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.
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.