How Much Did Wikileaks Hurt Hillary Clinton?

[JHan]

2. Yes it would have:

Uncurated data was scoured for scandalous headlines, no matter how silly.

Even mundane email exchanges were exploited by media : e.g. emails between Podesta and Palmieri about dogmatic catholics became a thing for two weeks and may have hurt Clinton among Catholics. All the other "revelations" would have contributed to doubt and mistrust and trustworthiness was made into a big issue for Clinton this year.

And a lot of the talk about wikileaks ignores the major point which is violation of privacy.

"I have some dark secrets. Some I am not proud of, some that are fine by me but I know would be better kept private. So do you. So does everybody. And the more complex your life, the more “big” things you have done in the world, the bigger your mistakes and other secrets are. It is true for all of us. This is one of the reasons the world needs privacy to work.

The 2016 US election hack makes clear the big challenge. In a world where everybody has secret flaws, the person who can point the flashlight at their enemies, and not themselves or their friends, has a truly powerful weapon. Now that we conduct our entire lives on computers, those who can penetrate them can learn those secrets.

"When one house has a big pile of dirty laundry in front, we know intellectually that all the other houses almost surely have a similar pile in the basement. But the smell of the exposed one is clear, and it’s bad, and we can’t keep our minds on that fact. So we can be manipulated, even though we know we are being manipulated.

In this election, we got to see exposed various flaws at the Democratic National Committee. The flaws were real (though on the scale of such things, not overwhelming.) Our gut reaction, though, is to feel, “it doesn’t matter how we learned this, it’s still bad and not to be ignored.” We feel this even though we know the information was gathered illegally, then disclosed to manipulate us. That’s because generally we do and should love whistleblowers. They are usually brave heroes. But what we learn that the whistleblower revealed the secrets not for the public good, not to expose a wrong, but instead cherry-picked what to expose to manipulate us, we must do something else we normally taught is wrong and “shoot the messenger.”"

- http://ideas.4brad.com/terrible-power-computer-espionage-our-world-shame