to be held accountable for her actions and should
not be president. However, this sort of thing leaves me worried. If this leak
were to put an end to her eligibility (in his words "@HillaryClinton is
done.") would another democrat step into her place and/or would that make it
easier for Trump to win?

~~~
saalweachter
Just out of curiosity, which of Clinton's actions would you most like to see
her held accountable for?

~~~
r_smart
Not OP, and not sure I'd say 'held accountable', but I'll take a shot. I think
there needs to be an _honest_ investigation into the Clinton Foundation and
whether or not there is a pay for play situation going on there. It could be
nothing, but it also could be one of the deepest corruption scandals in the
history of the country. The fact that most news organizations have shit the
bed in their effort to stop Trump means that it's been almost completely
ignored. That's my top pick.

*edit: removed redundant redundancy, also corrected word typo.

~~~
allemagne
>It could be nothing, but it also could be one of the deepest corruption
scandals in the history of the country.

That seems to be the theme of Hillary scandals. It's always some superlative
outcome. Either she is going to be exposed as a mastermind or "oh nevermind I
guess that's not a big deal after all." It's absurd. An opponent of Clinton
making a more modest critique than "she is the antichrist" would be very
refreshing.

Conservatives and Bernie supporters spent months fuming over how email servers
showed exactly how evil Clinton was and the most that came out of it was
apparently "extreme carelessness." Years of Benghazi and nothing to show for
it but words to be poorly scrawled on protest signs for at least another year
or so.

I am definitely not informed enough to determine whether or not there is or
isn't merit to any given controversy or scandal. There are probably a handful
of people who could possibly know for sure. She is definitely one of the most
powerful people in the world. She is certainly capable of conspiracy. But I
know there are also powerful people who are would benefit a lot from harming
her career and her image.

Honestly, it's at least worth considering that innuendo, accusations, and
connecting dots that aren't there, or are there in a much less dramatic form,
are all much cheaper than actually pulling off conspiracies.

~~~
r_smart
Agreed. I did my best to come across as measured and non-accusatory in my
post. I'm very specifically not saying there's anything wrong, but there's
evidence that there's some pretty deep corruption here. The trouble is, she
seems to be untouchable. People don't seem interested in seriously pursuing
investigations into her and her husband, and so you're stuck with apocalypse
scenarios and people hand-waving it all away as fine. I don't think either are
true.

I remember when I got my first degree, in journalism (kinda), it was generally
considered that the Watergate scandal would never get published in the modern
age. I think the Clintons are pretty much the proof of that.

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dmihal
Why do news sites continue to post articles that WikiLeaks "plans" to release
documents?

