7 ms·

Snowden and WikiLeaks clash over leaked Democratic Party emails

40 points by tooba 10y ago

venomsnake 10y ago
>The group's recent release of emails from the Democratic National Committee exposed things such as the credit card numbers, social security numbers and passport numbers of some donors -- putting them at risk of identity theft. It is not like any of the people that wrote the information in the emails has any fault, right? It is not Wikileaks' job to save DNC's collective ass. You put your donor's info in jeopardy - you are to blame. If there was common sense in the DNC - the leak would not have been possible.
- formula1 10y ago
  Well, if we are talking about common sense. I should never make a payment transaction online. Never send personal details to doctors, freinds or family. Never provide information under nda to parties online. This isnt a problem of common sense, this is a problem of encryption, who has access and how easy it is to force access. Saving emails could also prove things in the courts defensively if necessary
  - fit2rule 10y ago
    Never do it .. unless its encrypted. (Hint: you can do this pretty easily, if you learn how.) Email is not, by default, encrypted. Anyone on any of the networks between the send and the recipient of any of those emails could have seen this data. The security failure happened when the person composing the email typed in the data that should have been protected. People - especially people in power - need to realize that email is NOT private by default - it is by its very nature, an open and public line of transmission, and can be very, very easily intercepted by interested third parties. So, lets stay focused on the real point where the security failure occurred: whoever typed the data in, in the first place, while composing their 'very important' emails ..
    - formula1 10y ago
      Your expecting people who have spent their lives climbing the political ladder and understanding / memorizing / interpreting law to then be able to know that their emails are viewable by a man in the middle or anyone able to read the harddrive? If anything, this is a problem with their IT staff. Now that being said, the DNC may have not made it obvious that this was necessary and thats where the burden can rest. They knew that everything needed to be secure but either assumed incorrectly that it was encrypted or didnt want to inform IT that there are sensetive materials
      - fit2rule 10y ago
        >Your expecting people who have spent their lives climbing the political ladder and understanding / memorizing / interpreting law to then be able to know that their emails are viewable by a man in the middle or anyone able to read the harddrive? Yes, indeed, I do expect that level of competence from people who aspire to govern the subject.
      - venomsnake 10y ago
        > Your expecting people who have spent their lives climbing the political ladder and understanding / memorizing / interpreting law to then be able to know that their emails are viewable by a man in the middle or anyone able to read the harddrive? Yes, yes I do. It takes less than an hour to learn how to use pgp. It takes less than a second to understand why you don't put passwords, credit card details or root passwords in email. Is that so much to ask from the nation's Ivy League elite?
    - crummy 10y ago
      Would end-to-end encryption have helped this situation at all? None of the emails were intercepted between parties, to my knowledge.
      - nitrogen 10y ago
        It's likely, unless the email dump also included private keys of recipients.
- LA_Banker 10y ago
  It's not Wikileaks' job to save the DNC, but they could claim more moral authority if they didn't so brazenly also play a role in disseminating donor financial information. That's essentially what Snowden is saying. Go ahead and expose things worthy of exposure (by all means!), but doing so in a way that puts others at risk is irresponsible. If your home gets broken into because the door was left unlocked, is the thief innocent because "you are to blame"? No. Sure, you bear some responsibility for not being more responsible and exercising better judgment; but you're not the one who committed the theft.
  - fit2rule 10y ago
    The problem is, the word 'theft'. There is no theft possible in an open protocol such as email. There is only interception and observation - which occurs inherently as a part of the way email is handled. If the original author of the leaked emails had used encryption, none of this would matter. The fact that they chose not to encrypt the contents of the email, instead stupidly thinking that email was secure by nature (it most definitely is NOT), is the real issue here. If I hear you shouting your social security number at the top of your voice to your friend across the room, its not my responsibility that your information is no longer secure or protected. Its yours, and yours alone. The technological incompetence of the authors of DNC emails is the issue here, people. Do you really want someone running the country who can't even fathom the most basic, basic aspects of the technology that runs the world?
    - tedunangst 10y ago
      Even if you hear somebody shouting a secret across the room, you can choose not to rebroadcast that information.
    - csydas 10y ago
      No, this is wrong from a legal standpoint, at least with US law and many EU laws as well. Ownership laws are fairly clear and have lots of precedent in regards to email, and there are also clearly defined cases of theft and violations of the CFAA. Your analogy breaks down in that the leaks are are a result of a breach, most certainly a violation of CFAA. No current understanding of law shares your opinion that because it's an open protocol that you no longer have agency over the content. Security measures were put in place, though certainly not enough to prevent a major leak. Though I hate bringing in analogies, you're not more culpable for your house being broken into just because you don't have 6 cm steel shutters for all openings; it's certainly more secure, but illegal access is illegal access. I say this next part not to be demeaning but to state an assumption of mine, but I'm going to assume you probably dislike the CFAA; I do as well, but to say there's no theft possible is a naive notion in the face of labyrinthine laws. The world has been dealing with email breaches since your average hacker got a home connection fast enough to move a few megabytes of data without timing out. The law's opinion on theft of email is incredibly different from your own.
- detaro 10y ago
  That the DNC is partially at fault doesn't absolve all other involved from their part.
danmaz74 10y ago
Edit: I wrote what is below in response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12197796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12197796 but the mobile client published it on its own... Only now I understand the answers. no, really, no. This is exactly like blaming a woman who was raped because of how she dressed.
- formula1 10y ago
  I understand the metaphor but its really disgusting that you have this kind of language on what should be a superior environment. Delete the comment or explain the metaphor in depth would be preferable over the caustic form its in right now. If I could downvote, I certainly would
  - OneNoteIsFree 10y ago
    You seem new. How many comments here are actual in-depth analysis? Rare. Its all circlejerks (me included). Smart people work quietly.
  - LA_Banker 10y ago
    The metaphor strikes me as somewhat self-explanatory. They could have done more to prevent it, sure, (just like a woman could avoid situations where rape is possible [I guess? I don't even think that's feasible]), but since the crime was committed against them, blaming the victim is just that: victim blaming. It implies the only actor with agency in this scenario is the injured party. As though somehow the perpetrator was naturally bound to commit such an act – and is therefore absolved of guilt.
    - formula1 10y ago
      Exactly. It is victim blaming. But there is no need to bring in such a vision. When I come to this site I expect people to argue about macro politics, building scalable architectures and education. I dont expect to see an offhand comment relating an act on the political scale to someone being physically and emotionally abused.
revelation 10y ago
Hilarious what you can turn into an article these days. The basis of this "clash" seems to be two single tweets.
- d1str0 10y ago
  My thoughts exactly. This article basically just showed two different very small stories and the two tweets. Very short, pointless article.
- Natsu 10y ago
  The WaPo has something more juicy they could investigate, too: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/2699 https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/2699 === From:kaplanj@dnc.org To: RangappaA@dnc.org Date: 2015-09-22 13:29 Subject: Re: WaPo Party Great - we were never going to list since the lawyers told us we cannot do it. We are waiting === They aren’t going to give us a price per ticket and do not want their party to be listed in any package we are selling to donors. If we let them know we have donors in town who will be at the debate, we can add them to the list for the party.
- jjulius 10y ago
  "Breaking news! Two people have different opinions! More at 11."
zitterbewegung 10y ago
This is really illustrative of the motivations of Snowden VS Wikileaks. Wikileaks was founded under the idea that you could disrupt governments by leaking their private data so that they become so paranoid that they can't function. Thats why they don't do any curation. Snowden's motivation is to reform the Intelligence Organizations in the United States. Thats why he supports curation and attempted to make the information that he leaked only have the information to reform. http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf
- raverbashing 10y ago
  Except Wikileaks is hurting people that have nothing to do with the leaked documents, like Democratic campaign donors (even those who donated $5)
  - MichaelGG 10y ago
    It's not nice, but if those people get harassed, then that'll put more pressure on the parties. So it still helps the goal of making it hard for government orgs to operate.
    - tedunangst 10y ago
      Yeah, and if some Republican's daughter gets an abortion, we should totally publish her medical records to prove he's a hypocrite. Maybe next time she'll choose a better father.
    - raverbashing 10y ago
      > making it hard for government orgs to operate Sure, that will be lovely Just remember what might happen if firefighters, police, CDC, FAA, FDA have trouble operating
      - MichaelGG 10y ago
        Not agreeing just saying it clearly adds pressure to the org.
OneNoteIsFree 10y ago
I'm amazed anything that's slightest pro-hillary gets so much attention but nobody talks about how she's paying $6M quarterly to manipulate votes on Reddit
beshrkayali 10y ago
Kind of getting tired of internal intelligence agencies wars getting all this attention...
zackya89 10y ago
Even though I think, Snowden is on the right here, lets not kid ourselves, they using Snowden right now to trash Wikileaks, anyone remember when Snowden leaks came out, he was a russian spy, who apparently went to Russia by himself and dumped American intelligence documents to them. now according to most mainstream publications Wikileaks are shill for Putin, cold war era rhetoric in 2016.
- jonathantm 10y ago
  wat u call trolling when not funny?
- placeybordeaux 10y ago
  Who is 'they'?
  - MichaelGG 10y ago
    Big media outlets and the DNC? CNN even had their frontpage with Trump and Putin pictures side by side saying "Russia Helping Trump?" The actual story was more clear that it was just someone in a campaign accusing Russia. But the headline and setup was obviously intended to convey a different idea. http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-trailguide-updates-hillary-clinton-campaign-raises-1469368571-htmlstory.html http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-trai... http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/24/politics/robby-mook-russia-dnc-emails-trump/ http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/24/politics/robby-mook-russia...
jccc 10y ago
It's illuminating that this isn't framed as Snowden vs. Assange. Certainly if they could frame it that way for their juicy story, they would. We don't know (at least here on HN) who personally posted that reply on the WikiLeaks Twitter feed. It seems reasonable to assume that there are internal differences today just as there were a few years ago when Assange publicly battled a top ex-WikiLeaker, among other conflicts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Defections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Defections So what is "WikiLeaks" to us aside from the material they produce? Aside from that, as has been pointed out, different legitimate tactics can serve different legitimate goals, and in different strategic contexts.

40 points by tooba 10y ago

>The group's recent release of emails from the Democratic National Committee exposed things such as the credit card numbers, social security numbers and passport numbers of some donors -- putting them at risk of identity theft. It is not like any of the people that wrote the information in the emails has any fault, right? It is not Wikileaks' job to save DNC's collective ass. You put your donor's info in jeopardy - you are to blame. If there was common sense in the DNC - the leak would not have been possible.

formula1 10y ago
Well, if we are talking about common sense. I should never make a payment transaction online. Never send personal details to doctors, freinds or family. Never provide information under nda to parties online. This isnt a problem of common sense, this is a problem of encryption, who has access and how easy it is to force access. Saving emails could also prove things in the courts defensively if necessary
- fit2rule 10y ago
  Never do it .. unless its encrypted. (Hint: you can do this pretty easily, if you learn how.) Email is not, by default, encrypted. Anyone on any of the networks between the send and the recipient of any of those emails could have seen this data. The security failure happened when the person composing the email typed in the data that should have been protected. People - especially people in power - need to realize that email is NOT private by default - it is by its very nature, an open and public line of transmission, and can be very, very easily intercepted by interested third parties. So, lets stay focused on the real point where the security failure occurred: whoever typed the data in, in the first place, while composing their 'very important' emails ..
  - formula1 10y ago
    Your expecting people who have spent their lives climbing the political ladder and understanding / memorizing / interpreting law to then be able to know that their emails are viewable by a man in the middle or anyone able to read the harddrive? If anything, this is a problem with their IT staff. Now that being said, the DNC may have not made it obvious that this was necessary and thats where the burden can rest. They knew that everything needed to be secure but either assumed incorrectly that it was encrypted or didnt want to inform IT that there are sensetive materials
    - fit2rule 10y ago
      >Your expecting people who have spent their lives climbing the political ladder and understanding / memorizing / interpreting law to then be able to know that their emails are viewable by a man in the middle or anyone able to read the harddrive? Yes, indeed, I do expect that level of competence from people who aspire to govern the subject.
    - venomsnake 10y ago
      > Your expecting people who have spent their lives climbing the political ladder and understanding / memorizing / interpreting law to then be able to know that their emails are viewable by a man in the middle or anyone able to read the harddrive? Yes, yes I do. It takes less than an hour to learn how to use pgp. It takes less than a second to understand why you don't put passwords, credit card details or root passwords in email. Is that so much to ask from the nation's Ivy League elite?
  - crummy 10y ago
    Would end-to-end encryption have helped this situation at all? None of the emails were intercepted between parties, to my knowledge.
    - nitrogen 10y ago
      It's likely, unless the email dump also included private keys of recipients.
LA_Banker 10y ago
It's not Wikileaks' job to save the DNC, but they could claim more moral authority if they didn't so brazenly also play a role in disseminating donor financial information. That's essentially what Snowden is saying. Go ahead and expose things worthy of exposure (by all means!), but doing so in a way that puts others at risk is irresponsible. If your home gets broken into because the door was left unlocked, is the thief innocent because "you are to blame"? No. Sure, you bear some responsibility for not being more responsible and exercising better judgment; but you're not the one who committed the theft.
- fit2rule 10y ago
  The problem is, the word 'theft'. There is no theft possible in an open protocol such as email. There is only interception and observation - which occurs inherently as a part of the way email is handled. If the original author of the leaked emails had used encryption, none of this would matter. The fact that they chose not to encrypt the contents of the email, instead stupidly thinking that email was secure by nature (it most definitely is NOT), is the real issue here. If I hear you shouting your social security number at the top of your voice to your friend across the room, its not my responsibility that your information is no longer secure or protected. Its yours, and yours alone. The technological incompetence of the authors of DNC emails is the issue here, people. Do you really want someone running the country who can't even fathom the most basic, basic aspects of the technology that runs the world?
  - tedunangst 10y ago
    Even if you hear somebody shouting a secret across the room, you can choose not to rebroadcast that information.
  - csydas 10y ago
    No, this is wrong from a legal standpoint, at least with US law and many EU laws as well. Ownership laws are fairly clear and have lots of precedent in regards to email, and there are also clearly defined cases of theft and violations of the CFAA. Your analogy breaks down in that the leaks are are a result of a breach, most certainly a violation of CFAA. No current understanding of law shares your opinion that because it's an open protocol that you no longer have agency over the content. Security measures were put in place, though certainly not enough to prevent a major leak. Though I hate bringing in analogies, you're not more culpable for your house being broken into just because you don't have 6 cm steel shutters for all openings; it's certainly more secure, but illegal access is illegal access. I say this next part not to be demeaning but to state an assumption of mine, but I'm going to assume you probably dislike the CFAA; I do as well, but to say there's no theft possible is a naive notion in the face of labyrinthine laws. The world has been dealing with email breaches since your average hacker got a home connection fast enough to move a few megabytes of data without timing out. The law's opinion on theft of email is incredibly different from your own.
detaro 10y ago
That the DNC is partially at fault doesn't absolve all other involved from their part.

danmaz74 10y ago

Edit: I wrote what is below in response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12197796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12197796 but the mobile client published it on its own... Only now I understand the answers. no, really, no. This is exactly like blaming a woman who was raped because of how she dressed.

formula1 10y ago
I understand the metaphor but its really disgusting that you have this kind of language on what should be a superior environment. Delete the comment or explain the metaphor in depth would be preferable over the caustic form its in right now. If I could downvote, I certainly would
- OneNoteIsFree 10y ago
  You seem new. How many comments here are actual in-depth analysis? Rare. Its all circlejerks (me included). Smart people work quietly.
- LA_Banker 10y ago
  The metaphor strikes me as somewhat self-explanatory. They could have done more to prevent it, sure, (just like a woman could avoid situations where rape is possible [I guess? I don't even think that's feasible]), but since the crime was committed against them, blaming the victim is just that: victim blaming. It implies the only actor with agency in this scenario is the injured party. As though somehow the perpetrator was naturally bound to commit such an act – and is therefore absolved of guilt.
  - formula1 10y ago
    Exactly. It is victim blaming. But there is no need to bring in such a vision. When I come to this site I expect people to argue about macro politics, building scalable architectures and education. I dont expect to see an offhand comment relating an act on the political scale to someone being physically and emotionally abused.

revelation 10y ago

Hilarious what you can turn into an article these days. The basis of this "clash" seems to be two single tweets.

d1str0 10y ago
My thoughts exactly. This article basically just showed two different very small stories and the two tweets. Very short, pointless article.
Natsu 10y ago
The WaPo has something more juicy they could investigate, too: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/2699 https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/2699 === From:kaplanj@dnc.org To: RangappaA@dnc.org Date: 2015-09-22 13:29 Subject: Re: WaPo Party Great - we were never going to list since the lawyers told us we cannot do it. We are waiting === They aren’t going to give us a price per ticket and do not want their party to be listed in any package we are selling to donors. If we let them know we have donors in town who will be at the debate, we can add them to the list for the party.
jjulius 10y ago
"Breaking news! Two people have different opinions! More at 11."

zitterbewegung 10y ago

This is really illustrative of the motivations of Snowden VS Wikileaks. Wikileaks was founded under the idea that you could disrupt governments by leaking their private data so that they become so paranoid that they can't function. Thats why they don't do any curation. Snowden's motivation is to reform the Intelligence Organizations in the United States. Thats why he supports curation and attempted to make the information that he leaked only have the information to reform. http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf http://cryptome.org/0002/ja-conspiracies.pdf

raverbashing 10y ago
Except Wikileaks is hurting people that have nothing to do with the leaked documents, like Democratic campaign donors (even those who donated $5)
- MichaelGG 10y ago
  It's not nice, but if those people get harassed, then that'll put more pressure on the parties. So it still helps the goal of making it hard for government orgs to operate.
  - tedunangst 10y ago
    Yeah, and if some Republican's daughter gets an abortion, we should totally publish her medical records to prove he's a hypocrite. Maybe next time she'll choose a better father.
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    > making it hard for government orgs to operate Sure, that will be lovely Just remember what might happen if firefighters, police, CDC, FAA, FDA have trouble operating
    - MichaelGG 10y ago
      Not agreeing just saying it clearly adds pressure to the org.

OneNoteIsFree 10y ago

I'm amazed anything that's slightest pro-hillary gets so much attention but nobody talks about how she's paying $6M quarterly to manipulate votes on Reddit

beshrkayali 10y ago

Kind of getting tired of internal intelligence agencies wars getting all this attention...

zackya89 10y ago

Even though I think, Snowden is on the right here, lets not kid ourselves, they using Snowden right now to trash Wikileaks, anyone remember when Snowden leaks came out, he was a russian spy, who apparently went to Russia by himself and dumped American intelligence documents to them. now according to most mainstream publications Wikileaks are shill for Putin, cold war era rhetoric in 2016.

jonathantm 10y ago
wat u call trolling when not funny?
placeybordeaux 10y ago
Who is 'they'?
- MichaelGG 10y ago
  Big media outlets and the DNC? CNN even had their frontpage with Trump and Putin pictures side by side saying "Russia Helping Trump?" The actual story was more clear that it was just someone in a campaign accusing Russia. But the headline and setup was obviously intended to convey a different idea. http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-trailguide-updates-hillary-clinton-campaign-raises-1469368571-htmlstory.html http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-trai... http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/24/politics/robby-mook-russia-dnc-emails-trump/ http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/24/politics/robby-mook-russia...

jccc 10y ago

It's illuminating that this isn't framed as Snowden vs. Assange. Certainly if they could frame it that way for their juicy story, they would. We don't know (at least here on HN) who personally posted that reply on the WikiLeaks Twitter feed. It seems reasonable to assume that there are internal differences today just as there were a few years ago when Assange publicly battled a top ex-WikiLeaker, among other conflicts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Defections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks#Defections So what is "WikiLeaks" to us aside from the material they produce? Aside from that, as has been pointed out, different legitimate tactics can serve different legitimate goals, and in different strategic contexts.