4 ms·

Yes, the DNC wouldn't have called them out as fake immediately if they were... Come on. Podesta himself admitted he got hacked and the password he emailed hims

by ZoF 10y ago

Yes, the DNC wouldn't have called them out as fake immediately if they were... Come on. Podesta himself admitted he got hacked and the password he emailed himself in plaintext worked for his other social media accounts.

acdha 10y ago
Think about that a little more in depth: For any one email, it's easy to check and dispute a discrepancy. Checking thousands of emails takes time but you have to take that time to avoid the chance of validating a forgery. During that time, they're in the news a lot and someone may confirm a legitimate email in the dump, which will be taken by many as proof that the entire thing is valid. Many people will never change their memory of that. If you do find anything tampered with, it may be hard or impossible to prove to a level which will satisfy critics. It doesn't need to be provable to the level needed for a court case to be damaging politically – just look at how much mileage the GOP got from birtherism based on repetition and incredibly clumsy forgeries even with contradictory evidence available. So if you compromise a political target's account, you could get the most damage from real dirt but you can get almost as much from a clever forgery among all of the normal office chatter as long as you don't do something like adding a Russian name to the Office metadata or claim something happened when it was unquestionably impossible (e.g. claiming a secret meeting when someone was giving a speech nowhere near the purported location).
- ZoF 10y ago
  Your implication is that I haven't thought about it in depth. I have. I care a lot, about my community, the country and our world. Wikileaks has a 100% accuracy rating(meaning they have not once pushed a falsified leak). You showing other falsifications by other corrupt organizations isn't enough for me to throw away evidence as 'false' when there is no reason to do so. Again, if there was an individual falsification why wouldn't DNC officials call it out? Can you provide me a rational explanation. In the context of a leak dropped a day before the election with no chance to fact check, sure, I could entertain the possibility there might be forgeries to control the election results. Weeks ahead? What is stopping any forgeries from being called out? Where is _your_ proof these are false emails? You have none, because there is none.
  - acdha 10y ago
    Just to start with, remember when Wikileaks doxed millions of ordinary Turkish citizens falsely claiming they were secret documents about the ruling party? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zeynep-tufekci/wikileaks-erdogan-emails_b_11158792.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zeynep-tufekci/wikileaks-erdog... Whatever you may believe about their actions in the past, they don't appear to be checking before publishing much now and that means it's on the reader to look for confirmation rather than credulously assuming nobody would lie about matters of political importance. In this case, we've already seen that cycle with the Guccifer documents being heavily cross-promoted by Russian state media and Wikileaks but showing many signs of modification and misrepresentation (e.g. the alleged Clinton Foundation documents which didn't hold up to non-casual examination). That doesn't mean that Wikileaks might not have real data but it definitely shows that anyone who isn't just looking for propaganda should take time to investigate rather than assuming they're legitimate or correctly summarized.

by ZoF 10y ago

acdha 10y ago

Think about that a little more in depth: For any one email, it's easy to check and dispute a discrepancy. Checking thousands of emails takes time but you have to take that time to avoid the chance of validating a forgery. During that time, they're in the news a lot and someone may confirm a legitimate email in the dump, which will be taken by many as proof that the entire thing is valid. Many people will never change their memory of that. If you do find anything tampered with, it may be hard or impossible to prove to a level which will satisfy critics. It doesn't need to be provable to the level needed for a court case to be damaging politically – just look at how much mileage the GOP got from birtherism based on repetition and incredibly clumsy forgeries even with contradictory evidence available. So if you compromise a political target's account, you could get the most damage from real dirt but you can get almost as much from a clever forgery among all of the normal office chatter as long as you don't do something like adding a Russian name to the Office metadata or claim something happened when it was unquestionably impossible (e.g. claiming a secret meeting when someone was giving a speech nowhere near the purported location).

ZoF 10y ago
Your implication is that I haven't thought about it in depth. I have. I care a lot, about my community, the country and our world. Wikileaks has a 100% accuracy rating(meaning they have not once pushed a falsified leak). You showing other falsifications by other corrupt organizations isn't enough for me to throw away evidence as 'false' when there is no reason to do so. Again, if there was an individual falsification why wouldn't DNC officials call it out? Can you provide me a rational explanation. In the context of a leak dropped a day before the election with no chance to fact check, sure, I could entertain the possibility there might be forgeries to control the election results. Weeks ahead? What is stopping any forgeries from being called out? Where is _your_ proof these are false emails? You have none, because there is none.
- acdha 10y ago
  Just to start with, remember when Wikileaks doxed millions of ordinary Turkish citizens falsely claiming they were secret documents about the ruling party? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zeynep-tufekci/wikileaks-erdogan-emails_b_11158792.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zeynep-tufekci/wikileaks-erdog... Whatever you may believe about their actions in the past, they don't appear to be checking before publishing much now and that means it's on the reader to look for confirmation rather than credulously assuming nobody would lie about matters of political importance. In this case, we've already seen that cycle with the Guccifer documents being heavily cross-promoted by Russian state media and Wikileaks but showing many signs of modification and misrepresentation (e.g. the alleged Clinton Foundation documents which didn't hold up to non-casual examination). That doesn't mean that Wikileaks might not have real data but it definitely shows that anyone who isn't just looking for propaganda should take time to investigate rather than assuming they're legitimate or correctly summarized.