> Can you just not? The whinging is a serious distraction.
It's also against the rules. That said, the discussion and comments here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27982672 - one of the only times downvoting could be openly discussed because it's directly within the scope of the article) definitely sheds light on frustrations people have with downvotes on HN.
Anyway, my comment is offtopic enough. For more downvote discussion, head to that link instead; at least it'll be on topic.
I could but the HN, and worse Reddit, mob has down voted certain opinions without even commenting. Especially as it relates to whistle blowers and the US military/government.
I’ve even seen legitimate conservative view points be flagged instantly.
If any USA soldier or Afghan collaborator had ever been harmed as a result of Wikileaks' journalism, the war media would have been wall-to-wall on the story for years. That has never been reported. Ergo, it never happened.
This article suggests that certain people have at least been threatened. You may deem that to be worth the value of the information being leaked, but it has been reported on.
This seems to be the most damning phrase from that link, and it was uttered by a federal government spokesperson in 2010:
"No doubt some of those people were harmed when their identities were compromised."
That's so weak. "I'm sure it will probably happen at some point!" NPR on Friday afternoon is the sockpupppet the lizards prefer for their most pathetic, half-assed spin attempts. No one is listening, no one will challenge the narrative, they can say whatever they want, and that was all they dared to say? Yikes.
> The uncensored cables are contained in a 1.73-GB password-protected file named "cables.csv," which is reportedly circulating somewhere on the internet, according to Steffen Kraft, editor of the German paper Der Freitag. Kraft announced last week that his paper had found the file, and easily obtained the password to unlock it.
It sounds like Wikileaks was, at the bare minimum, extremely sloppy.
There's also this:
> After nine months of slow, steady publication, WikiLeaks abruptly opened the spigot last week on its cable publications, spewing out over 130,000 by Monday afternoon – more than half the total database.
Wikileaks is one man with a few cult followers. Any feel-good standard they put in place can be overridden at his whim. There are enough ex-cultist testimonies to that effect.
Do you mean the emails that were made available in the form of thousands of PDFs by the US State Department as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request and that wikileaks made searchable? That is a different case: https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/?q=&mfrom=Hillary+Clint...
Take the situation the other way around. If your country had been colonized ("liberated" they would say) by say Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia or Daech, would you not consider it crucial information to know what persons and institutions collaborated with them?
Do you believe Assange lied about Daniel Domscheit-Berg being the source for the unredacted cables and his conversation with Cliff Johnson was all for show? Why did he break his own protocol and release so many documents en mass?
