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>As Steven Levy has observed, this sort of leak is a digital counterpart to what had been sought by the Watergate burglars by bugging the offices of the DNC — o
by jsprogrammer 10y ago
>As Steven Levy has observed, this sort of leak is a digital counterpart to what had been sought by the Watergate burglars by bugging the offices of the DNC — occasioned through hacking, rather than breaking and entering. Watergate thus looms not only as an example of a cover-up that was revealed through whistleblowing — the covered-up burglary was itself a roundly-denounced, and criminal, attempt to procure a political rival’s private conversations.
I'd never heard that the Nixon team planned to release their recordings to the public.
- mcv 10y agoIs any invasion of privacy okay as long as the results are released to the public? I think to many people that would be even worse than only having the government snoop at their private email. The point of whistleblowing is that you reveal actual crimes, not just sharing private conversations.
- jsprogrammer 10y agoThe US has a prohibition on government snooping. There is no such prohibition on private intelligence gathering; in fact, the publication of such intelligence is specifically protected.
- mcv 10y agoReally? There's no protection for communication between private individuals in the US?
- vkou 10y agoStrange - in my state, recording a conversation without notifying the other party is a felony.
- jsprogrammer 10y agoSounds like a seriously repressive state. If the law were used, it could be invalidated as it is in violation of a person's right to make records of their observations and, especially, their right to publish those records.
- tedunangst 10y agoDo you know how many seriously repressive states there are?
- vkou 10y agoEleven states require the consent of every party to a phone call or conversation - California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington. I've no doubt that there were plenty of constitutional challenges to the statutes, none of which were successful.
- jsprogrammer 10y agoDo you know of a person serving a felony sentence for violating such law?