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Comment by deepnet | Hacker News Reader

A free press and whistleblowers are essential to democracy.

Without a free press & whistleblowers democracy cannot function.

It is clear from the last five years of leaks that elected governements around the world feel they must act in secret because they suspect the electorate would not approve.

Without much more oversight this will worsen.

Free Chelsea Manning. Pardon Edward Snowden. Drop the inditement against Julian Assange. Offer sanctuary to Mossack Fonesca's whistleblower. Lead by example.

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A free press and whistleblowers are essential to democracy. Without a free press & whistleblowers democracy cannot function.

The scariest part of what you said is not that it's true, it's that you're being down voted for saying it.

sigh... this again. He's being downvoted because statements like

> "A free press and whistleblowers are essential to democracy. Without a free press & whistleblowers democracy cannot function."

are applause lights that contribute nothing of substance to this conversation.

Pick a bunch of random people-- hell, even random politicians-- and ask them if a free press is essential to democracy. I guarantee you 100% of them will say yes, and probably 100% of them actually believe it and aren't just cynical liars. This suggests that the causes of this muzzling are deeper than people simply not realizing how important a free press is, and that the solutions are more complex than repeating two-sentence mantras that everyone already agrees with.

Given that the press doesn't have that much freedom in most of the world (even supposedly democratic countries), I think your statement that "everyone already agrees with" these mantras is plainly false.

Given that the entities suppressing that freedom are powerful minorities, I think the statement still holds.

"Everyone" is a colloquialism meaning "most reasonable people" in this case.

You're making assumptions. You're assuming that your position is "reasonable", and you're assuming that most people (at least in the western world) agree with you. And then to make your logic work, you're assuming that there's a vast conspiracy to oppress most people to prevent them from having freedom of speech and press.

The reality is that there aren't a lot of places where there's anything close to an absolute freedom of speech or the press. America really sticks out as an anomaly there, by having it written into the constitution. If it were really a strong part of a nation's culture, you'd think this wouldn't be so unusual, but it is, and in fact other western nations have laws completely contrary to this to some degree. Just look at the UK, where the truth is not an absolute defense against libel.

> that contribute nothing of substance to this conversation

What does ignoring the (debatable[1]) bulk of a post - arguing that democracies should support whistleblowers, rather than persecuting them - and simply downvoting because of a repeated platitude, contribute to the conversation?

[1] Unless you think "everyone" believes Manning, Snowden and Assange should be freed/supported.

Manning just did a data dump, damn anyone who was actually in there. From what I understand, there were active agents dossiers in the data Manning released.

That's simply not a responsible whistleblow. Now, turning in bad programs and illegal operations that the US did, IS responsible discourse: Snowden scrubbed for potential people in his leaks. He went for policies and plans and programs, not people.

Didn't the Bush Administration do that very same thing to a CIA operative

It was rumored to be revenge against her husband for holding an opinion contrary to the government. I can't remember the person's name but I do remember it happening.

Sauce for the goose, as they say.

The accusation of harm is not borne out by the facts.

Its falsehood is dealt with here https://theintercept.com/a-conversation-about-privacy/

Isn't it Wikileaks that data dumped, not Manning? I guess you could say Manning is partially responsible by not giving the data to journalists instead? Not really sure.

No one was compromised, the leak was an accident.

Wikileaks encrypted the data and were going through it with other journalists to redact info such as agent details.

They requested the White House also vet each article before publication as did Greenwald and Poitras for Snowden - the White House never responded in either case.

Some portion of the raw data leaked by accident when a Guardian Journalist inadvertently published the decryption key.

Remember this was all pre-Snowden and traditional Journalists were playing catchup with the necessary security.

Even so no actual harm has ever been shown.

Claims to the contrary have been made as vague press releases, but no actual harm has ever been shown.

source - https://theintercept.com/2016/03/30/edward-snowden-noam-chom...

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