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Wikileaks: Police Arrested Movie Pirate As “A Personal Favor” To Movie Official
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- grandalf 15y agoI hope by now those on HN skeptical of Wikileaks have been sufficiently won over.
- pyre 15y agoHow so? Those that have argued against Wikileaks on here have argued against the 'shotgun' approach to releasing all of the cables regardless of whether or not they contain incriminating evidence. How is finding bad things within the deluge of cables going to win someone with that opinion over?
- grandalf 15y agoI think the reason Wikileaks has not filtered the cables (aside from some minor redacting to avoid putting lives at risk) is to retain credibility as an unbiased reporting organization. We have learned that (in the case of the Iraq/Afghanistan releases), much of what was deemed "secret" was done so simply to prevent embarrassing info from entering the public domain. In other words, for propaganda reasons. There was not any national security or safety reason to keep the information secret. Filtering the cables to reflect what one group deems "incriminating" would be just another form of propaganda, something Wikileaks does not wish to engage in.
- defroost 15y ago> Filtering the cables to reflect what one group deems "incriminating" would be just another form of propaganda, something Wikileaks does not wish to engage in. Exactly. And it is certainly news to me that anyone here on HN is critical of WikiLeaks as they have done what any journalists do: by shining a light on the worlds most powerful for the benefit of all of us. There is no real difference between how WikiLeaks or The NY Times achieve their goals, except WikiLeaks is not beholden to anyone, so the have more credibility. Unlike Bill Keller and the NYTimes, they don't work with the White House to see if it is OK to print something. Because they are a stateless entity, they are able to break more stories than any news agency, and this year have broken more than all of them combined. But they have done so at great personal sacrifice. Julian Assange (and WikiLeaks) whatever your personal feeling are about them, have made an enormous personal sacrifices so that we may all benefit. Aside from the usual arguments that have been soundly debunked about the dangers of mass dumping un-redacted documents, what fault could anyone at HN possibly have with WL?
- grandalf 15y agoWell said. Bill Keller has really lost a lot of credibility as a journalist with his ad hominem attacks against Assanage and tabloidesque coverage of many matters relating to Wikileaks.
- tzs 15y agoHow about the ambassador to Mexico's report that the Mexican officials were incompetent in their attempts to deal with organized crime? By not filtering that, the end result was that high Mexican officials were annoyed and the ambassador had to resign. I don't see how any good whatsoever comes of trying to create an environment where diplomats and other government employees have to worry that by given an honest opinion in a report they put their jobs at risk, and hence see no reason whatsoever for Wikileaks to have published that cable.
- extension 15y agoIt's the responsibility of the government to use their powers of secrecy only for legitimate purposes, like diplomacy, and not abuse those powers to deceive its own citizens. The responsibility of the journalist is to expose such deception. If the government compromises their own secrecy by abusing it, that is the government's own fault. How many bones the journos throw them is far aside from the point.
- grandalf 15y agoExactly. This is part of the "checks and balances" created by the first amendment, every bit as legitimate and deliberately engineered as the separation of powers between the three branches of government.
- NotSoMuchReally 15y agoI don't quite follow this line of thinking. The unstated but obvious leaning of wikileaks, Assange, and a large portion of the hacker community is towards anarchy be it anarcho-capitalism, crypto-anarchy, some variant. To find wikileaks dangerous and counter productive simply requires being opposed to anarchy. You can obfuscate and spin the issue all you want but the most parsimonious explanation is that the motivation, to put massive amounts private information out in the public's view, is political. The clear intention is disruption not reform of the establishment. Now one can agree or disagree with the political goals of the organization or players involved (and these are quite well known btw) but that's irrelevant to the discussion. Be political, advocate for anti-establishment causes, spread anarchy if you believe in it, but be honest about it. I can respect that even if I disagree.
- TillE 15y ago> releasing all of the cables regardless of whether or not they contain incriminating evidence. Except that's not remotely true. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/07/wikileaks http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/07... "Currently released so far... 11214/251,287" That would be less than 5%. Not "all". http://wikileaks.ch/cablegate.html http://wikileaks.ch/cablegate.html
- tzs 15y agoYou are just counting cables released on Wikileaks' site. All of the cables have been given to several newspapers directly by Wikileaks, and have passed on from there to other newspapers.
- killerswan 15y agoEvery time I think about donating to Wikilieaks, I give to the ACLU [1] and EFF [2] instead. ;D For the sake of the future, fixing the law in the USA _matters_, and I trust them. [1] https://www.eff.org/ https://www.eff.org/ [2] https://www.eff.org/ https://www.eff.org/
- anonymoushn 15y agoI do not expect it is possible to fix the law in the USA under its current political system.
- rbanffy 15y agoIf citizens give up, they win.
- chopsueyar 15y agoAll that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
- rbanffy 15y ago
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- anonymoushn 15y agoAssange said he would release incriminating information about some banks by a couple months ago. Has he done it yet?
- lhnz 15y agoAnonymous did instead, I think. (Not sure if that was the same documents though...)
- redthrowaway 15y agoThey weren't, if memory serves. I think Applebaum (ioerror) confirmed it, but I'm not sure.
- surething 15y agoI can imagine the release coming after sufficient interest in the current legal proceedings against Assange die down, such that the leak obtains full attention.
- grandalf 15y agoI agree. WL has been way smarter about PR lately... They are actually defining the message now rather than letting the rest of the media define them.
- neuroelectronic 15y agoYou've got to be joking. This continues to show how Wikileaks uses the timing of its information for PR. They probably want more hacker sympathy for some soon to be revealed target.
- killerswan 15y agoI have heard unverifiable stories of similar "personal favors" in San Francisco, too. Not to mention the legal wild-west that is China and India...
- rprasad 15y agoHe committed the crime,and was successfully prosecuted for it. The personal favor was not the arrest, it was assigning an agent or two to investigate the case. This is not much different from asking your cop friend to give a ticket to your neighbor for parking too far out into the street, or asking the zoning board to investigate a neighbor's unapproved addition.
- FrankenTan 15y agoI have little to add beyond pointing out that this is discussed in the comment-section by more commenters than the one I am linking to now: edit: Replaced with better link: http://torrentfreak.com/wikileaks-police-arrested-movie-pirate-as-a-personal-favor-to-movie-official-110430/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Torrentfreak+%28Torrentfreak%29#comment-194852117 http://torrentfreak.com/wikileaks-police-arrested-movie-pira...
- rbanffy 15y ago> He committed the crime Unless I misread the article, camming was not a crime where he lived at the time he was arrested. What the article describes is the police harassing someone because someone with lots of resources asked politely for an illegal favor. Or, to put it more bluntly, the police decided it was OK to break the law because the MPAA asked for it.
- lukeschlather 15y agoHe committed no crime in Canada. If a US Citizen was jailed for making statements against the Chinese Communist party, he also would have "committed a crime" but the idea that anyone should be jailed if they commit something that is considered a crime somewhere is obviously fallacious.
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