And you think the leak of personal information didn't contribute to that at all? It would be like if the UK government published the name and address of every sex offender, then acted surprised by the mob lynchings. Oh wait, they already do that. Doesn't excuse irrational behaviour just because it's popular, though.
Indeed. You are completely correct.
We don't need their help with drafting press releases. What position we take and how we react will be decided by the Federal Council and members of the Pirate Party, no one else.
My apologies, Mikkel. I didn't mean to suggest we contact Wikileaks and involve them in the creation of a press release or for help constructing our position. I was only suggesting it as an option for if at some point we needed to comb through the
copious amount of documents Wikileaks has released.
There is no evidence that the BNP is a racist/facist organization - because wikipedia says so, doesn't make it true.
I've seen the BNP website and their policy, and I fail to see anything racist or even close to fascism - therefore they are mainly nationalist.
As I said before, I have absolutely no desire to further discuss this issue within this thread. If you would like to discuss it, perhaps this discussion would be better in the Political Discussion board. Anyway, I apologize for upsetting you.
Another reason I have reservation about how we voice our support is we are a political party and cannot be seen as explicitly supporting hacking. However, revelation like the fact that the Spanish copyright law was written by the U.S. are fair game IMHO. Wikileak on a lot of instances replaced the job of what media used to do back when investigative journalism were done by journalist who risked their lives to expose government's malpractice. So on matters relating to government actions, Wikileaks are acting like a journalist. They did not do the hacking themselves but are merely releasing information given to them by an insider. Some government agency protect whistle-blower for the purpose of encouraging exposé of malpractice (e.g. The Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act). However on matters where a private citizen's information is released without their consent, then it depends on the value of the information in relation to keeping the government honest. If the individual is not involved in wrong doing then their name should be blocked out. We can maybe release a statement to that effect if we are to support Wikileaks for keeping government accountable. Although for the latter case, judging the value of information and individual's involvement in some instances might be too subjective.
As far as the notion that a political party cannot explicitly support breaking into computer systems goes, I agree with you. However, while these actions clearly result in increased government transparency, most of the population doesn't have enough of an understanding of the concept for hacking to be mentioned in the press release, at least in my opinion. Also, I feel that specifically mentioning information we feel should not be included in the releases could be viewed as censorship by many people (n addition to subjectivity), and puts PPC on thin ice. I think Mikkel said it best in the Wikileaks Special Meeting thread. All we need to do is "[maintain] the reservation that personal information should not be needlessly compromised by leaked information."
