If he didn’t want to hurt anyone and be a complete professional about it, he should’ve kept his mouth shut and done his job. We all live in a more dangerous world today because of his loose lips.
Cite?
A few people in the thread have mentioned Manning. Can someone clarify for me, what wrong doing, specifically, was Manning blowing the whistle on?
I mean, with Snowden, everything he has exposed had to do with the scope of NSA surveillance being more extensive than most people knew it was, and arguably more extensive than the general public or the Congress believed it should be. One can argue whether the NSA was in the right or in the wrong, but Snowden was clearly exposing something that many people would consider to be wrongdoing.
Manning seems to have leaked huge numbers of documents indiscriminately. While some of those may have contained evidence of wrongdoing, most of them so far as I know don’t indicate any specific wrongdoing at all. He seemed to be operating from the perspective that “government secrets are bad”, no matter what they are.
Maybe I’m misinformed here…
As a result of Snowden;
- Iran is aware that Stuxnet was a US/Israel collaboration
- Al Jazeera is aware that it was infiltrated by the NSA
- Criminals who used deepweb/encrypted services to engage in online crimes are moving to other systems now that they know they were being monitored
- The US is known by Arab states to be more deeply involved with Israeli intelligence
- The Ayatollah is aware that the US was eavesdropping on him for a decade
- Secret treaties that have been kept clandestine for over half a century have been exposed, putting Sweden’s neutrality at risk and threatening US-Russian relations
- Six times as many classified documents have been exposed as were leaked by Bradley Manning, and nearly 400 times as many as were included in the Pentagon Papers
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s no telling what other pipe bombs the Guardian is waiting for a slow news day to drop.
That’s great, but I asked for evidence that the world is more dangerous today because of Snowden. You just linked to articles illustrating NSA abuses. How is the world more dangerous today due to exposure of the US Government’s wrongdoing?
I guess this was the big moment:
I believe, as with Snowden, much of what Manning took hasn’t been published. Wikileaks seemed to go for the embarrassing stuff (Embassy cables in particular). I may stand corrected on that.
Also, Manning was of course pre-Snowden. I’d be interested to know if and what changed for Snowden in the wake of Manning.
I fail to see how monitoring our enemies, sabotaging a rogue state’s plan to build a nuclear weapon, winning the Cold War, or keeping tabs on drug dealers and child molestors qualify as “wrongdoings”.Do you suppose the world would be a safer place if Iran had the bomb and you could still buy child porn over Tor?
While it wasn’t treason, most Americans couldn’t have given two shits about Jonathan Pollard and he’s spent nearly 30 years in prison for sharing intelligence with Israel and there’s no sign he’ll be released any time soon.
Taking what you say at face value, it wouldn’t be any less safe. A lot of countries have nukes, enough to wipe out 20 earths. One more isn’t making anything more dangerous. Besides, Stuxnet is done. Knowledge of it doesn’t make the world less safe. Was Kapersky Antivirus guilty of making the world more dangerous when they disclosed its existence?
Anonymity and encryption are useful tools. The NSA breaking those tools should be a crime. How would you feel if a hacker emptied your bank account because the US government weakened the security of your bank’s website? If you were a Chinese dissident trying to communicate anonymously over Tor, but were caught and executed due to the US Government weakening that software? For that matter, what if you’re a US Government agent trying to do your job securely and secretly, but fail because the software you trusted was subverted by a rogue arm of your very own government? That doesn’t make the world safer.
Child porn has already been made. Go stop the molesters, not the poor souls afflicted with an illness they are trying to satisfy without harming anyone further. But for that you need actual police work, not spies breaking useful software from the comfort of their cubicles.
The knowledge of the authors of Stuxnet, 4 years after the fact, hurts no one. Knowing that some journalists were spied on in the past hurts no one. Cyber war is upon us.
The knowledge that an important anonymity tool, invented by the US government, was then undermined by another US government agency is important to know. It nevertheless hurts no one, and may save many.
The knowledge that the US works with Israeli intelligence is not a surprise to anybody and hurts no one.
The knowledge that Iranians are being spied on by the US hurts no one.
The revelation that Sweden’s neutrality was a lie is an important revelation that nevertheless hurts no one. It makes the world safer in fact, for foreign policy stances to be known, rather than obfuscated.
The fact that Snowden took a lot of data does not imply any harm whatsoever so those numbers are irrelevant. Show me actual harm.
Snowden took care to keep actual harmful info, like names of agents and information on ongoing operations in China and elsewhere, secret. Details, things that actually should be kept classified, remain secret. But the fact that our government is lying to us and undermining our privacy and security is important to know if our democracy is to continue to work. Transparency is important, was promised to us by our President, and then actively eliminated everywhere possible. This needs to be rectified, and Snowden did his part.
So basically what I’m hearing here is that any form of government spying, clandestine intelligence, or secret negotiations are objectively bad, that “transparency” is an end in and of itself, and that anyone who leaks secrets is a heeo because some vague right of the people to “know” trumps all safety, security, law enforcement, or geopolitical concerns.
I don’t think we have anything left to discuss if that’s the consensus, then.
Well that pretty much summarizes my feelings on the matter, that is, except for the right of the people to know being “vague.” Our government is not our mommy and daddy, it’s a bunch of greedy thieves, for the most part. Trusting their word is almost always a bad idea.
The government isn’t some alien monster The government is us. We elect the people who write the laws and carry them out. If the government is “a bunch of greedy thieves”, then that only reflects on the voters, not the institution.
On that note, is there anything that you believe the government should be allowed to keep secret?
Well, then, you expect and demand that the government will obey its citizens’ demand for privacy. Good to know…
Gotta love this. The government is “us”. And apparently we are hiding all kinds of things from ourselves. Because we judge that we shouldn’t know these things that we know, and we really shouldn’t even know what exactly we don’t know about. Because if we knew the things that we know that we shouldn’t know about we might not like the way we run things.
It’s all becoming clear now.
Sure. Health records. Social security numbers. Queries into whether someone is legally allowed to purchase a firearm. Things that are kept secret to protect privacy, not to protect attempts to undermine privacy.
So privacy is OK for individuals, but not for governments.
Check.
The government as an entity has no rights. The only valid purpose of a government’s existence, the only reason it should ever have the extraordinary powers granted to the government, is to make it a better servant.
Government represents the collective will of the people. How can the people have rights as individuals if they have no rights collectively?
That’s an incredible misunderstanding of what rights are. It sounds like you’re saying we can’t have rights as individuals unless “we” (in the form of the government) are can do whatever we want. That’s not how it works. Rights are freedoms we’ve agreed we are all entitled to as individuals, and even the government isn’t supposed to stop us from exercising them without an extremely good reason. That’s expressly how they are set up in the Bill of Rights: the government can’t pass laws blocking freedom of speech, religion, or the press. It can’t infringe on the right to bear arms. It can’t deny us the right to a speedy trial. The list goes on. Even we - collectively, in the form of the government - cannot deny ourselves the exercise of those rights as individuals (with some limited exceptions). It doesn’t work the other way around.
It is a communist viewpoint, using “communist” in its correct sense as a political descriptor rather than as a simple insult. Countries like North Korea embrace the communist viewpoint (notwithstanding the fact that their system has become a hereditary monarchy that doesn’t really even pay lip service to Marxism anymore); countries like the United States do not.