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Was it wrong to hack and leak the Panama Papers?

marginalrevolution.com

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Re: Was it wrong to hack and leak the Panama Papers?

#51

Post by rev_bird »

sickbeard wrote: post #34
slg wrote: post #12

>Yet somehow many of us approve when the victims are wealthy and higher status, as is the case with the Panama Papers. Furthermore most of those individuals probably did nothing illegal, but rather they were trying to minimize their tax burden through (mostly) legal shell corporations. This is a scary thing that has been building over the last 10 years. Wealthy people are vilified for being wealthy even when they pla…

Deep down, we all want to be communists. That's what I've learned the last 5 years. Someone is rich and that's not fair. /s

I'm having trouble figuring out which part of this is sarcasm, but I can't imagine anyone but a child could boil this whole thing down into "Someone is rich, I want their money."

Re: Was it wrong to hack and leak the Panama Papers?

#52

Post by sliverstorm »

slg wrote: post #12

>Yet somehow many of us approve when the victims are wealthy and higher status, as is the case with the Panama Papers. Furthermore most of those individuals probably did nothing illegal, but rather they were trying to minimize their tax burden through (mostly) legal shell corporations. This is a scary thing that has been building over the last 10 years. Wealthy people are vilified for being wealthy even when they pla…

IMO there exists behavior I'll call "bad faith tax reduction". You might not be doing anything illegal by the letter of the law, but maybe those education expenses you deducted, went to a business you own (or something like that).

An exploitable tax code is like an exploitable software package. Yes, the software gave you everyone's personal information in the database. But maybe it only did that when you ran a buffer overflow attack to escalate your permissions.

Setting aside exact numbers, I figure a decent razor for whether you're being honest is whether you mind other people learning about what your tax return looks like. I deducted my property tax and my mortgage interest; I will tell you that freely. But if I had twelve offshore shell companies scooting money around through various tax loopholes, even though it's not illegal I probably wouldn't want anyone but the IRS to know...

Re: Was it wrong to hack and leak the Panama Papers?

#53

Post by ianbicking »

How many of us would approve of that behavior? Keep in mind the hacker is spreading the information not only to prosecutors but to the entire world, and outside of any process sanctioned by the rule of law.

The Panama Papers didn't get uploaded to the internet, it was distributed to journalists. The person who leaked the information was deferring to the judgement of journalists to publish information in a responsible way. It's entirely possible that there is material in the Panama Papers that is exactly what he describes, but we haven't seen it because it's not being published.

The journalists have come up with some criteria about what's responsible here. It might be not be the right criteria, but it does exist.

Re: Was it wrong to hack and leak the Panama Papers?

#54

Post by sliverstorm »

DigitalJack wrote: post #33
forgetsusername wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wealthy people are vilified for being wealthy even when they play by the rules. Playing within the rules is irrelevant when you're the one who gets to write the rules.

As if there existed some impartial authority to make rules.

"Everyone else", is the idea.

For example, if you wrote the tax law, you could say "let's tax everyone but me"

But if everyone writes the tax law together, nobody will let you exempt yourself, and you won't let them exempt themselves.

Like some kind of law-making standoff.

Re: Was it wrong to hack and leak the Panama Papers?

#55

Post by krapp »

jessaustin wrote: post #19
dogma1138 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So should the police do the same? No need for search warrants anymore...

Of course not. Police are employed by society. Unfettered police will destroy society. We would never choose to fund our own destruction, so police have to follow rules. Are there really educated adults who think that we should accept any behavior whatsoever from our police?

If you believe "hacking and leaking is never wrong" because they're forms of speech, except when the state does it, you're not really a free speech absolutist.

Re: Was it wrong to hack and leak the Panama Papers?

#56

Post by cmdrfred »

chopin wrote: post #47
cmdrfred wrote: post #16

If the net effect was good then the action was good.

The ends justify the means? The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Platitudes like that are how intelligent people trick themselves out of doing what is necessary.

Re: Was it wrong to hack and leak the Panama Papers?

#57

Post by deong »

blueprint wrote: post #46

It's quite simple. It's never wrong to reveal facts. It's always right to reveal facts. It's always wrong to hide facts.

I don't believe it is quite that simple.

Suppose you're a gay man living in Yemen. I do not accept any definition of "right" or morality that would compel me to disclose that information.

Re: Was it wrong to hack and leak the Panama Papers?

#58

Post by deong »

I think the flaw in the analogy is that we as a society have had the chance to openly debate things like attorney-client privilege. We understand that we have a legal system in which guilty people may enjoy protection, and we understand the reasons for it. At the very least, the fact of the matter is public knowledge. That's not the case for kinds of tax-avoidance and general shadiness being revealed in the Panama Papers.

Re: Was it wrong to hack and leak the Panama Papers?

#59

Post by jessaustin »

slg wrote: post #18
jessaustin wrote: post #10

Slowly but surely, I'm coming to the position that "hacking and leaking" is never "wrong". It's a form of speech, and I'm a free speech absolutist. Let's stipulate that some things are illegal and not "wrong", just as others are legal and "wrong". It's not clear to me, however, that this case actually is a hack, in the sense that whoever released this material might have had legitimate access to it as a part of doing…

>Slowly but surely, I'm coming to the position that "hacking and leaking" is never "wrong". It's a form of speech, and I'm a free speech absolutist. What about the celebrity iCloud hack? That seems like a cut and dry case of "wrong" and should prevent most of us from using words like "never" and "absolutist". Once that is established, it becomes a question of where that line falls.

Yeah that's a challenging case. ISTM that norms with respect to body image are changing (consider, for instance, the more nuanced responses of the Kardashians to similar situations), but they haven't changed completely yet. Therefore it's wrong that the nude image of a woman is treated differently than the nude image of a man. It's perhaps more wrong that the nude images of celebrities are treated differently by prosecutors than those of humbler folk, but that's a different discussion.

N.B.: Humans often use words in rhetorical rather than literal fashion.

Re: Was it wrong to hack and leak the Panama Papers?

#60

Post by dogma1138 »

jessaustin wrote: post #19
dogma1138 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So should the police do the same? No need for search warrants anymore...

Of course not. Police are employed by society. Unfettered police will destroy society. We would never choose to fund our own destruction, so police have to follow rules. Are there really educated adults who think that we should accept any behavior whatsoever from our police?

Because we live in a civil society, if the police can't break into your house and take what evidence they want, and they won't accept evidence from anyone else who broken into you house what exactly does this serve?

If the only thing that is ok here is to leak stuff to the media stuff that usually cannot be collaborated, and often might actually be intentionally if not completely fabricated than at least edited to some extent you are advocating for mob rule and trial by public opinion.

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