I mentioned that case for completeness, but it’s one case, and it was a news outlet albeit Russian which altered it, not Wikileaks. So IMO that and Trump (himself or campaign) lack of due diligence and lack of retraction is part of the general landscape of picking up phony stories from dubious sources on the internet. Any Russian news agency is a dubious source and not just ‘from our POV but let’s understand theirs’, but dubious as in likely to be reporting objective untruths or half truths for Russian govt purposes.
But we’re not discussing whether there are in general phony stories or persistently dubious information processing sources on the internet and who believes them.
We’re discussing, as I see it, whether I as reasonable person should suspect that Wikileaked original documents are false or altered if they become a point of contention but the targets don’t claim they are false or altered. I don’t see why.
The email wasn’t altered afaik. The reporting of it was wrong because the entire email was really just a cut and paste of the Eichenwald article not Blumenthal’s own thoughts.
It was a cut and paste job that would definitely have gotten a warning if it was inside a quote tag here.
It’s like editing a movie review that says “This film was so irredeemably terrible I doubt even the MST3K guys could even have much fun” down to “This film was so… much fun.”
That is my point too. What I was saying also is that the right wing media grabs the documents and misquotes, misrepresents and cherry picks them to give us the worst interpretations.
What I’m saying also is that the lack of any acknowledgment by Trump of being wrong regarding that email demonstrates what an incompetent he is. For my part I don’t see why that should be excluded as this is about the election.
I was responding to
Originally Posted by Chronos
“OK, grant for the sake of argument that Wikileaks is reporting everything exactly as it came to them, and that they’re not altering anything. That still doesn’t mean anything, if it was already lies when it got to them. What evidence do we have that it’s not all lies? Only the word of people whom we already know beyond doubt to have behaved unethically. Why should we take the word of thieves and liars?”
The seems to say we have no idea if Wikileaks documents are valid. I say we do. If the supposed authors of particular leaked documents or passages which become celebrated points of contention don’t deny they are real, the simple conclusion is that they are.
I think it’s quite different from your point that right wing (and left wing, no interest in debating the %'s) sources give a distorted processing of facts during elections, and every other time. That’s more like ‘sun rises in east, film at 11’.
It may be, but it is related to the election indeed and the leaks. It is very important to see who is ignoring what for most is a clear mistake or misstatement found in the e-mails that continues to be passed as the next best thing since sliced bread by Trump to his minions. Just saying.
What a great idea! Instead of campaigning and trying to get people to vote for them, they can waste all their time poring over all the stolen e-mails and confirming and denying them one at a time, then waste even more time with the inevitable demands to “prove” that they aren’t lying about what they confirm or deny. BTW, if the original emails are/were classified, I’m not even sure they would have the option to talk about them at all. Nice time-wasting trap you’ve set up there, bub.
No, that isn’t a correct conclusion. It’s one possible conclusion, but that doesn’t make it true.
What the purported authors of the emails are saying is that they refuse to confirm, deny, or comment on the accuracy of the emails posted on Wikileaks. It’s a position that’s generally in line with how people attribute non-responses in various situations, such as:
Someone asks the CIA if they carried out a coup in Ubekibekibekistanstan last week. CIA says they will neither confirm nor deny. That doesn’t mean that the CIA did it.
A reporter asks a politician if they have ever cheated on their spouse. The politician says, “No comment.” That doesn’t mean the spouse is a cheater.
A police officer asks if a criminal robbed a bank this morning. He refuses to answer. Not saying anything doesn’t mean that they did.
IMHO, sometimes I think we can reasonably assume that some stolen documents are the real deal. For example, I don’t have any reason to believe that Edward Snowden manipulated the classified information he stole, since it seems reasonable that his motivation – as much as I may disagree with it – was to “get the truth out there.”
In this case, with the evidence mounting that Russia is not only behind the theft of these emails, but is also doing so with the intent of manipulating U.S. elections or political debates, and given Russia’s demonstrated willingness to lie through their fucking teeth at any opportunity, I don’t believe that we are obliged to give Russia the benefit of the doubt that they are not tinkering with the content before passing it on to Wikileaks.
Pretty tame stuff. Basically aides thinking out loud about campaign strategy. How to deal with various potential Rep candidates. What to do about the email server.
It’s a interesting read for people who want a glimpse inside the campaign. This type of dialogue and strategizing is common within any organization.
It’s by no means a triumphant PR coupe for Russia.
But he insists that the Russians have nothing to do with the hacks or that he collaborates with the Trump campaign about the hacked email releases. Riiiiiiiiighhtttt…
More emails released. I thought this report about micromanaging and scripting the candidate was very revealing. There’s always been a artificial and plastic feel to Hillary. She’s never connected to voters. This explains a lot. Very glad the idea to send Hillary out to work a job waiting tables (for a few hours) didn’t go forward. People would have seen right through that bs.
I don’t expect this to change a single vote. The alternative candidate is so horrible that we got no choice in this election. We have to vote for her.
Excellent news report. I think this applies to most candidates. There’s nothing spontaneous or genuine in candidates today.
This shouldn’t change a vote no matter who her opponent is. It’s both funny and sad to think that people are clutching at pearls to “learn” that politicians and campaigns manage this stuff. “She has people recommending how she should handle this or how she should act at that event? Oh my, oh dear, oh my… fetch the salts!”
Wikileaks just put on twitter that “Julian Assange’s internet link has been intentionally severed by a state party. We have activated the appropriate contingency plans.” Which I regard as horse shit and more attention seeking. First they’d have to have cut off access to the entire embassy which would be a diplomatic incident and the embassy would be screaming about it.
Second it would be trivially easy to bring in to the embassy 100s of pre-paid sim cards with data plans and if he uses strong encryption they would have no way of knowing which ones are used by him and which by embassy staff. They’d have to jam GSM network coverage for the whole embassy which again would cause a diplomatic incident.
So until I see something on BBC covering it (from the Ecudorean Embassy not from wikileaks), nope, just more attention seeking.
There was a rumor circulating for several hours that the embassy was raided and Assange was either “taken” or dead, but it seems pretty unlikely that such an operation would go down with nobody actually noticing. It’s not some lonely rural outpost. You can’t fart in central London without someone tweeting a picture of it.
