I think this raises an issue we can't easily dismiss, how to handle whistle-blowers. On one hand they are essential to democracy, so we don't want to jail all of them; on the other they can cause great harm, so we don't want to enable all of them. How do we enable good whistle-blowers and stop the bad ones?
Let's hear serious proposals. Would a law that puts the consequences on the leaker's shoulders be sufficient? Prosecuting someone after-the-fact when, due to the leaker's misjudgment, their leak lost a war and killed hundreds of thousands wouldn't be enough. Require them to exhaust internal institutional solutions? Again, that wouldn't protect us from a leaker with bad judgment; the worse their judgment, the more likley the institution would rightly reject all the leaker's claims, leading to a leak. Rely on executive clemency?
What is wrong with responsible whistleblowing of unlawful activity? I think it should be encouraged!
To the extent that the individual leakers could have some sort of culpability, it would be for the people with whom they chose to share their information, though I grant that the who is not independent of the how.
To his credit, Snowden did attempt to vet reporters as I recall. ;)
In fact, the majority of disclosures were foreign in nature, and of those, quite a few ran counter not only to American foreign policy and security interests, but Western interests in general.
The articles exposing intelligence activities in Indonesia were but one example.[1]
Indonesia is such a nice, non-repressive country[2], and it's not like they aren't making significant progress on the human rights front[3]. How dare western intelligence spy on them. /s
Other examples include severe damage to foreign relations with China[4], coverage of offensive capabilities such as network infiltration and hardware implantation[5], the CIA using co-traveler inference to shake tails in the field [6], and more.
Today's news is certainly a positive thing, but I think it's fair to say Snowden's whistleblowing is far from responsible, even if it isn't wantonly reckless (i.e. Manning).
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[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/18/australia-tried...
[2] http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/06/08/letter-president-yudhoyon...
[3] https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/03/04/indonesia-begins-roll-ba...
[4] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/13/snowden-revelat...
[5] http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-nsa-uses-power...
[6] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-tr... (very last paragraph)
While I agree in a domestic context, that ideal can't really be applied to a foreign context with any specificity, at least in terms of intelligence activities.
The vast majority of intelligence operations rely on secrecy to be effective, and you can't maintain secrecy when you inform your citizenry about it.
I know that sounds bad, but the result would be that the representative democracies of the world wouldn't have effective intelligence agencies, and the other countries would. Not exactly an ideal outcome.
>Saying that the Snowden revelations damaged relations with another country is like an adulteress complaining that her snitching boyfriend damaged her relationship with her husband.
Sure, and if we extend my example using your analogy, the husband is and has been a cheating asshole the entire time. His hobbies include perpetrating various human rights violations on a massive scale.
in other news, Indonesia's oppressive regime has been propped up by the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suharto
That said, I fail to see how such history should have any bearing on whether or not Indonesia is a valid signals intelligence target today. If anything, it provides compelling justification to continue such programs.
In my opinion, countries that have terrible human rights records generally lose their right to complain about privacy when spied on by countries with significantly better records.
Whistleblowing?
> do we want to encourage this type of thing?
So long as the government tries to do things in secret that are illegal, yes, we do want to encourage this type of thing. The alternative is that eventually you have "turn key tyranny" where the apparatus is also used to suppress dissent and the government REALLY takes over.
The pendulum has swung too far away for this to be a credible objection. Yes, I do want to encourage what Snowden did.
I want as many Snowdens as we can muster. (I was once shadowbanned on HN for typing that sentence.)
2. All I was trying to say is that turning Snowden into a public mainstream hero could inspire some idiot that "wants to be a hero too" to do something dumb.
Blame the New York Times instead of Snowden for that failure if you want, but I wouldn't call sending that information to the New York Times in the first place 'very careful'.