> Does that mean that Manning doesn't deserve his sentence? If so, how?

Because it is immoral to remove a fellow human's freedom for lengthy periods of time unless absolutely necessary, when there is no other way to protect the public from their future actions. For example, in the case of unreformable violent criminals, who must be physically restrained lest they injure others if unrestrained, there may be no other option than multiyear or even (in rare cases) multi-decade imprisonment. But that does not happen often, and even most people who committed violent crimes pose much less risk once they grow older.

There is no way you would be sentenced to 35 years for a nonviolent crime here (Denmark), because the idea is preposterous. Not even if you leaked something that offended the fairly influential and US/NATO-loving military. Sentences longer than 2 years are rare, reserved only for extreme crimes (murder, rape, etc.), which seems quite correct.

Americans seems somewhat vengeful, even sadistic on the subject, rather than rational. Somehow absurdly long sentences like confining someone in a cage for 5 years or even 10 years is seen as a "short" sentence, I guess because compared to locking people in a cage for 30 or 50 years or outright killing them, it seems lenient in comparison. You even hear people joking gleefully about prison rape. Not sure how you could approach fixing that culture.

>He exposed a small amount of wrongdoing with his leaking. [...] These leaks damaged relationships with foreign governments and jeopardized the lives of people

Abu Ghraib also damaged international relations and placed American lives at increased risk from terrorism. Plus, you know, it involved physically torturing people, not chatting online with Julian Assange.

Yet it is only Manning's crime that's judged worthy of deterrence (by a 3.5 times larger punishment). That's because his real fault is that of exposing the inner workings of a style of policy making that can only function effectively as long as the public is kept ignorant. Only this kind of a crime can "undermine the entire system", as the prosecutor very frankly put it.

Abu Ghraib may have embarrassed America, but the real no-no is exposing its government.

No, Manning's real crime to the military is disregarding orders and showing his own judgement.

Abu Ghraib was horrific, but it was close enough to what was ordered to be done by Mi, by the CIA, by special forces (water boarding, walling, stress positions, sleep deprivation) that no one thinks the soldiers really disregarded the chain of command (aside from the standing orders against prisoner treatment which others were by direct order ignoring), they just got out of hand. So from the military's point of view, it's not a discipline problem.

Abu Ghraib, as a systemic thing, is deterred by simple never issuing orders to do that kind of thing again and making it explicitly clear that it's prohibited. After all, non of the soldiers involved thought they were explicitly disobeying their superiors, they thought they were doing what everyone else did. If ordered not to torture people, they would not torture people.

Manning, on the other head, disregarded lawful orders stemming from the civilian command authority to protect information. He didn't do it because what he leaked exposed crimes against humanity(he leaked far more than leak the "collateral murder" video), he did it because he thought he knew what was best.

Soldiers don't get to decide what they think is best with in the context of lawful orders. If they could, they might decide they know what is best for the country and stage a coup, or frag their commanding officer, or any number of other things.

That's what they needed to deter.

> and jeopardized the lives of people in foreign nations employed by or cooperating with the US.

Didn't independent studies/orgs show that this wasn't true, and was just a phrase paraded around by the government to get the public against Manning?

I'd be interested in seeing such studies, especially the methodology. The Taliban themselves were quite clear that they would be on the hunt for any and all collaborators, and there are eyewitness accounts of foreign service agents who had to be rapidly withdrawn from their post (sometimes in the middle of the night while literally out in a field) due to their name being revealed in these leaks.

And no offense, but what is the simplest explanation here? That a bunch of collaborator names were leaked and not a single person was put into harm's way as a result of that? Keep in mind that we're not talking about some random subdivision of the IRS, we're talking about the organization that gunned down Malala and detonated a bomb in the middle of a policeman's funeral.

Yes.

> These leaks damaged relationships with foreign governments.

If truth hurts it's not a good sign.

Hint: you don't really want to hear everything your friends might think of you, much less your frenemies, acquaintances, or coworkers.

The very fact that lowly private Manning had access to this stuff should tell you that the intelligence services of literally any country in the world have access to this.

The system is only effective at hiding information from citiziens, who are not able to access the very information that politicians use to guide their decisions. That is, of course, why they happily go on record with blatant lies, at no risk of being exposed. Contrast this with their complete non-statements in this current NSA situation; they would rather make no statement at all than be exposed as a liar, for no one knows what else Snowden/Greenwald will release that could make previous statements look like disinformation.

You'd be surprised but I really do want to know that and I believe it would benefit me greatly.

But would I get angry at my friend, or the person who told me what my friend secretly thinks of me?

The latter, of course. Humans are imperfect. Humans know that they are imperfect. Humans know that other people recognize their imperfections. Life goes on because we don't rub in each others' faces what we think of each others' imperfections. Sometimes it's necessary in cases where a particular imperfection is becoming a serious issue either in the persons life or in the friendship, but generally the best policy is to leave things be.

I love every single one of my friends dearly and would go to great lengths for them. But for any one I can point to a list of things that are flawed about them, and I'm sure every one of them could put together a long list of things flawed about me. I'd be pissed at someone who told one of my friends that, e.g. I thought they had unrealistic expectations about potential mates given their own looks, because the only reason someone would do that would be to either hurt my friend or to hurt me.

Human relationships are very often about delicacy, and part and parcel of delicacy is knowing what thoughts to share and what not to share. When someone takes away that discretion and makes that decision for you, you are entitled to get mad.

I find your opinion utterly bizarre.

Read some Eric Berne books. Human interactions are practically built on pretense and games (and it is not always bad - actually, unless you are caught up in a self-destructive game, it often is good). Unless you're communicating with robots all day, truth is not exactly the primary factor here. Otherwise morning greeting would look like:

- I notice you! Here's some meaningless words acknowledging the fact. - I noticed you too. Please don't tell me anything about your life unless it's exciting but not making me envy you in any way. - Same to you, and please don't waste my time anymore now unless you are going to benefit me in some way. - I'm going to depart now, and I don't care how the rest of you day goes. - Neither do I for you.

I would submit a world like this would be perceived as utterly bizarre by most of us.

Are you married? Do you tell your wife every thing you think of her all the time?

I'm not married, but I doubt that I would tell her everything. That's not what I have an issue with. My issue is with the idea that society is some brittle construct that's reliant on honesty, and especially the idea that you would be angry at the person who leaked a secret rather than the person holding the secret.

>My issue is with the idea that society is some brittle construct that's reliant on (dis)honesty, and especially the idea that you would be angry at the person who leaked a secret rather than the person holding the secret.

Well, I am sorry to say that in fact society is that brittle and you are being lied to in one fashion or another most of the time.

I do want to clarify what I mean by lying though because it would be easy to interpret what I am saying as conspiratorial. In fact what I mean is that your information diet is nearly completely full with selective information, weasel words, legalese and implied trust. The constructs between nations and even within our nation are the same and often worse than interpersonal relations. So the reason that you trust any entity is not because they are moral pillars, its because they don't show you the questionable things that people do on a day to day basis that make little difference. This is exactly the argument against the widespread intelligence gathering - everyone is doing something illegal at pretty much any time. Similarly everyone, whether they know it or not lies to others on a daily basis (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/homo-consumericus/201111...)

So yes, it really is that fragile and it is insanely magnified at the global politics level way beyond you would even imagine.

> Well, I am sorry to say that in fact society is that brittle and you are being lied to in one fashion or another most of the time.

And you don't believe bit more honesty might be in order?

I would love to see that happen, but I don't think we can handle it from a biological perspective. We are too emotional, vain and have too muddled an understanding of our own goals and volition to be able to be honest even with ourselves let alone the rest of the world. It just doesn't seem feasible without some kind of widespread cognitive change.

In Europe we used to think that killing each other over some differences is a good idea. Two wars later, around 10% population lost and look how well we get along.

We used to like having slaves. All people used to hate gays and atheists. Women used to be perceived as incapable of having public lives.

At some point we might reach the conclusion that being lied to is not all that convenient because truth eventually comes out and if it's too far from perception it leads to shitstorms.

People can change. But they do not change by themselves. There is always some kind of technological advancement that forces people to change their ways. I sincerely hope that internet will lead us to more honest lives.

To wit, from the front page of HN right now: "Fukushima leak is 'much worse than we were led to believe" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23779561

Indeed you are correct that the truth will come out and I am the first person to support full transparency. I do know however that in this example, if the Japanese said they don't know what they are doing, please help - the people in charge would lose their jobs immediately. So it's not just a one way street with people being honest, it is also the public and everyone who has a voice understanding that there is a difference between incompetence, hostile intent and accidents.

People at the basic level demand perfection from people in power - so those in power do everything that they can to make it look like they are either infallible, or are victims. In one way or another how we as a society respond to failure that will determine how truthful we can be. If we continue to have the zero fault mindset for those in power, they will continue to lie.

^ I meant "reliant on dishonesty"

"If you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear"

Or I forget how the quote goes, but anyways I thought we supported the concept of privacy in general on this site. Governments need privacy to serve the interests of their people for the same reason people need privacy to serve their own interest.

Yeah. And corporations are people too. /sarcasm

Government should operate in the open. I might understand need for military secrecy of government of a small country in unfriendly region, but not for a broad secrecy of the government that has has largest military force in the world at its disposal. Unless you think that all this NSA thing is all good because government needs to have its privacy when it's spying you.

Don't be absurd. Of course I want to know these things. They don't stop thinking them because you don't find out, you know!

This comment is so remarkably naive and juvenile, I have to assume it's parody.

Well it wasn't a parody.

From what I heard relationships with foreign governments were damaged by the fact that foreign governments found out that friendly diplomacy called them chumps behind their backs. When the truth about this talk and how american diplomats understand words "friend" or "ally" leaked out it did hurt. As I said, if revealing what you really think about others hurts you, that's not a good sign. It's a sign that you might be kind of an asshole.

It's quite the opposite of naive and juvenile.

Are you sure you want everybody know all the truth about you? Every fine detail, including your bathroom routine, your most secret thoughts, your dreams and your secret wishes? Does the word "privacy" mean anything to you? Yes, knowing the whole truth sometimes hurts. Some truths are not meant to be known by everybody.