Just like Snowden, Manning would have been treated as a whistleblower if he had only leaked illegal or possibly illegal things the government did. Instead, he dumped a full archive of secret diplomatic cables. That's not as bad as Snowden, who deliberately leaked Chinese targets to China in hopes of getting asylum in Hong Kong.

Why is the focus always on what these people did, and not on the crimes that they exposed?

Why are you saying "if they had done it differently they would be treated better" instead of "I am ashamed of the evil and illegal acts that my country has done and want to change the system to make this impossible"?

Why do you care what either of them did more than you care about what the government did?

Which crimes had Manning exposed? There has to be a list somewhere.

Two of my former colleagues (both Reuters journalists) were murdered by U.S. soldiers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=zYTxuW2vmzk

Then all the civilians that took care of their bodies were also killed, including children.

Then the Department of Defense then denied existing video coverage of the event (personal comm., Tom Glocer, J.D., former CEO and attorney, Reuters).

-> So homicide, mult. war crimes and lying.

I'll be eternally grateful to Manning and Assange for letting the truth come to light, and to all whistleblowers driven by their conscience and idealism.

But the most disturbing thing about this all is the dirty laughter of that helicopter crew. Seeing that video makes one ashamed to belong to the human species.

That was not a part of the cables released by Manning.

The "Collateral Murder" video of the unlawful killing of journalists was part of the archive that Wikileaks published that's been attributed to Chelsea Manning. All available evidence supports this was part of the material. Chelsea's leak was the contents of the shared drive, not just diplomatic cables.

The release of the diplomatic cables themselves gravely harmed U.S. interests and is alleged to have led to the deaths of CIA collaborators.

Again, Snowden leaked a single extant program that was potentially illegal. All he had to do was blow the whistle on that program and the other possibly program that had already been shut down, and we wouldn't be having this conversation. Instead, he told China what systems the US had compromised and additionally claimed the US was doing a bunch of illegal things that his documents did not support, causing hysteria and helping Trumpism.

The thing that makes illegal programs almost impossible to hide are the reforms after the Church Committee, including SSCI oversight and whistleblower procedures and protections.

Your transphobia hardly makes you look unbiased, shill

It was an honest mistake, and I apologize for it to Chelsea if she is reading this. In my mind, I remembered her gender at the time she leaked the documents, which had nothing to do with whether she should be considered a whistleblower. She herself has said she should not be considered one.

I will admit to shilling for literacy and common sense. You got me there.

No one was holding them up "as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists." I was holding them up as history. History will judge Snowden differently because he chose exile and didn't give himself the opportunity for pardons or plea deals like Manning and Assange.

My point was that "both of these people are currently free" isn't the flex it appears to be.

And again, why are we so focused on judging Snowden and not focused on judging the crimes he exposed? I would think that history will judge him very favourably considering that he was completely correct to expose those crimes.

Once again, there was no flex. We aren't judging the morality or ethics of the situation in any direction. We are simply looking back on historical events with hindsight.

We also don't have to flatten these historical events into one good side and one bad side. Reality tends to be more complicated than that. It's ok to recognize that Snowden maybe made some mistakes. That is neither an endorsement of the US government's spying or an accusation of ill intent against Snowden.

we also don't have to flatten these historical events (snowden maybe making some mistakes vs the US government's spying) so we can pretend that they're of equal valence, scale and severity. they are actually extremely dissimilar and one is very transparently worse and more serious than the other

>we also don't have to flatten these historical events (snowden maybe making some mistakes vs the US government's spying) so we can pretend that they're of equal valence, scale and severity

In what way do you think this was done? Nothing I said here was condoning the government's behavior.

Crimes? What a strong word.

Right now, American sailors and officers are doing war crimes every week in the Caribbean, shooting at boaters. They are boasting about it and showing it on social media.

Zero reaction. But you are more concerned because you might have some of your private data put into a huge database by the CIA. Heh. Seems that really sets you off is not the scale of the "crime", but that you may have been affected. "How dare they!"

If a person does an illegal thing, that cancels out the illegal things other people did.

Reality Winner got five years for showing Russian interference in elections, which seems like doing the right thing

Is Snowden... free, in Russia? Is he, really? Between his constant KGB handlers and the Ukrainian bombings?

In the case of Assange, Australian politicians did a lot of work to get him released in the end[1], including:

* Sending a delegation representing all major political parties to the US to argue for the release of Assange. Imagine picking the Republican and Democrat politician LEAST likely to want to cooperate on anything, and those two would have been Australia's equivalent representatives in this delegation. Reports afterwards of the meeting at DOJ HQ indicated it wasn't the type of meeting where the Australians would have brought Tim Tams to share around the room.[2]

* The Australian parliament voted publicly 2:1 on a motion for Assange's release.

* Repeated petitioning through ambassadors in the UK and US, official visits of Australian politicians, etc. Not in private either, as is typically the case for diplomatic affairs.

* Australian politicians attending UK extradition hearings.

* After getting agreement to a plea deal, flying Australian ambassadors for the UK and US to the court of a one-pub-town in the middle of the Pacific Ocean no one has heard of (Northern Mariana Islands) in support of Assange, then all of them flying back to the Australian prime minister's aircraft terminal for a welcome home bevvy.

This was all at a time too where "Free Assange" posters and graffiti was _widely_ distributed across Australian cities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Plea_bargain_an...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-27/inside-the-us-austral...