'There's debate, even among
people who believe in radical transparency, over the proper way to handle
information like this'
A discussion between The
Intercept's Glenn Greenwald and author and activist Naomi Klein tackled thorny
privacy issues surrounding WikiLeaks' indiscriminate release of
John Podesta's hacked emails in
a 30-minute
discussion published by The Intercept late Wednesday.
The Intercept has covered
the release of thousands of emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign manager in
depth, from exploring Clinton's
speeches to Wall Street to examining the
Clinton campaign's inner workings, and Greenwald had previously described the
decision to cover the emails as "an easy call."
But Klein wondered whether The
Intercept might be betraying some of its core principals—most prominently, its
privacy advocacy—by not taking note of the moral issues raised by such
indiscriminate email dumps.
"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," Klein said.
"That's why I wanted to talk with you about it, because I think we need to
continuously reassert that principle."
"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," Klein added.
"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,"
Klein said, "and I come to this as a journalist and author who has used
leaked and declassified documents to do my work."
"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," Klein continued, referring to
right-wing groups' harassment of
prominent climate activists.
Greenwald noted that WikiLeaks
has radically changed its stance on privacy since its start, moving from
curating leaked material to simply releasing all of it to the public.
"So there's debate, even
among people who believe in radical transparency, over the proper way to handle
information like this," Greenwald said. "I think WikiLeaks more or
less at this point stands alone in believing that these kinds of dumps are
ethically—never mind journalistically—just ethically, as a human being,
justifiable."
Listen to the whole discussion here:
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