Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Wikileaks has officially lost the moral high ground

https://www.wired.com/2016/07/wikileaks-officially-lost-moral-high-ground/
 
 
Wikileaks has officially lost the moral high ground 
 
Emma Grey Ellis, 7, 27, 2016
 
WHAT THE HECK is going on at WikiLeaks?
 
In the last two weeks, the font of digital secrets has doxed millions of Turkish women, leaked Democratic National Committee emails that made Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign look bad but also suggested the site was colluding with the Russian government, and fired off some seriously anti-Semitic tweets.
 
It’s…weird.
 
WikiLeaks is always going to be releasing information some people don’t like. That is the point of them. But lately the timing of and tone surrounding their leaks have felt a little off, and in cases like the DNC leak, more than a little biased. At times, they haven’t looked so much like a group speaking truth to power as an alt-right subreddit, right down to their defense of Milo Yiannopoulos, a (let’s be honest, kind of trollish) writer at Breitbart. But the way WikiLeaks behaves on the Internet means a lot more than some basement-dwelling MRA activist. “WikiLeaks’ initial self-presentation was as merely a conduit, simply neutral, like any technology,” says Mark Fenster, a lawyer at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law. “As a conduit, it made a lot of sense, and had a lot of influence, immediately. The problem is, WikiLeaks is not just a technology. It’s humans too.”
 
WikiLeaks has endangered individuals before, but their release of the so-called Erdogan Emails was particularly egregious. The organization said that the infodump would expose the machinations of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan immediately after the attempted coup against him, but instead turned out to be mostly correspondence and personal information from everyday Turkish citizens. Worse, it included the home addresses, phone numbers, party affiliations, and political activity levels of millions of female Turkish voters. That’s irresponsible  any time, and disastrous in the week of a coup.
 
The incident exposed gross negligence, though it’s true that lots of publications (including WIRED) made things worse by failing to vet the leak’s content and linking to the documents in their coverage. Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (herself of Turkish descent), wrote an essay criticizing WikiLeaks and Western media outlets for endangering Turkish citizens, and WikiLeaks and their supporters turned on her, hard. “Within five minutes they called me an Erdogan apologist, which speaks volumes to their lack of research,” Tufekci says. “And then they blocked me. So much for hearing something they don’t like.”
 
The provenance and truth of the DNC emails looks more solid—but those sketchy ties to Russia make the whole thing seem like a foreign government trying to influence the US presidential election. It’s a little weird (tinfoil hat alert) that Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ founder, has a show on RT, a Russian government-funded (read: propaganda) television network. And a little off that the DNC leak whodunnit seems to point to a pair of Russian hackers thought to be affiliated with the Russian intelligence agencies FSB and GRU, respectively.
 
And then, inexplicably, the WikiLeaks official Twitter account also dove straight for naked anti-Semitism. (The triple parenthesis around names is code for “Jewish” in antisemitic circles.)
 
https://twitter.com/MarlowNYC/status/756996229821829120/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
 
 
First they denied the tweet was anti-Semitic at all. Then they deleted it, and defended the deletion like this:
 
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/757006779695923200?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
 
 
Which as rebuttals go, is about as convincing as “I know you are, but what am I?”
 
But that’s not what’s really important here. WikiLeaks and Assange say they have no responsibility for the content they leak, and that no one has evidence that the sources of the DNC leak are Russian. But these leaks and tweets damage WikiLeaks’ credibility. If they’re not scrutinizing their own leaks on the base level of their content, it’s not hard to imagine that WikiLeaks could unwittingly become part of someone else’s agenda (like, say, a Russian one). “If you are a legitimate leaker, why go with WikiLeaks? You go with The Intercept or the New York Times, like they did with the Panama Papers” says Nicholas Weaver, a computer scientist at UC Berkeley who studies the organization. “Wikileaks is a pastebin for spooks, and they’re happy to be used that way.”
 
WikiLeaks isn’t necessarily the big bad here—if the FSB wants to leak some DNC emails as part of an effort to install Trump as a “Siberian Candidate,” (don’t look at us; that’s the New York Times’ joke) they’re going to do it. But WikiLeaks’ actions could have effects that run counter to their own ideals. “This has done more damage to the fight for free and open internet than anything Erdogan could do,” says Tufekci. “If you expose people’s private information, and then the Western media publicizes it, they are going to withdraw from the Internet.”
 
Fundamentally, WikiLeaks was supposed to be better. Assange openly said he hoped the DNC leak damaged the Clinton campaign. “There was the hope that in the wake of WikiLeaks’ emergence, a thousand WikiLeaks would bloom, in the same way that the Arab Spring was a really romantic ideal of the effect that digital communication can have on geopolitics,” says Fenster. “But the ideal of WikiLeaks as an information conduit that is stateless and can serve as a neutral technology isn’t working. States fight back.” WikiLeaks’ moral high ground depends on its ability to act as an honest conduit. Right now it’s acting like a damaged filter.

 WikiLeaks’ moral high ground depends on its ability to act as an honest conduit. Right now it’s acting like a damaged filter.
 
"WikiLeaks lost the moral high ground only because it started exposing Democrats at the national level as slimeballs. When the information exposed anyone else, it was highminded journalism. Democrat = Hypocrite."
59 like
 
I am certainly not going to defend WikiLeaks, but isn't interesting that as soon as what they find is hurting the libs all the sudden this is a big problem? I would bet the company payroll that if this had been Trump or GOP email leaks this story would be written quite differently!
148 like
 
Wiki Leaks is great until they turn on one of your own, now you accuse them of being some right wing org?? They never had the moral high ground, they release private documents and let people make the assumptions on the matter, that's it. Instead of a meaningful article, you have exposed yourself and Wired as another political hack owned and ruled by a political party. While I wound't call Wired journalism, you have proven that real journalism doesn't exist anymore, they are just agenda driven ads in the form of "content".
45 like
 
You should defend WikiLeaks, they are doing dangerous and important work exposing serious government and crony criminal activity. The leaks show direct pay for play - DNC trading government jobs for donations. The long time narrative that the liberal media is a biased mouthpiece for the DNC - fully supported in the leaks with emails that show the DNC providing talking points, editing reporters articles, and directing reporters where and where not to report. The leaks also show the Washington Post trading party tickets for DNC donations - strictly prohibited by law. They had a 'work around' to get donors added to the list rather than saying they were selling tickets, distinction without a difference, you pay and you get entry to the party.
The media, Fox included, is buying into a progressive meme blaming the Russians. Yet Wiki has hinted this was a leak and not a hack. I don't know if it was a hack or an Bernie follower insider leak with the DNC, regardless, that is not the story. The story is the content of the leaks and yet every network skips the content of the leaks to discuss something else. Cronyism and elitists control of the state is exposed and everyone watches the puppet show instead of reading the leaks.
49 like
 
una risata seppellirà le blatte che si ergono a giudici della morale-


 
Like 301 - Argomenti 0
 
Vincono i Like. yeeeh.
 
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