3 ms·

I suspect when a trove of documents is big enough, newspaper readers lose interest before you run out of documents. I mean, even on this tech forum hardly anyon

I suspect when a trove of documents is big enough, newspaper readers lose interest before you run out of documents. I mean, even on this tech forum hardly anyone knows who Cavium are, let alone your average Washington Post reader.

elif 3y ago
Maybe the moral of the story is that future snowdens should leak to selected law firms instead of selected journalists? If there's one organization designed to comb through large documents for details and understand the impacts to potential parties, it is law organizations. Put 2-3 in time competition to make cases out of the documents and it will be a scramble race for justice.
- hcurtiss 3y ago
  Law firms aren't terribly entrepreneurial. Absent somebody paying them their hourly rate, I suspect not a single document would be read. Newspapers regularly take risks deploying humans to investigate issues without any assurance there will be a story at the bottom, but even the newspaper business has less appetite for that these days (as an aside, I suspect it's that margin that the financial investors have exploited -- at the expense of high quality reporting).
  - hammock 3y ago
    >Law firms aren't terribly entrepreneurial. Personal injury guys are the most entrepreneurial people I know...
    - kube-system 3y ago
      And they make money by going after low-hanging fruit. Ever wonder why they advertise 90%+ success rates and work on contingency? Because if your case isn't easy, you aren't their customer.
      - hammock 3y ago
        If you are injured in a car accident and the insurance company is trying to screw you over, they seem like an important advocate
    - thewildginger 3y ago
      That's why other lawyers call them ambulance chasers. Their ethics are notoriously questionable.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
        …and patent trolls… Just Sayin’…
      - iinnPP 3y ago
        We're such a weird society when it comes to enforcing laws on business. It's all "scummy" behavior. For examples: Accessibility laws, consumer protection laws, and privacy laws. It's a trivial matter to determine which websites don't comply with the easy targets of accessibility. Yet the concept of running such a scanner, automatically, and charging for corrections, is seen as predatory behavior. There was an article about grocery pricing with obvious collusion, dark practices, and misinformation yet nothing is done. Business as usual, people need to understand it and work around it. Problem is, it's clearly outside the realm of the average intellectual ability. Predatory behavior is everywhere. I don't feel compelled to list even a single example. If the lawyer chasing the ambulance results in a law being followed instead of ignored, that is a positive thing.
      - asveikau 3y ago
        More importantly, there's money out the other end for them. The payoff is more questionable for information from Snowden leaks. Yes, I guess a journalistic outlet can get a big scoop and that drives eyeballs which leads to advertisers... But that's pretty different from the ambulance-chaser payout.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- shortrounddev2 3y ago
  I can't imagine there's any money in it for them
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  All the big leaks should be done this way The Ashley Madison leaks should have been one name a week and making it a big spectacle till this very day! Same for the Snowden leaks you can also get bigger bidders for the data by drumming up interest and suspense hackers really suck at marketing, so far.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    Then your risk identifying yourself in the Ashley Madison leak. You run the risk of not getting your message out in the Snowden case. The biggest threat is future publishing which is why so many countries broke laws made up charges going after Wikileaks. A wikileak revival scares the most powerful
    - yieldcrv 3y ago
      It would also be allot of fun
      - dr-detroit 3y ago
        [dead]
- cbsmith 3y ago
  You'd be surprised. Top journalism organizations do this kind of thing with tremendous efficiency. The Pandora Papers were impressive for exactly that reason.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
akira2501 3y ago
> newspaper readers lose interest before you run out of documents So.. what's your case here? It would be so expensive to host and publish the documents that they would be unable to recoup their investment based upon lack of interest? > hardly anyone knows who Cavium are, let alone your average Washington Post reader. Oh.. I don't know.. maybe that's because no one has reported on it and explained why it would be important? There's a lot of circular reasoning present to create excuses for an entity that really doesn't need or deserve it.
ormax3 3y ago
sounds like something LLMs can help with, sift through huge amounts of documents to summarize and highlight the interesting ones
- jstarfish 3y ago
  If only. The biggest problems right now are limited context size and basic security, including having to share such documents with God-knows-how-many third parties. Tangent, but we use Azure instead of OpenAI due to data-retention concerns. To ensure nobody's inputting anything classified or proprietary, Legal demanded implementation of an "AI safety" tool...so we demoed one that ships all prompts to a third party's regex-retraction API. So you never know who ends up the recipient of your LLM prompt, where it's getting logged to, who's reviewing those logs, etc. Even some local models require execution of arbitrary code, and Gradio ships telemetry data. Uploading Snowden's docs into a black box is a good way to catch a ride in a black van.
  - ormax3 3y ago
    Nowadays even consumer-level hardware can run some decent local LLMs, completely offline. You might want to browse /r/LocalLLaMA/ if "security" is an issue for you.

elif 3y ago

Maybe the moral of the story is that future snowdens should leak to selected law firms instead of selected journalists? If there's one organization designed to comb through large documents for details and understand the impacts to potential parties, it is law organizations. Put 2-3 in time competition to make cases out of the documents and it will be a scramble race for justice.

hcurtiss 3y ago
Law firms aren't terribly entrepreneurial. Absent somebody paying them their hourly rate, I suspect not a single document would be read. Newspapers regularly take risks deploying humans to investigate issues without any assurance there will be a story at the bottom, but even the newspaper business has less appetite for that these days (as an aside, I suspect it's that margin that the financial investors have exploited -- at the expense of high quality reporting).
- hammock 3y ago
  >Law firms aren't terribly entrepreneurial. Personal injury guys are the most entrepreneurial people I know...
  - kube-system 3y ago
    And they make money by going after low-hanging fruit. Ever wonder why they advertise 90%+ success rates and work on contingency? Because if your case isn't easy, you aren't their customer.
    - hammock 3y ago
      If you are injured in a car accident and the insurance company is trying to screw you over, they seem like an important advocate
  - thewildginger 3y ago
    That's why other lawyers call them ambulance chasers. Their ethics are notoriously questionable.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
      …and patent trolls… Just Sayin’…
    - iinnPP 3y ago
      We're such a weird society when it comes to enforcing laws on business. It's all "scummy" behavior. For examples: Accessibility laws, consumer protection laws, and privacy laws. It's a trivial matter to determine which websites don't comply with the easy targets of accessibility. Yet the concept of running such a scanner, automatically, and charging for corrections, is seen as predatory behavior. There was an article about grocery pricing with obvious collusion, dark practices, and misinformation yet nothing is done. Business as usual, people need to understand it and work around it. Problem is, it's clearly outside the realm of the average intellectual ability. Predatory behavior is everywhere. I don't feel compelled to list even a single example. If the lawyer chasing the ambulance results in a law being followed instead of ignored, that is a positive thing.
    - asveikau 3y ago
      More importantly, there's money out the other end for them. The payoff is more questionable for information from Snowden leaks. Yes, I guess a journalistic outlet can get a big scoop and that drives eyeballs which leads to advertisers... But that's pretty different from the ambulance-chaser payout.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
shortrounddev2 3y ago
I can't imagine there's any money in it for them
yieldcrv 3y ago
All the big leaks should be done this way The Ashley Madison leaks should have been one name a week and making it a big spectacle till this very day! Same for the Snowden leaks you can also get bigger bidders for the data by drumming up interest and suspense hackers really suck at marketing, so far.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  Then your risk identifying yourself in the Ashley Madison leak. You run the risk of not getting your message out in the Snowden case. The biggest threat is future publishing which is why so many countries broke laws made up charges going after Wikileaks. A wikileak revival scares the most powerful
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    It would also be allot of fun
    - dr-detroit 3y ago
      [dead]
cbsmith 3y ago
You'd be surprised. Top journalism organizations do this kind of thing with tremendous efficiency. The Pandora Papers were impressive for exactly that reason.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

akira2501 3y ago

> newspaper readers lose interest before you run out of documents So.. what's your case here? It would be so expensive to host and publish the documents that they would be unable to recoup their investment based upon lack of interest? > hardly anyone knows who Cavium are, let alone your average Washington Post reader. Oh.. I don't know.. maybe that's because no one has reported on it and explained why it would be important? There's a lot of circular reasoning present to create excuses for an entity that really doesn't need or deserve it.

ormax3 3y ago

sounds like something LLMs can help with, sift through huge amounts of documents to summarize and highlight the interesting ones

jstarfish 3y ago
If only. The biggest problems right now are limited context size and basic security, including having to share such documents with God-knows-how-many third parties. Tangent, but we use Azure instead of OpenAI due to data-retention concerns. To ensure nobody's inputting anything classified or proprietary, Legal demanded implementation of an "AI safety" tool...so we demoed one that ships all prompts to a third party's regex-retraction API. So you never know who ends up the recipient of your LLM prompt, where it's getting logged to, who's reviewing those logs, etc. Even some local models require execution of arbitrary code, and Gradio ships telemetry data. Uploading Snowden's docs into a black box is a good way to catch a ride in a black van.
- ormax3 3y ago
  Nowadays even consumer-level hardware can run some decent local LLMs, completely offline. You might want to browse /r/LocalLLaMA/ if "security" is an issue for you.