Showing posts with label unvetted sources deciding what hacked documents to put on Web. Show all posts
Showing posts with label unvetted sources deciding what hacked documents to put on Web. Show all posts

Saturday, May 6, 2017

'Risk' Is A Messy, Ambitious Portrait Of WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange; NPR, May 5, 2017

John Powers, NPR; 

'Risk' Is A Messy, Ambitious Portrait Of WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange


"Assange clearly believes that the world's power elite maintains control by doing things the public never gets to see. By leaking documents, he thinks, WikiLeaks is revealing how the world actually works — for instance, how Democratic National Committee big shots actually were conspiring to help Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders.

Yet here's the problem. Just as most of us don't want our government secretly hoarding people's private information, we also don't want the release of sensitive documents to be controlled by a handful of leakers who answer to no one.

In last year's election, WikiLeaks didn't just leak things to damage Clinton — whom Assange considered a personal threat. The leaks failed to redact personal info about Clinton donors, like credit-card numbers, a violation of privacy called out by Snowden himself, though ignored by Poitras.

I don't trust Assange or any other unvetted source — and there will be more — to decide which documents from Russian hackers or NSA leakers get put on the web."