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The single biggest "success" of the whole leaks thing has been to help put Trump in office, which shows three things.

First, it's ridiculously easy for powerful and dubious players (example here Russian intelligence, not Trump) to twist this well-meaning idea into a horrible parody of itself.

Second, the most vulnerable to manipulation from this technique are democracies (and to a much lesser extent) public corporations, who I would argue, are less of a problem than either autocracies or super-rich individuals. You can't embarrass Putin out of office no matter what gets leaked. Anyone who tries to use it against him will fall out of a window and it will be forgotten. Nor can you easily make the Koch brothers behave, even if an award winning journalist writes a best-selling and award winning book about their shenanigans https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radic...). You'd pretty much have to leak photos of them holding severed heads to get the US government to move against them effectively.

Third. Often, it's politically dangerous for a leader to do the 'right thing'. This technique is just as useful to prevent someone from doing the right thing as it is to prevent them from doing the wrong thing. The difference is how controversial the action is, not whether it is right or wrong.

So, regardless of whether this can be done securely, it's really important to ask yourself how it is likely to be used, by whom, and to what end. People tend to forget that stuff when they have a cool new technology.

⬐ ljw1001

So many down-votes, so few coherent arguments. :)

Maybe somebody can show me why I'm wrong in stating that democracies are asymmetrically more vulnerable, or that this can be used as readily by bad actors for bad ends as it can by well-intentioned people for good ends.

⬐ vivekd

I didn't down-vote but pretty good counter arguements is there really is no evidence that Russia was actually behind the leaks other than the CIA and the department of homeland security said so. Seeing as these are the same organizations that lied to us time and time again, like lying about the cause of Benghazi, I'm not inclined to believe anything they say without evidence. These people are known liars and pretty much everything they say is a politically motivated manipulation.

Sure Russia could be behind the DNC leak, but so could a 14 year old who guessed that podesta's password was password (if you believe Julian Assange's claims which haven't been denied by the DNC). It could also be a disgruntled Democratic party staffer who saw what Hillary and Podesta were like behind the scenes and said "fuck these people, the public needs to know what they're really like"

Second, why is it a bad thing that Hillary's email was leaked? It gave an insight into how corrupt the Democratic party is and how corrupt our politicians are and how the democratic process is being rigged. This is a lady who ran a private email server as secretary of state. I'm happy that we were able to find out how the Democratic party rigged the campaign against Sanders and worked a little too closely with the media to ensure a Hillary victory. I'm also glad we found out the real reason for the attacks on Libya (gold reserves not protection of people).

Sure it had a bad result for Trump opponents who didn't want Trump to win. But imagine it was not Trump but Obama running against Hillary and the emails had been leaked. I'm sure you and everyone else would be saying that it was a great moment for democracy instead of regarding it as a terrible mockery.

⬐ ljw1001

You can change all the names, but all of the criticisms remain valid. It's super-easy to game an anonymous "leak" distribution platform, in particular if you're an intelligence agency. That alone should give people pause, but it doesn't.

⬐ boomboomsubban

An intelligence agency can already leak stuff to the press while remaining largely anonymous, this doesn't improve their situation nearly as much as an actual whistleblower.

⬐ ljw1001

who was the whistle-blower in the Hillary emails?

Someone else gave the Pentagon papers as an example of a "good leak" and it was. But I think good leaks tend to be those, like the pentagon papers that are handled by responsible organizations (NY Times and Wash. Post in that case). The people who created this code may be just such people, but there's no reason to think someone who does git-clone on this repo is.

By the way, both the Post and the Times openly solicit leaks.

⬐ boomboomsubban

You're missing the point. If you assume some intelligence agency was behind the Clinton email leak, they could have anonymously leaked them to a range of press outlets and generated the same result. Meanwhile, Ellsberg had to work incredibly hard to prevent being caught before the Pentagon Papers went public. A site like this makes Ellsberg's life easier, while making no difference to the intelligence agency.

The method of leaking has little to do with the value of the leak, someone will print almost anything. The Times and the Post regularly print items intentionally leaked for propaganda purposes, the classic example is the buildup to the Iraq War.

⬐ antpls

Do you have a better idea?

This is an iterative process. Yes, GlobaLeaks could be used to spread fake leaks, but then it will force all democratic processes to be more transparent, in order to efficiently prove or disprove leak L or new N.

How fast we can prove a piece of fact is the next step, but to get there, you have to give people the tools to spread information (true and fake) as much as possible, imho

Edit : Also, this initiative is European. If you don't trust your own intelligence services, stop whining about it and come live in Europe?

⬐ caio1982

I suppose you were too cynical to actually deliver your [fair] points, which rarely is an effective or respectful way to convey ideas.

⬐ nabla9

I didn't downvote you, but I can see a reason for downvotes others than your arguments.

Maybe this post is not seen as relevant starting point of the discussion you wanted to have.

⬐ ljw1001

It's only irrelevant if you think it's reasonable discuss/promote technologies while only considering their technical merits and the "pros" for their use. I don't think that anyone can legitimately make that argument.

⬐ comboy

I suggest to remove the first sentence that is just a distraction from the later points that you make, especially without some further elaboration.

If we can create some technology, then dismissing it because it can be used to do bad things seems futile. Bad actors will create and use it anyway[1]. If you want to protect some secrets then have a decent security protocols in place, network of trusted people, slightly different data encrypted with different public keys and so on.

I don't think government intelligence needs projects like this to do what they want to do.

I doubt you are trying to argue not to have knifes because they kill people. You work at Google so I think your context may come from the fact that you can easily put things that make a lot of sense after considering them carefully in a bad light when presenting them to public without enough context. But you can do that based on any information, not necessarily private.

In general, in politics, data doesn't seem to matter all that much, unfortunately. We don't have democracy. We have some media-cracy. Majority of voters opinions are heavily influenced by the media. So it's them who actually make decisions (or whoever controls them).

That's why Snowden for example, probably had much more influence on people who already thought about those things, than it had on general public.

1. bioweapons come to mind and those are indeed scary as our current defense is pretty much what I'm considering to be futile

⬐ boomboomsubban

All three of your points are about the dangers of a free press, not anything specific to online leaks.

⬐ notveryrational

Aren't the biggest recent successes of whistleblowing websites the publication of the the Pentagon papers, HBGary Federal leaks, embassy cables, collateral damage material/videos and US global surveillance program? To my knowledge, whistleblowing had very little to nothing to do with the recent election.

Information manipulation is one of the core functions of the CIA, Russian Intelligence, etc. Whistleblowing agencies do not seek to solve CIA information manipulation - only provide an outlet for the publication of contradictory material. In other words: these systems publish information - they are not golden bullets. They do not protect you entirely from the CIA. They aren't intended to. Don't let perfect the enemy of good.

Regarding the third point: it's often very easy for a leader to do the easy thing instead of the right thing.

Agree wholeheartedly that a person needs to be careful about how information is used, by whom, and to what end. I think that more than equally applies to Western intelligence and national security agencies.

I just got Dark Money and reading through it. It is very revealing.

https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radic...

I actually have a couple of sources for this :). Apologies for the late reply, I also have a day job ;)

I would recommend Krugman's Conscience of a Liberal for an entertaining read. He referenced another book, aptly called Inequality[1], which I'm currently going through. Its a little more academic prose so its not something I can finish quickly (in short, its not an entertaining read...not that all books have to be of course).

Both of these books examine historical precedents for income inequality and attempt to analyze the current situation as well. I think they did a fair job, although I am open to change my mind if there is a better explanation. But these and other books, such as Dark Money[2], and just general news about the scummy activities of people like the Koch brothers have made me more convinced of this viewpoint.

Now to address your comment...

> Only a minority of companies in the US even have executives that get the much maligned high pay and bonuses in the last decade or so. What about the massive percentage of wealth that didn't fall into this category? They may have gain significantly from globalism but that was hardly the result of US tax policy alone.

This is most certainly not true [0]. From [0] and from Krugman's book, you can see just how much the changes in tax policy has incentivized ballooning executive pay and created a new class of executives, who may not be as rich as the landed/inherited, but are certainly "rich". And this class has grown and become more enriched due to globalism, the opening of foreign markets and plummeting of labor costs, both due to automation and cheap foreign labor. I almost think of it as a weird form of trickle down effect, where most of the wealth goes to the very rich but a little (relatively insignificant but in absolute terms very much so) trickles down to the executive class.

> Lets not forget that democrats were in power for the last 8yrs and the state has only grown exponentially since the 1990s under both republican and democrat governments. Just because tax rates weren't the extremes of pre-1980/1970s doesn't make them low. They've been relatively consistent while the middle class income dropped.

Yes Democrats were in power for 8 years but how many of their policies could not be enacted due to obstructionism? But lets not get into that area here: 8 years is a relatively small time to create/destroy inequality. And I don't see any Democrats pushing for tax cuts on the rich, especially cutting estate taxes, which affect only the very rich.

> The complexity of the tax code and lack of competitiveness with international countries may have heavily influenced inequality. But it was hardly the result of explicit tax reduction for the rich...

Its not the complexity of the tax code but its very nature. The top tax rate for personal income is around 35% in the US whereas it is much higher in other developed economies. And the sources that I've listed point to historical trends that prove the same point: once you have a class of super wealthy, they will inevitably influence the Government to reduce their tax burden no matter how that is achieved.

> The idea that tax havens are something that were merely a matter of weak policy is naive. Even worse than the drug war hawks.

I don't think that comparison achieves anything but hyperbole so I'm not going to comment on it.

> Just because the middle class didn't keep pace with the wealthy doesn't mean only the wealthy were at fault. The fact the middle class lost wealth is hardly singularly the fault of the wealthy. I know this narrative sells well in politics but it's very short sighted.

I think you're conflating wealth with income. The middle class, by their definition, is not wealthy (at least in the same country; middle class in US is most certainly more wealthy than in India, say). The US middle class hasn't lost wealth, its their incomes that have not been growing as fast as the incomes of the wealthy. Its unfortunately not just politics: investments in people reap great benefits for society. If a country fails to invest in the health and education of its citizenry because its unable to raise the revenue to do so by the wealthy, then its most certainly the fault of the rich.

> Even if the US adjusted tax policy to redistribute a larger chunk of taxes towards the middle class it would hardly make a dent in the new reality in the fact there is hardly a middle class economy like there used to be. So you must either develop a new middle class economy or you get temporary perks of taking it from the wealthy. This is the big whale in the room that the Bernie bro guys are ignoring. The likely scenario is that the wealthy would become continually less competitive over the years, shift way more money over seas, and the middle class would be in the same situation with a little bit more money for a short period.

I don't think that is likely. Sure its a changed reality now, and I certainly don't see what other future markets will open up, but this new reality demands a healthy, educated workforce to operate it. Income redistribution is less about taking from wealthy and giving it to the poor as much as taking from the wealthy and investing in institutions/programs that can assist the most vulnerable in society. More taxation by itself won't make the wealthy less competitive... I mean, how does that even happen? On the contrary: educating a kid from Inner City Detroit might give us the next Steve Jobs.

> Gov spending under any administration that enacts those policies would largely offset most of the gains going directly to the people regardless (which is good if it results in universal health care, but little else if it's not sustainable).

You seem to imply that all Govt. spending is wasteful which is most certainly not true. Surely its not perfect, but that's another problem that needs fixing.

Also, you asked for a source but failed to provide a single one for any of the many many assertions that you have made.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Pay-without-Performance-Unfulfilled-C...

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Inequality-What-Can-Be-Done/dp/067450...

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radic...

⬐ dmix

Thanks for the extended reply. I'll read this during the weekend and get back to you.