This unacceptable and outright disgusting. For me, Wikileaks lost all credibility. It is wrong to violate the privacy and confidentiality of employees and contacts of the company. It does not matter if there are clues of wrongdoing or if somebody calls the contents trivial.
Government ties, connections to the military industry and support for politicians? How is that a scandal? And how is that worth violating people's rights. Nothing is redacted. Nothing is explained in context. This is awful.
If something is worth a scandal, it's the chutzpa of Wikileaks.
I'm having trouble falling on either side of this whole-heartedly. On one hand privacy, rights… On the other, secrecy at the heart of how our societies function, trivialization of democracy, public interest, free press.
Take this example (pointed out by randomname2):
"NY law only allows corporations to give him $5,000 (which we’ve done)… and, with Michael’s support, we are trying to raise $50k overall. This means I need to ask individual senior execs for support… ..consider contributing $5,000 to Gov. Cuomo?"
This is at the heart of how a lot of our democratic systems work, the money-in-politics question, the corruption of our systems of government. Surely that's something that is important to bring into the light, no?
The criticism I've had with wikileaks from the start is still somewhat valid. Wikileaks are press. We have a culture of protecting, empowering & respecting the press. We have legal protections for the press. There are cultures within the press for balancing need to know against other considerations. But wikileaks (mores earlier on) never really saw or projected themselves this way, free press. To most people, including their supports they always seemed more like activists than journalists.
When Assange was originally targeted I stopped to sign a petition in Melbourne. I read it. A Caricaturized synopsis might be "Free Assange! Free Gaza. Troops Out of Iraq! Fuck America! Abortion! Gays! Aboriginal RIghts! Like I said, caricature. But I don't think these guys were a million miles away from how wikileaks saw (or at least presented) themselves. Activists more than press.
I think that's part of the problem you are sort of pointing to. Activists stealing documents sounds different to journalists with secret sources. The latter is an important part of democracy.
"WikiLeaks is an international, non-profit,[3] journalistic[6][7][8] organisation, which publishes secret information, news leaks,[9] and classified media from anonymous sources.[3][10]."
Based on the number of references for that sentence, I think we can conclude you are not the only one disputing this. What's your definition of press or what disqualifies Wikleaks?
But here my point is, the press instead dumps whole swaths of radioactive waste pretending to be "information" on public that is definitely not in the public interest.
While I agree that it's distasteful revealing people's email, and I've had no interest in looking in what was revealed, it's not clear to me what rights are being violated here. These were corporate accounts, and, anyone who is an employee of a corporation, knows that every email they write/send on a corporate mail server, absolutely can come into public purview, quite often during legal discovery. The old saying, "Do not put anything in email if you don't want it to appear on the front page of the New York Times" is absolutely correct.
(True story - while I was working for desktop support at Netscape, one of my fellow technicians ended up having one of his emails end up in the New York Times - and he had sent it to our internal lawyers. Turns out even that can't protect you).
Sony probably has strong grounds to come after whoever breached their security, and send them to prison for many, many years - but I don't know if their are specific individual "rights" being breached by wikileaks here.
What exactly are in these emails that are in the greater public interest? It isn't them lobbying for their own interests, as everyone here would be doing the same scraping money together for their small startups. The whole reason these docs were leaked in the first place was because someone didn't like the premise of a movie. Not because Sony was allowing chemical spills to poison people in a small town and are covering it up.
There is no "greater interest" here other than people wanting to stick it to Sony because they won't let you download their movies for $1 the day they hit the theater.
anyone who is an employee of a corporation, knows that every email they write/send on a corporate mail server, absolutely can come into public purview
Is this coming from the HN crowd that registers domains with contact information anonymity enabled, loves to incorporate in Delaware and complains about privacy and NSA spy programs?
Could you please turn your emails public so we can review them in case you might be doing something wrong? No? Thought so.
It's for the courts to decide if Sony is doing something wrong. Wikileaks is a nice idea and I've supported them for a while, but they can't help but shoot themselves in the foot with dubious behavior like this.
Corporate != private. Companies are subject to a large number of restrictions in a tradeoff for limited liability. People acting on behalf of the company are substantially shielded from personal liability for their actions - but the business must be subject to scrutiny.
Private individuals don't have to file audited accounts, for one thing, just a tax return.
Perhaps part of the reason that people are so OK with mass publication of private emails not specifically tied to anything is because they have lost faith in the laws and the institutions tasked with maintaining them. That I can relate to, but I don't think it justifies what WikiLeaks is doing.
One key difference, of course, is that the NSA is spying on everyone, and has all the powers of a government agency, and its many billions of dollars.
What both of them are doing is distasteful.
To some degree, though, I compare this behavior to that guy who walks up to people with a video camera, a couple feet away, and just points it at them. They become very uncomfortable, and upset, and yell at him.
What he's doing with this "performance art" - as annoying as it is, is making people realize that they are already under constant surveillance.
Anybody who previously didn't understand why privacy is so important to individuals, making them claim, "Oh, I have nothing to hide." - certainly is probably aware now how important it is to them after the Sony Dump.
And, while not defending WikiLeaks (much), can we at least agree that there is a difference between dumping people's personal emails/photos (which is 100% unjustifiable) and exposing corporate machinations of Sony?
Your interpretation of corruption may not be equal to its lawful meaning. If you have a problem with the donations to for example Cuomo, than you can lobby for change (e.g. by donating to a politician who shares your view).
Again, there is no reason for violating people's rights even when they can be _accused_ of wrongdoing. It is for courts to decide.
This is exactly the reason this question is difficult, with a strong case on both sides.
There are laws. Those laws have intent. Then, there is the actual behavior of individuals and corporations in practice. Loopholes, perhaps intentionally left open. There is a law limiting corporate donations. There is a practice for circumventing it. Without reveals like this, it looks like lots of private individuals donated money but in reality, a corporation effectively got around the legal restriction placed on it.
Those restrictions are there to prevent auctioning off legislation and policy. This is no joke.
These are not pictures of your wife in lingerie. This is squarely in the public interest. It's in the pubic interest to have the law updated so that this will be illegal, so that courts can do something about it.
Getting a political message out there costs money, just as everything else - small parties can't even afford to mailshot the electorate in order to identify their beliefs.
Promoting an anti-donation message directly benefits Cuomo and the parties of big business and finance. Their backers are not going to hear that message, and their opponents' backers are more likely to act on it.
That's not the only way. You can vote for the politician who shares your views. You still have democracy in America, you can still vote. But somehow most Americans always vote for politicians who support those donations.
A human framed lawful meaning is not the same as a morally correct meaning. What your essentially saying is that if we want to end corruption then we need to partake in corruption ourselves (bribe a politician for change).
I don't have $5k of disposable income to give to a political candidate willy-nilly. Sony's execs apparently do. That puts them at an advantage in our supposedly-democratic system.
Compare the recent rise of public video documenting US police shootings. There's no way the alleged wrongdoing would be seriously investigated if there wasn't video widely available to the public.
Ah yes, bully the bully. I'm sure the NSA will remember this legal defense when its on trial for corporate espionage. We only hacked & spied on Apple because they were bullying 3rd party developers!
The NSA will never be on trial for corporate espionage, so I'm not sure what you're going on about.
The problem with the NSA is that they're a government entity doing something very dangerous from a democratic point of view and of dubious value overall. It's a totally different problem from private citizens publishing stuff they may or may not be entitled to.
Why have they lost your respect now and not years ago? Didn't they publish 750,000 unrelated and benign files along with the couple of files that showed government wrongdoing when they leaked Manning's stuff? Its not like Wikileaks changed recently, its more like people are just finding out what Wikileaks is.
So official government emails vs official company emails? These weren't individuals' private emails, they were emails sent on company information systems. When you send private emails on a company system, they become company emails.
There is definitely a difference between the two, but I don't think it matters much in these particular cases.
"Government ties, connections to the military industry and support for politicians? How is that a scandal?"
The archive is made public to enable us to find out exactly that.
Edit: so many angry reactions. I was answering to a post that seem to hold the point that it wouldn't be a scandal, if a multinational company buys influence from politics. With this I indeed disagree.
What your comments suggest is that I think it is ok to publish illegally hacked material. I don't and I did not write that.
On the other hand I have some trust in wikileaks that they don't publish the data just for everybody to sneak into private affairs. I expect it to contain proof of illegal action. That's now for journalists and investigators to find out.
But there is still the issue of illegally acquired data. Where I come from, this must not even be used in court and thus would be worthless.
This kind of implies that all private company correspondence is "fair game" for us to find out if they're doing anything bad if you're clever enough to obtain it. e.g. via hacking, whistleblowing, crappy security policies, etc.
Yeah, I don't understand. If the government hacked a private corporation and published 50,000 internal documents online, there would be a shitstorm. But some group of rogue hackers does it and suddenly it might be ok? What's the difference?
The difference is that the duties of government are clearly spelled in law, and are financed by everyone. You don't get a choice on whether to obey to your government or not, and in a democracy this is balanced by giving everyone a chance to influence such government, so that it can represent everyone's views as closely as possible (well, that's the theory at least).
With a private entity, that's not the case. If you don't like Wikileaks, you're free not to support them, or even fight them in court if you want. Wikileaks works under the umbrella of journalism/free speech laws, if there is a public interest in the matter then they should be left free to continue doing it.
Ah, so if the government had just contracted out the NSA's services and had them act as a private corporation rather than have the NSA be a government entity, then their actions would have been 100% a-ok.
No, because the money would still come from "everyone", and the government would still be "doing" something.
If the NSA was a completely privately-owned corporation without any ties to the government, yeah, the judgement would be different (likely still negative, since no private actor can legally compromise networks like they do).
I think we've already had this conversation. It would be legal, yes; it wouldn't necessarily be "ok" from a moral/ethical/philosophical/whatever point of view, in the same way as cutting a thief's hand is legal in Saudi Arabia.
It doesn't matter anyway, bringing in the NSA on this is a red herring.
Yup exactly. I'm assuming GP is anti-NSA eavesdropping (he/she posts on HN) so it makes it even more eye-opening how quickly he/she turned to "if they have nothing to hide..." when the victim is someone else.
One force having all knowledge and controlling it, even using their advantage of information asymmetry to control it, I would say, is different enough from EVERYONE KNOWING THE TRUTH, that yes, perhaps we can have this discussion.
All your private correspondences is already fair game to those with the power to silence you, torture you, cage you for life, and worse. Yet there is so much outrage when the general public, which holds little power in comparison, gets a glimpse to the inner workings of the elite (such as mega corporate entities).
"It is wrong to violate the privacy and confidentiality of employees and contacts of the company"
I don't see a problem here. It's not like private communication was leaked, it's a business communication from a mega corp that happened to reveal a lot of dirty details from inside the industry, so public should know that. If you used business email for personal communication, well then, next time you should know better.
This is more freedom and more transparency. What is wrong with that?
Remember, openness and transparency has many levels. You may be at different level than Wikileaks. If this level of openness is uncomfortable, so be it but there may be many who feel, this level is ok. Look at how some Govt's point at others as closed societies. Just in this case, there is some one who took more higher level of openness than traditional ones.
>> "This is freedom and complete transparency. What is wrong with that?"
It's stolen documents of a private company. Most of the information is nothing more than embarrassing.
>> "If this level of openness is uncomfortable, so be it but there may be many who feel, this level is ok."
So you publish your communications openly then? Seriously, one minute HN is complaining (rightly so) about government invasions of privacy and the next it's congratulating theft of private communications from someone it doesn't like.
Wikileaks has lost what little remaining credibility it had in my eyes. This is little more than stolen documents to satisfy the kinds of people that read gossip sites.
I'm not arguing against your position that the legal workings of a corporation, in the context of fair laws administered by a legitimate government, should not be splashed around.
But, if you believe we don't have a legitimate government specifically because some big corporations have bought the government, there really is no barrier between those corporations and the government they bought, and there is no difference leaking government or corporate documents.
Evidently, the people at Wikileaks think the latter.
I agree, in fact the lobbying system really bothers me. If that was all that Wikileaks published I might not have a big problem. But they didn't redact, they released everything, the majority of which just satisfies voyeurism.
Lobbying, if it is clean and transparent, and there is good access from expert organizations that are not just a fig leaf for buying the government, is fine and healthy. But, in contrast, secret influence-buying to enshrine bad copyright law into a hard-to-modify treaty, is not so good.
All societies, at some point in the past, may have started at similar level of privacy ...etc. Due to various reasons, if we see now, some societies are more open than the rest and this is due to the choices they made consciously or accidentally or made by influencing entities in those societies. Wikileaks is following the same trend but may be with more speed/velocity.
If we see history, there are no absolute boundaries of privacy and it changes with time and it may feel outrageous now but if we see multiple similar incidents, then it becomes natural,common and after few years, it becomes standard of life and I won't be surprised if future generations in these societies feel proud of that level of transparency and make fun of those who lack that level of openness.
That's fine but you can't force openness (because it aligns with your beliefs) through theft. Society has been becoming more open (as people tweet and blog publicly) but forcing the changes you want through illegal means, especially when there is no consensus that that is what society as a whole would like, is wrong.
No one is forcing openness here. You are not in "follow it or else" situation. You can just ignore as if nothing has happened. Where is force applied? It is imaginary.
In many cases, people act without consensus based on their decisions. Did you take consensus before posting above message? Just like you did what you thought as right, some one else make other decisions w.r.t wikileaks. Always, there will be initiative and later on consensus comes into picture.
>This is more freedom and more transparency. What is wrong with that?
People have an inherent right to privacy, and they don't (generally) forfeit that right when they decide to coordinate their actions with other people (within or without the context of a corporation) that also have a right to privacy.
Government ties, connections to the military industry and support for politicians? How is that a scandal? And how is that worth violating people's rights. Nothing is redacted. Nothing is explained in context. This is awful.
If something is worth a scandal, it's the chutzpa of Wikileaks.