I've seen variants of this argument made up and down this thread, and I don't think it holds any water. And I say this as someone that thinks the NSA's mass sur

I've seen variants of this argument made up and down this thread, and I don't think it holds any water. And I say this as someone that thinks the NSA's mass surveillance is morally wrong, unconstitutional, and probably ultimately counterproductive. I'm willing to stipulate there's an avenue for civil disobedience in which leaking of private information is used as a way to apply pressure to actors within the government and private industry who might be sanctioning the NSA's practices. In other words I could see a course of action that includes widespread, comprehensive attempts to hack and leak the emails of FISA court judges, employees and appointees of US intelligence agencies, executives and board members of companies like AOL, Palantir, and Verizon who are known to have enthusiastically participated in this surveillance, and elected officials in the executive or legislative branches of the government who have supported or perpetuated this spying. The idea being that if the people who keep this system of surveillance grinding onwards experience the personal consequence of having their private info leaked to the public, they might reconsider their actions. I could see a course of action like this and even agree there's some valid arguments for it, but it's also incredibly dangerous, and would require, I dunno, a great deal of judgement and restraint to not cause huge collateral damage to perfectly innocent people, or to end up ruining the lives of people who were only tangential participants in the system. In other words, this strategy is deeply problematic and dangerous at the best of times. But let's not kid ourselves that that's even what's going on here. You could try to argue that Hillary Clinton, as the likely next president, is a part of this system, and so she should be on the list of people who are targeted for leaking in the course of civil disobedience. But Trump also supports this surveillance, so he should too. But the thing is, we don't have to guess at the motives of Wikileaks here, they are quite clearly making no such civil disobedience claims [1]. And if you look at whose information is being leaked—Clinton campaign staffers, the DNC—and estimate where these particular actors fall on the scale of culpability in the NSAs spying (hint: well down the list), you start to see that trying to ascribe some higher civic purpose to these particular leaks isn't warranted. [1] https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/press-release https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/press-release