This is really worth reading. BUT. But here’s what I wrote five years ago about why the idea of a ‘leak’ was already over: ///snip/// Where the leak involved the press mediating the shift of knowledge or documentation between government and business, there is of course a new kind of leakage that’s much more systematic and on a scale that very regularly dwarfs Cablegate. It’s endemic to networks and the corporate consolidations they enable, but we still don’t have a good name for it: hack, compromise, exploit, ID theft, and dataleak are the most common names, but poor ones‚ they’re all hopelessly burdened with baggage and they shift emphasis from agency to the event and the product, two hopelessly commodified forms. The forces responsible for these new leakages are sometimes organised, sometimes not; many are in a fast flux of constant, ephemeral reorganisation around means of production, derivatives, affiliations and federations, buyouts and betrayals. These leakages from the ‘private’ sphere, or whatever it is that encompasses relations between corporations and individuals, have reached boggling proportions. It’s only a matter of time before they do the same in the ‘public’ sector‚ if secretive civil and military authorities, as well as surrounding penumbra can be called that. But there’s nothing passive about them: these aren’t leaks, they’re takes. This transformation can be summed up in a single word that doesn’t exist yet: Wikitakes. ///snip///
Rebecca Solnit October 21, 2016
Naomi Klein says: But personal emails — and there’s all kinds of personal stuff in these emails — this sort of indiscriminate dump is precisely what Snowden was trying to protect us from. That’s why I wanted I wanted to talk with you about it, because I think we need to continuously reassert that principle.
As journalists — now that it’s out there — we do have to go through it and talk about the parts that are politically important and newsworthy. But at the same time, we have a tremendous responsibility to say that people do have that right to privacy. I heard you defend [the leak] to some degree on the grounds that these are very powerful people. Certainly Podesta is a very powerful person, and he will be more powerful after Hillary Clinton is elected, if she’s elected, and it looks like she will be. But I’m concerned about the subjectivity of who gets defined as sufficiently powerful to lose their privacy because I am absolutely sure there are plenty of people in the world who believe that you and I are sufficiently powerful to lose our privacy, and I come to this as a journalist and author who has used leaked and declassified documents to do my work. I could never have written “The Shock Doctrine” or “This Changes Everything” without that. But I’m also part of the climate justice movement, and this is a movement that has come under incredible amounts of surveillance by oil industry-funded front groups of various kinds. There are people in the movement now who are being tracked as if they were political candidates, everywhere they go.
So how are we defining powerful? Because once we say this is OK, and I’m not saying you’ve said it — you’ve made that distinction — but I think we need to say it louder. And particularly you, as the guy who brought us the Snowden files, need to say it louder.
Greenwald It’s interesting, this burn it down model. I remember one of the first distinctions that Edward Snowden drew when we met in Hong Kong — not to keep drawing this Assange-Snowden distinction, but it’s one that is actually quite fundamental that I think a lot people have overlooked.
He made a fascinating point when I asked him: You have this incredibly sweeping trove of unimaginably sensitive information, which if published on the internet would instantly destroy huge numbers of U.S. surveillance programs, including ones you strongly dislike. Why didn’t you just do that? Why didn’t you just upload it to the internet? Why did you need to work with us, to have journalists as the middleman and mediators to process this information and take the decision-making out of your hands about what the public will and won’t see?
And he said: Think about how incredibly sociopathic, how narcissistic it would be for me, Edward Snowden, to decide that I have the right, singlehandedly, to destroy all of these programs simply because I don’t like them.
NK: This is why I say I’m nervous. I’m not comfortable with anybody wielding this much power.
I am not comfortable when it’s states, but I’m also not comfortable when it’s individuals or institutions. I don’t like people making decisions based on vendettas because the message it sends is: “If you cross me, this could happen to you.” That’s a menacing message to send. Now I acknowledge that this could be over the edge, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s had that thought, and I think we have to acknowledge that this is how fear spreads. It isn’t only states that are capable of sending that message .The level of ego makes me uncomfortable given the role of ego in this election cycle and people thinking these elections are just all about them personally. We don’t need somebody else treating it like that.