Wikileaks To Sell Hugo Chavez' Email

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Wikileaks seems to be a bit hard-up for cash, so they're trying a little experiment. They plan to auction off an archive with three years worth of Hugo Chavez' email. The winner will get a period of embargoed access to break any stories they can find in the files, while Wikileaks will later publish the archive in full. Wikileaks plans to use the profits for their legal defense fund, but they may run into trouble because most reputable news outlets have policies against paying sources."

Comments

Reputable news sources

[Anonymous Coward]

most reputable news outlets have policies against paying sources

Then mabye someone else will buy it and break stories?

Re:Reputable news sources

[meringuoid]

Then mabye someone else will buy it and break stories?

There are plenty of disreputable news sources around, but would their readership be interested in Hugo Chavez's email? I can't see the average Sun reader caring too much. Unless some of the emails were sexually explicit and addressed to a former Big Brother contestant.

Suicide.

[urcreepyneighbor]

This stunt will come back to haunt them.

Re:Suicide.

[stephanruby]

This stunt will come back to haunt them.

I agree. If I was an existing source for wiki leaks, then I would stop giving them free information -- I would want to get paid for it. Same goes if I was donating them free hardware and free bandwidth. This may be just an experiment, but it's going to completely change the way people perceive wiki leaks from now on. Once you sell out, you can never go back.

Re:Suicide.

[NorQue]

And I hope it shuts them down. Seriously, I'm all for the idea behind Wikileaks... but *selling* your information to the highest bidder? This is about as diametral to informing the public as it gets! This is moral bankruptcy for them, IMHO.

Money is not the intention

[nietsch]

They are not doing this to scrape some money together. There is some kind of paradox that newspapers are less interested to invest time if the sources are there for any competitor to see. The free availability makes the perceived value less/zero. So by giving exclusive access to an interested outlet, they are guaranteed a better exposure then when they just would give it to all takers for free.

Re:They pay photographers

[Swizec]

They may not want incentives for sources to create stories, but why then are reporters paid? They create stories, "spin" them I believe is the term they use, all the time and we love 'em for it.

Re:They pay photographers

[Swizec]

That's like saying politicians don't lie.

Any story can be written so it comes out meaning something completely different to what really happens even if what you write isn't a lie per se.

Wow...

[abigsmurf]

For a site that's supposed to be about promoting openness and moral conduct this is an incredibly immoral move.

'victims' of leaks will not get a chance to respond or refute big stories before they hit the front pages. The site wants no accountability for the information it provides whilst at the same time wanting to reap all the benefits that posting false informaiton can bring.

They may bring in more money but they're leaving themselves open for far worse than lawsuits. They're leaving themselves open to real criminal charges. The second money becomes involved, it can easily become blackmail.

"we have an email saying you did something naughty. If you don't want the press to get it before you can find out if the email is true or not or you want to pre-empt it, just make sure you outbid all the other newspapers"

I don't know what country they're based in but that kind of thing will wind up in a criminal court with the site owners facing years in prison.

That's what bothers me

[Moraelin]

Well, that's what bothers me the most: that it's essentially an invitation for anyone, the less reputable and scrupled the better, to use those for a fishing expedition.

Now I'm all for leaks which actually prove _some_ kind of breech of law, contract, or such. You know, take one or two emails out of there that prove Chavez has done anything illegal, and publish or sell only those.

Basically sorta how using a quote from a book to make a point is fair use, but "quoting" the whole book is breech of copyright law.

(And if you think that that's a bad analogy, no, it's not even just an analogy: everything you write, even emails, is automatically copyrighted by you. So essentially they're selling something wholesale, on which that guy and everyone who's ever sent him an email, has a copyright.)

But here you don't even know if there's any incriminating stuff at all in those emails. It's just an invitation to buy them and see if you can find something you can mis-use. Or to put it even better: it's not even selling some newsworthy story, it's just selling someone else's privacy. No more, no less. Maybe incidentally you can find some story material by trawling through his private correspondence, or maybe not, but at the end of the day what remains is that you paid to rape someone's privacy.

And, yeah, it doesn't matter if you're even a reputable news outlet or a news outlet at all. Conceivably even some spammer could buy them to harvest all email addresses in there. Or someone could buy them and see if they can find any blackmail material in there. Maybe not even as much against Chavez, as against some random politician who's mentioned taking a vacation for some medical condition in an email to Chavez. Or anything else.

I don't know... it seems an absolute low. It seems like the kind of thing only a complete scumbag would even think about doing.

Re:That's what bothers me

[jedidiah]

This is not an "individual". this is a head of state and a key
member of a government. "privacy" doesn't enter into it. His
communications need to be documented for tranparency of
governance and historical and archival purposes.

We would do the same thing to Bush if we could.

Re:That's what bothers me

[IgnoramusMaximus]

And, on the other side, having any aspects of governance that could be made arbitrarily secret (because those governing decide what does and what does not infringe on their "privacy") is oh so conductive to preventing back-room machinations involving CEOs of mega-corporate friends of the politicians and other the like-minded cash-bearing chums, meetings in, say, the White House with, say, the Vice President, where, completely hypothetically, plans of invasions of foreign lands aimed at securing resources, say, oil, which somehow ended up under the sand owned by some undeserving brown-skinned "barbarians" are made. It also completely prevents authoritarian sociopaths with God complexes, who "just know better then you what us good for you and you do not need to know what it is for reasons of 'state security' and that is why you are on a secret no-fly list" from participating, no?

Moreover, making arbitrary government communications secret is well known to encourage honest and corruption-free government operations, leading to senior policy makers making well considered decisions in the best interests of those the government is supposed to represent and no possibility whatsoever of such a scenario aiding aiding decision making for their personal gain, that of their buddies, or for their most "charming" lobbyists, certainly?

Look, between the two "evils" of utterly stripping public officials and the government itself from any "privacy" and granting them "privacy" (which is by definition arbitrarily defined and subjective) to hide behind, it is clear that the former choice is orders of magnitude better.

Sure the do

[John Hasler]

Wikileaks plans to use the profits for their legal defense fund, but they may run into trouble because most reputable news outlets have policies against paying sources.

Most "reputable" news outlets have policies against admitting that they pay sources.