Chelsea Manning acted on her conscience, which is the best we can expect anyone to do. The governments punishment was to prevent that happening again.
Manning released a large volume of information to the public en masse with no regard to it's whistleblowing value. Some of that information was dangerous and harmful.
Manning's battering ram is much different than Snowden's scalpel, even though their base motivations had a lot in common. Snowden knew what he was doing and did it with great care and consideration. Manning was suffering from some serious mental health issues and did something foolish with questionable value at best.
No. She leaked the documents to Wikileaks, who decided to publish them uncensored. She had no control over what Wikileaks would do. Other media outlets opted not to release information they considered dangerous.
And, as @mhurron pointed out, there is no record of someone who was harmed by that information being released.
Manning did it wrong, Snowden did it right.
I do think Manning was naive and sloppy for handing the whole thing over to Assange, though in her defense, Assange seemed fairly reasonable and responsible at the time. It's only after this enormous leak that he seems to have gone mad with power.
With this issue there is a remarkable degree of misinformation, as well as fascist ideology supporting the the surveillance state. These neverending, unechecked powers undermine civil rights and allow human rights abuses to go continue. And it's all wrapped in this package of 'a good liberal just supporting the good guys like Obama and Hillary that evil Assange is trying to destroy.' Assange is far from perfect, but I cannot understand how people do not fight back in solidarity with outrage against human and civil rights abuses.
I think there is a very sad aspect of human nature which makes humans bow before power.
Keep in mind all of the recent leaks have been from individuals and organizations that have supported domestic spying under the rationale "if you've got nothing to hide". Yet they hide in shadows and evidently misbehave when the public isn't looking.
That was the government's position against Snowden, Wikileaks, etc. Also called the "Safe if Nothing to Hide" fallacy. What secrets can cause damage in what ways is pretty broad and arbitrary. Interestingly, it applies to the government's schemes much like people's, private lives. We have to keep them in check more but that should be done by citizens leaning on various branches of government. Including groups doing something about problems in GAO reports.
Really easy to say, though, to never piss off any important person in any foreign country or company with one's private decisions or actions. Really hard to do, too.
The result: a whistleblower for one just gives a competitive advantage to the others. So, both the country's policy and the whistleblower shifting people or investments to other scheming countries or companies are each causing damage.
The debt we owe Manning for exposing the fact that the US murdered innocent civilians far outweighs the damage she did by releasing the cables. The prosecution couldn't identify anyone who was harmed, beyond those innocents harmed by the US government machine guns, which wasn't Manning's fault.
A people deserves to know what their government did on their behalf.
Chelsea had a moral imperative to leak the murder of innocent civilians by the US military. But she should have stopped there.
AFAIK, both Manning and Snowden released large quantities of information without reviewing all of it in detail for public interest vs. potential harm, and released it not to the public but to third parties that managed public release. The difference is that Manning released it to Assange and Snowden released it to more responsible journalists.
Snowden released his information to journalists who carefully vetted each item for newsworthiness with the participation of the US government. Then that data was parceled out over many months, so it would remain in daily news cycles and continue to generate commentary over that time, staying in the public's mind.
Manning gave her data to Wikileaks, who posted it online in its entirety.
In fact, in Greenwald's book No Place to Hide, he describes how they held off publishing for several days while waiting for a response from the government. Greenwald was so frustrated with the delays that he considered quitting the Guardian and going on his own. I think that's the idea that eventually turned into The Intercept.
Why did you ignore the SCMP entirely?
As we all know by now, it's illegal to read the leaks unless they're on CNN. "Responsible" journalists from CNN told us as much.
Sort of. They're more responsible in the general sense but also foreign journalists receiving U.S.'s spying capabilities on foreign persons. The aiding and abetting concept is quite appropriate given they published all kinds of NSA attack strategies & subverted companies while the foreign attacks & companies... including in their own countries... didn't get the same treatment. Both attack and defense on the other side got a great boost while U.S. companies simultaneously lost market share.
Quite a bit of damage giving stuff foreigners shouldn't know to foreign journalists. I might be happier if there was a Snowden in all 20+ countries involved in economic and industrial espionage. Instead, it was just what mainly two (U.S. and U.K.) were doing outside the many eyes partnership that extends to Europe. Quite asymmetrical.
The real question is whether there is a greater good to that damage justifying it. I think there was for the domestic leaks but not the foreign ones outside a few. Far as that few, the Belgacom attack is a good example where taking down allies' telecoms over bullshit could have consequences for America past the usual info collection the spies do. Americans should have a conversation about that kind of thing before those acting on our behalf do such acts.
They did it different, different tools for different purposes. Comparing them like for like is not a good comparison.
More over, if some of those reprehensible things you did, you happen to have done to your own allies, it means they are entitled to have second thoughts about whether they will want to continue aligning their interest to yours, or if they should be more assertive in the future to compensate for the cost of doing business with you.
So, you can keep shooting at the messanger all you want, but any bad outcomes comming out of this, you brought to yourselves.
Then she should've released it to someone else. She is ultimately responsible for deciding to give it to Wikileaks.
Neither reason nor morality made our government listen to criticism from within but maybe the pain of suffering these leaks will.
You've clearly never been deployed. You have more free time than you know what to do with.
Think about what you do when you get off shift at your job. Now remember that you have no family or friends that aren't also co-workers to hang out with. No alcohol, limited access to new movies and video games. You are also stuck within the confines of whatever base you're assigned to. If you're lucky there might be a one-screen movie theater or an internet café. You might even be able to get severely bandwidth-capped satellite internet in your tent/third-of-a-trailer-shared-with-a-roommate that you call your room.
Despite what you want to believe about Manning, lack of time was no excuse for indiscriminate leaking of sensitive information that honestly and truly put lives at risk.
Maybe I'm an asshole, but the "put lives at risk" line seems like nationalistic swill. Even if it risked American combatants, why should that justify hiding the deaths of possibly fifteen thousand Iraqi civilians?
Most of the military intelligence Soldiers I deployed with brought their own personal laptops.
You really underestimate how much free alone time is available to you when you are deployed. Remember that Manning was also kind of a black sheep at the time. Spending hours alone on a laptop would not have been seen as out of the ordinary at all.
Even with the route she took, it was only a matter of months for her to make a mistake that got her arrested. Giving it to wikileaks reduced her anxiety, going through it likely would have ramped it up. Additionally, needing to keep a local copy of the data is a huge risk.
I don't think the war diary stuff made much of an impact, or the apache video. The diplomatic traffic OTOH was the spark into the tinder of the middle east autocracies that set off the so-called Arab Spring.
Besides, we saw ~10 people blown away in that one video. That's a fair number of eggs you'd get to break by leaking before even being at parity with that one instance, let alone all the others.
So to paraphrase "they did nothing wrong and even if they did it would have been okay".
First, they clearly shot civilians trying to take other civilians to the hospital by essentially inventing weapons they didn't and couldn't have seen. Secondly, in most countries when you get the responsibility to fly something like an attack helicopter, which takes a fairly long time to learn, you tend to have to be better than some random soldier. The "war is hell" excuse isn't really viable with the attitudes displayed in the video. But if you're trying to say that these are the kind of actions we should expect when the US invades a country then I guess we are in agreement.
Don't fall for a logical fallacy, and try to view the situatiom from the lens of the information that they actually had, not the hindsight.
(from the transcript [0])
05:30 There's one guy moving down there but he's uh, he's wounded. ... 06:01 He's getting up. 06:02 Maybe he has a weapon down in his hand? 06:04 No, I haven't seen one yet. ... 06:33 Come on, buddy. 06:38 All you gotta do is pick up a weapon. ... 06:54 This is Two-Six roger. I'll pop flares [drop flares]. We also have one individual moving. We're looking for weapons. If we see a weapon, we're gonna engage. ... 07:18 Bushmaster; Crazyhorse. We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly uh picking up bodies and weapons. .... 07:36 Picking up the wounded? 07:38 Yeah, we're trying to get permission to engage. ... 07:59 Roger. We have a black SUV-uh Bongo truck [van] picking up the bodies. Request permission to engage.
There's nothing unclear here or anything to be misunderstood. If they had seen weapons they would have engaged already instead of asking for permission. It's just that the crew of the helicopter really wants to shoot them and that they, the US military nor the US public don't really give a shit if they are civilian as long as they can get away with it, which they can.
[0] https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/en/transcript.html
Had this been reviewed properly, yes. A "Mistakes Happen" stamp could probably be used. But by hiding it and lying about it, they turned it into something we can't ignore.
Also, I don't think the pilots are blameless. If they ever hit civilian court that transcript would hang them.
The first part of your sentence shows why the second part is nonsense. Manning dumped a bunch of classified information on a third party. Manning left the ethical decisions to that third party. That is certainly preventable as many others have prevented it. I've done so many times with confidential information that I make public in a selective way in my writing that protects sources or just details that must be private.
Truth is Manning's mind was messed up due to internal struggles, she also saw messed up stuff in military, and simultaneously was blindly trusting third parties to make the right decisions. The combination led to a damaging, criminal decision to turn all of that over to Wikileaks rather than pure whistleblowing of combing for corruption to selectively leak and/or redact. This is what she was rightly punished for although how the punishment was delivered was cruel and should've been illegal.
Glad Manning is to be released soon but she set it in motion with foolish decisions that had alternatives. It certainly wasn't an inevitable set of cause and effect.
Yes, like her supervisor being absolutely willing to go along with faking information against innocent Iraqis that got them jailed and killed.
> damaging, criminal decision to turn all of that over to Wikileaks rather than pure whistleblowing
Ummm, her commanders refused to listen to pure whistleblowing. Didn't you read about the case?
As someone required to report a crime, you aren't required to put in a show of effort and declare it done, you're required to do your best to stop it.
> Manning left the ethical decisions to that third party.
No, Manning made the ethical decision knowing what Wikileaks promised - to get the information seen. And she made the right one.
Of course Manning (or anyone who leaks) is likely to be an imperfect messenger. It's silly to focus on those details when there is a much bigger issue at stake.
FWIW I wish all of the Snowden data would have been given to Wikileaks. I have great respect for Glenn Greenwald, but the government has utterly failed to respond to the leaks in an appropriate way, which suggests a great lack of respect for the rule of law and the American people.
Instead, they pretended it hadn't happened and that no excesses occurred. I think several top level officials should have been removed and imprisoned and we should have seen footage of all the computers being carted out and put up for sale so that the money stolen to build the apparatus could be reimbursed to taxpayers.
But it's clear to me that actions of both Snowden and Manning were moral but illegal.
Regardless of motivation, they both exposed serious crimes. We are all better off because of the risks they took, and there was very little damage to offset the obvious benefits.
The moral yet illegal is exactly what commutation is for. Kudos to Obama for exposing himself to vicious criticism to do the right thing.
So dangerous and harmful that it harmed no one.
Commuting Manning's sentence is magnaminous. She endured 7 years of torture in solitary confinement, tried to suicide several times, and plead guilty in a court of law.
Snowden GOT AWAY. And he went to Russia, where Putin granted asylum as a giant "screw you" to the US.
So yes-- we do have a moral imperative to pardon Snowden, just as much as Manning. But we won't do it.
This is not true. Aside from the domestic surveillance disclosures which lead to reform in that area, most of the Snowden leaks do not appear to have any sort of whistleblowing value.
Recent example of info release with no whistleblowing value: https://theintercept.com/2016/12/29/top-secret-snowden-docum...
Snowden stole a huge amount of highly classified information and gave a tiny amount to journalists to comb through. Now we only have his word that none of it went to Russian intelligence though all signs point to the contrary.
You don't have to be physically present in Russia to provide the Russians with intelligence.
I don't know why it makes any sense to assume that Snowden is leaking any more than what he gave to the journalists. His entire mission was out of loyalty to the American public, he did not intend to end up in Russia, and he wants to return to the US. America is keeping him out because they will not guarantee him a trial that meets his criteria of fairness/openness.
Don't be dense. Those other agents didn't make off with 1.7 million highly classified files, flee to China and then arrange a defection to Russia with Russian officials.
>I don't know why it makes any sense to assume that Snowden is leaking any more than what he gave to the journalists.
Because he has stolen much much more than he gave to the journalists and the stolen data was much more extensive than domestic surveillance programs.
>America is keeping him out because they will not guarantee him a trial that meets his criteria of fairness/openness.
I'm sorry the law doesn't meet his criteria.
Besides, we have his word, and two (or three) witnesses who saw him destroy the content of the SD card.
Diplomatic relations are handled by China's foreign ministry. There is no way Snowden's status would not be handled by the Chinese government.
Who is trying to muddle the point with irrelevant detail? It won't fly here!!
//
Also, I'm glad there were witnesses of some SD card being destroyed. Good thing we can trust the word of someone who at that point has already stolen deep operational intelligence in the first place (we're not even talking about information on mass domestic intelligence - just typical intelligence data), that this was the only copy he held or wasn't already compromised. A person who then fled to Russia by way of China. Unbelievable.
Or is it that I just refuse to take his unsubstantiated claims at face value, and that makes me a conspiracy nut?
The guy is the definition of a traitor to his country.
This is a poor defense of Snowden's actions.
If it was given to a journalist who wasn't authorized to have that information, it was "released" in the only sense that is legally relevant, even if the general public doesn't have that information. Imagine saying what you just did, but replacing "journalist" with "KGB agent".
The second half of your post seems to be arguing about the word "release" versus "leak". The former is a superset of the latter, both are accurate. Certainly nobody's saying what he did was legal.
But the rest was basically just normal communications.
I think she's served more than enough jail time, but this didn't really seem like a conscience-driven whistleblowing to me.
Snowden, on the other hand, leaked some seriously shady and unconstitutional activity (along with other things that IMO did not need to be released publicly). That very much did seem like he leaked it due to his conscience.
I took his opinions with a grain of salt given his background, but also couldn't refute due to being relatively unfamiliar with the Snowden saga.
The "in bed with Russia" thing is just a smear. No one has produced any evidence of this, and it's really hard to make it match up with how everything unfolded.
The biggest clue that what your friend says is wrong that Snowden wouldn't have gone public and announced himself if he was spying for Russia.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
I doubt he's fond of Russia, either, and he's made some passive-aggressive jabs at them on his Twitter.
That said, it can't be ruled out that he divulged even more secret information to Russia's intelligence services as a condition for asylum, but I don't think there's any evidence it was one of his motives when leaking.
Do you really believe Snowden was a double-agent, or that he was a conscientious whistle-blower? That's what it comes down to.
Even if you don't care for the content of the cables, the fact that an estimated 3 million people have access to them with nothing worth mentioning in the form of access control should give you serious pause. The 1% are real, they are just not all billionaires.
Ok... there are probably far, far worse hidden scandals in terms of access control/data security in the US government. I don't see your point. I don't think that's the point anyone was trying to make. It's bad, for sure, but it doesn't warrant leaking all of the documents.
>while others out there risk their life to produce the documents that can bring about actual change.
What in the diplomatic cables brought, or could have brought, actual change?
NSA surveillance leaks could (and, to a small extent, did) bring about actual change. The cables accomplished nothing positive for anyone.
I don't know, it taught me a lot about the US attitude towards the rest of the world. I feel that is worth knowing.
Which may have had wide-reaching consequences, with respect to the Arab Spring.
Are any other architects of these disasters serving 35 years?
If someone working in medical records uncovered insurance fraud, but put thousands of people's full records out on the internet (instead of a targeted disclosure), they would absolutely civil lawsuits and criminal penalties. Even if their original intent was noble, their actions would be subject to punishment.
The ends don't always justify the means.
The thing to keep in mind, though, is that Manning didn't simply dump these to "the public"; she gave them to Assange and his people, who (after some falling out with each other, and a lapse in some basic security practices) managed to leak the passphrase to one of their private keys.
Which isn't to say she's not responsible for the consequences of her actions; in any case, she's already very much paid the price for the decision she made. But still, it was not her intent that the cables be simply "dumped in public".
> the public has benefited greatly
> from the disclosures in the more
> pertinent cable leaks
Here's one of my personal favorites (summarized by Reuters):
"You know the movie 'The Godfather'? We've been living it for the last few months," a businessman involved in the dispute was quoted in the cable as telling an official from the U.S. diplomatic mission in Tripoli.
The cable, which was made available to Reuters by a third party, centers on a bottling plant in Tripoli that was shut down for three months. It had been seized by troops loyal to Mutassim Gaddafi, a son of Muammar, who at the time was feuding with one of his brothers, Mohammed. (Another State Department cable suggests a third Gaddafi son, Saadi -- better known as the family's professional soccer player -- may also have been involved in the squabble, though no details of his role are given.)
Eventually, the American diplomatic mission in Tripoli, known then as the U.S. Liaison Office, sent a firm protest to the Libyan government. The document states that around the same time, Mohammed Gaddafi, possibly under pressure from his sister Aisha, a family peacemaker, apparently agreed that shares owned by the Libyan Olympic Committee, which he led, would be sold to a third party.
Shortly afterward, the cable says, Mutassim's men left the Coke plant, ending the family standoff, but not before employees of the plant received threats of bodily harm and a Gaddafi cousin was stuffed in the trunk of a car.
Really, it shouldn't be hard to satisfy your own curiosity on this topic. Unless you think we're better off not knowing about this stuff, that is.
> Unless you think we're better off
> not knowing about this stuff, that is.
I guess that argument could be applied to high crimes and corruption of all sorts, just about anywhere: "We already know about that in broad strokes. What good does it do to air all that dirty laundry before the general public?"
> high crimes
This is, quite frankly, a bizarre equivalence to make.
Also, there's not necessarily an element of "great personal risk". It may just be social or embarrassment or minor damage to a career. If some flunky at a Peruvian consulate has a bit too much to drink and says his boss is an asshole, it gets written down and goes into a file somewhere. When people see that on the internet they think "Man, I really need to watch what I say to the Americans."
Given the degree of subterfuge the US has facilitated in many of these countries, over the years -- most of these folks already knew that.
And I think you're mostly jumping at shadows here. Diplomacy is a lot less interesting and less nefarious than you seem to believe.
About 95% of it, yes. But if the other 5% were so profoundly uninteresting then people wouldn't be talking about how "embarrassing" and "damaging" it was to have it released.
Again, there's a practical side here. As I asked in another post, just how much would you share with a friend or family member that was going to immediately run to publish what you said in a Facebook post? Because that's essentially what Manning did.
No, that's not what she did. She gave the archive to a third party (Assange) who turned out to be unreliable. But that's not "the same" -- or even "essentially" the same -- as just outright posting it on Facebook.
Can we just end the discussion there, please? I'm not saying this issue is cut-and-dried, or that there's no validity in your arguments. But if we keep going back and forth about the basic event chronology, then there's really not much a of a point.
Yes it is. Once it's there on the internet, people are linking to it, and it's a topic of discussion, anything that gets you into any kind of trouble is out there for people to see.
>Can we just end the discussion there, please? I'm not saying this issue is cut-and-dried, or that there's no validity in your arguments. But if we keep going back and forth about the basic event chronology, then there's really not much a of a point.
If you're really intent on ending a conversation, try not attempting to slip in the last word.
Sounds eminently reasonable. It's all yours, then.
As for outing what people "really think" of Berlusconi... I suspect that no one was surprised (including the clown himself, Silvio).
Acting on her conscience does not make what she did the right thing to do.
For example, the 2 men behind the boston marathon bombing, did what they did based on their conscience. Did that make what they did right?
What if someone indiscriminately leaked everything on the Manhattan project during WW2? Would they be a hero because they "acted on their conscience" and showed the world that the big bad USA was secretly developing WMDs? Or would they be a villain because they just taught other countries how to do the same? To the peace loving left he would be a hero, to the nationalist right he would be an enemy.
Bradley/Chelsea Manning is no different.
No thats not what's being said. I would hope we could all be above strawmen.
English is flexible/ambiguous like that.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2013/08/21/bradley-mannings-sente...
/s
Anyone who is able to condemn Manning would also condemn the soldiers of Hitler's army who chose to disobey orders to kill Jews because it would have been against the law.
Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it's wrong. And if our government didn't engage in illegal activity (like torture, political uprisings, wire tapping) then perhaps people like Manning wouldn't have to leak information that could compromise a few undercover agents.
In this case, the benefits far outweigh the costs. Find me a politician or soldier who got jail time for committing acts of torture in Baghdad and then we can talk about penalizing Manning.
See, e.g. the conduct that Colin Powell described in this email:
https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/30324
[EDIT: click to view the PDF to find the actual content.]
https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/23730#efmAEGAEh...
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3599
It's oversold, yes, but as far as I can tell, it's this Bill Ivey (NEA chairman under Clinton, Obama transition team member) and not some random spammer -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ivey
Other correspondence can be found here -
https://search.wikileaks.org/?q=bi%40globalculturalstrategie...
But she was punished. With 7 years that she already spent in jail. I don't think that reducing her sentence from 35 years to 7 years "encourage others to leak".
His motivation was money (selling his secrets for millions of dollars) and when he was caught, he was hoping to have his sentence reduced to 8 years so he may be with his family.
I think it would be encouraging to others to leak if the risk of making millions for their families to getting caught still allows them to live life if the punishment is anything less than life.
This is why I'm very much in the "Pardon Snowden, Commute Manning" camp.
There are/were several other leaders nearby who also suffered.
Along with them, the resulting violent conflict killed plenty more.
A one-time presidential commute or pardon would do no such thing. Saying that "this specific case has been looked at and deemed to be okay" doesn't automatically equate to "everyone can do this and they won't get in trouble." There's a huge difference between whistleblowing and treason
I too am troubled by the decision, but it does seem a bit out of whack with the total lack of punishment for the higher echelons of government. Lately it seems like the rules-based system we have been living under is cracking.
Personally I think esoteric pronouns like "ve" are a silly idea that won't catch on, but I like the idea of using "they" as a gender neutral way to refer to one or more people.
It's a straightforward expansion of the current usage: as a gender neutral way to refer to two or more people.
The NYT correctly stated in the parent article, "Ms. Manning was still known as Bradley Manning when she deployed with her unit to Iraq in late 2009." See how that works? She was always a she, even though she was presenting as a man at the time.
Highly religious, unscientific arguments are best taken to Gab where they will not be subject to scrutiny. Can I help you make an account?
Trans binary people enforce their gender identity quite strongly because they get so much "pushback" (a polite way of saying harassment and threats) from people. In this case "they" is tapping into that.
If you think this is complicated, try calling a baptist a catholic and see what happens.
Not actually. Manning was required by law to refuse and report illegal orders. And not just make a show of reporting it and then back to business as usual.
> didn't it also do things like give away the positions of some undercover agents?
No, but that'd be our fault anyways, for mixing legal and illegal.
> And harm US diplomatic relations with other countries?
The truth didn't harm relations, doing the things that the allies found out about in the first place was the problem.
> Look at it from the POV of the government: How could they not punish Manning?
Um, admitting fault and correcting it. But yeah, we know that'd never happen so what could they do but shoot the messenger?
> It would do a lot to encourage others to indiscriminately leak classified info.
Doubtful. The motivator in Manning's case wasn't the ease or difficulty of leaking, but the crimes that needed exposing.