Mass data releases, like the Podesta emails, conflate things that the public has a right to know with things we have no business knowing, with a lot of material in the middle about things we may be curious about and may be of some historical interest, but should not be released in this manner.
All campaigns need to have internal discussions. Taking one campaign manager’s email account and releasing it with zero curation in the last month of an election needs to be treated as what it is: political sabotage, not whistle-blowing.
These hacks also function as a form of censorship. Once, censorship worked by blocking crucial pieces of information. In this era of information overload, censorship works by drowning us in too much undifferentiated information, crippling our ability to focus. These dumps, combined with the news media’s obsession with campaign trivia and gossip, have resulted in whistle-drowning, rather than whistle-blowing: In a sea of so many whistles blowing so loud, we cannot hear a single one.
This is one of the best arguments against the recent activities of Wikileaks. Not because Wikileaks is operating as a front for Russia. Not because the contents of the recent leaks aren’t newsworthy. Not because the public doesn’t find the revelations to be interesting and fun.
No, the core issue with the latest rafts of leaks is that they were not sufficiently currated, with the impact being that obstensibly private information is taken and circulated and mischaracterized. This has the effect of stunting the electoral process while, simultaneously, reconfirming to persons in power that they need to adopt a culture of oral communications and decisions. This is not a governance direction that is in the public’s best interests.
However, it’s important to also situate Wikileaks’ activities in some context. Wikileaks is designed to clog up the machinery of government states and bureaucracies. Part of its mission is to scare organizations with the threat of leaks in an effort to hinder what Julian Assange/Wikileaks regards as harmful or objectional activities. So the leaks associated with the DNC and staff affiliated with Clinton are perfectly aligned with Wikileaks’ raison d’être. In the past such activities may have been regarded are more legitimate – the organization was principally focused on state level activities – but it is now focused on deliberately releasing information at core points in an electoral cycle. Doing so may have affected the unfolding of the election but it’s important to acknowledge that Wikileaks’ intent was not driven by Russia (presuming that was a source of at least some of the leaked information): instead, this was a case where Russian and Wikileaks just happened to have directly overlapping objectives.
Excited Pixels 