Snowden calls for whistleblower shield after claims by new Pentagon source
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Everyone is so gung-ho on getting rid of political insiders, exposing the wrong doings of the government, and yet we blacklist someone who could be a bannerman for that cause.
The people are entitled to trust the government and condemn those who leak state secrets. You or I might think that's short-sighted, but the whole point of democracy is to give people the power to make these value judgments. America wasn't set up for a class of self-appointed civil libertarian guardians to tell people what their priorities should be.
It is not direct democracy, which is also called a pure democracy, with the best known example being James Madison in Federalist 10.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_democracy for a list of some of the types of democracy. It does not list a "true democracy". I suspect that you meant to use "pure" instead of "true" in your comment.
Isn't that a self-fulfilling prophecy? If the government is allowed to lie to the people and keep secrets from them without oversight then the people have no way to make an informed decision, and will consequently be more inclined to make a decision favoring the government.
It's all too easy to win a public debate when everyone with the information required to refute your position is prohibited by law from disclosing it.
I don't think it is. To make that decision you have to know the cost of secret abuses. And how are you supposed to know that if they're secret?
To make the reductio ad absurdum, suppose the government's line is that a plague that becomes contagious before it becomes symptomatic is ravaging the population and everyone is being tested and the people infected are immediately taken to quarantine where they uniformly die of the plague, but in reality what's happening is that genocidal fanatics in the government are doing genetic testing and sending people to death camps.
There is no amount of undermining security that can overcome that amount of harm. But if people are assuming that the harm is dramatically less than that and are not allowed to be corrected then they can't be expected to make the right decision.
People are entitled to trust that the government won't do the sort of things that governments have historically done? This is getting dangerously close to the point of legitimizing the government of North Korea because it's nominally democratically elected.
> and also to presume that the really gross abuses will be hard to keep secret.
Isn't this directly at odds with aggressive systemic and cultural protection of secrets and imposing severe criminal penalties on whistleblowers? You're effectively arguing that the government can only get away with as much malice as they have the capacity to keep secret, and then using that as justification for bolstering the government's ability to keep secrets. That seems like it should go the other way.
"He didn't dump information on a random server somewhere." - That's exactly what he did. Once it left the secure facility, it was no longer secure and vulnerable - tis the point.
Tptacek says that if he were president, he'd "see Snowden prosecuted for overtly and recklessly breaking the law, but would commute his sentence" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5868853#up_5869346 ), whatever that means.
Marc Andreesen called him a traitor in a TV interview right after the leaks.
Even on HN and in Silicon Valley, there are people who think mass surveillance is more or less acceptable, even done in secret without the consent of the public, and that Snowden was wrong for revealing it.
As a nation, we also can't set the precedent that any person with classified information has the right to release information they morally object without any legal repercussions. If you are going to ask for whisteblowing protection, you need to be fairly focused on things that are either illegal or at the very least objectively amoral. Neither Snowden or Manning did that. They instead grabbed everything they could get their hands on in the off chance it was something they were looking for. Isn't that the exact problem we have with mass surveillance in the first place?
You cannot possibly make an informed vote when the government is a black box you cannot see into. The entire inner workings should be public knowledge. This mountain of secrecy left over from the cold war does not make for a free society and has no place in a just world.
My argument boils down to the government keeping secrets first place is inherently amoral.
That is an idealistic viewpoint that simply isn't possible in the real world. Yes, I believe the government should be more transparent about these things, but they can't be transparent about everything. How do you protect a country like the United States without any intelligence or military secrets?
Where did I mention closing them? I am just making the connection those are two aspects of governing that require some level of secrecy. If countries "minding their own business" need secrecy there, then it isn't a path to the US abandoning secrecy.
>The question at hand is whether the govt should be more transparent.
If that is your argument, I agree with it. But that wasn't the original argument. The original argument was complete transparency and "the government keeping secrets first place is inherently amoral."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowback_%28intelligence%29
I'm not interested in arguing absolutes, as perhaps the original ancestor was.
If anything, the dynamics of the our "real world" show that we heading towards a future of either complete openness or unlimited state secrecy (with unlimited state secrecy sadly looking the likely winner).
Beyond the particular illegal (or simply immoral) activity revealed by Snowden's revelations, we see the ability of secret powers to extend themselves secretly and thus grow without being bounded by any democratic norms or public debate. And we see the scale of the state and the scale of technology as only accelerating this.
It seems that NSA hacks every single hackable subsystem of every electronic device out there, keeping the cleverest things things for national security (the ability to track cellphone location even with batteries removed was considered a crucial tool for drone-killing Taliban/Al Qaeda leaders, etc).
The existence of an intelligence agency's "crown jewels" implies that "parallel construction" must be used with the information that these "crown jewels" gather, in the fashion Alan Turing's crowd already only selectively using their interceptions against the NAZIs.
But here we see that what in the 1940s a small region of secrecy and control can be in 2016 a potentially limitless area where a military paradigm is mobilized against the individual and where institutions like the courts serve the military purpose of decoys and misdirections (with even the secret courts winding up manipulated through even-more-secret programs and methods, etc). A military facing an opposing state wants to find weapons that give its opponent no recourse - secretly the opponents plans being one a great instance of this. But the court system and the democratic requires real debate, a real fight of opposing positions and thus the reality of democracy and rule of law is progressively degraded.
The existence of the means of secrecy justifies their expansion (discussion of the "most important" secrets requires more secret action to stop said discuss, etc) and this expansion naturally must be secret. Clearly, this complex will either rise to omnipresence or come to an end as things go forward. Sadly, it's hard to see how it will come to an end.
It isn't about having no secrets, it's about minimizing secrets. Which improves security, because secrets are a liability. They consume resources to keep and cause harm when revealed. The more of them you need the less secure you are. Government secrets are attack surface, not an unmitigated good.
Or maybe the IRS should release every tax return it has ever received?
Or in a time of war, we should announce where all of our troops are going in advance?
That's not so bizarre.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Finland#Publicity_...
> Even when information of earnings and the taxation procedure of individual persons and companies are not public, the amount of taxes carried for each person and company is public information. Tax Administration authority is required to submit information for free if request is targeted. Larger records are submitted for journalistic purposes. Capital income and earned income, are both public information, while taxation of dividends from unlisted limited company is not
Isn't saying the good outweighed the bad how you take all of the good and bad into account? Anything else is to say that everyone who is not without sin should be in prison, which is... everyone.
The problem with your alternative is that no one looks to the sins of mostly-good common people, but anyone who moves against the establishment is thrust into the spotlight where any human fallibility is seized as an excuse to punish them, not for the thing being punished, but for the thing that put them in the government's cross hairs.
High ranking government officials have been known to reveal classified information when it's in their political interest and not be prosecuted because no one was out looking for an excuse to prosecute them. There is no justice if the same thing doesn't happen in the case where the thing revealed is inconvenient to the government.
Whistleblowers before Snowden (Drake, Binney) tried to do it the normal way. They were investigated, prosecuted, charged in secret and shut down. They were the only people investigated. Only Snowden has changed things.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/22/how-pentagon-...
This is false, in a very strict sense; after almost 3 years, the entire world is still debating about his work - if this is not "public interest", what is?
> isn't illegal activity > you can't simply say the good outweighed the bad
This is actually a serious problem of it. Actually, under a certain interpretation, this is the radical problem - lack of accountability. The Clappers of the situation can do/say whatever they want, and get away with it.
If you put this in a political context where if you make a documentary about Iraq you go in the government dissidents watchlist [Poitras], you see the direction towards authoritarian themes; in my book, this is as bad as it gets.
> has the right to release information they morally object without any legal repercussions.
This is misinformed; Snowden said he would have come back in his home country, if there had been a fair trial. Whether this is true of false, everybody knows, that the alternative to "without any legal repercussions" is being crushed by some draconian laws of the early 20th century.
> They instead grabbed everything they could get their hands on in the off chance it was something they were looking for. Isn't that the exact problem we have with mass surveillance in the first place?
If we put aside rhetoric, then definitely are very different problems. There are several reasons why the Mannings/Snowdens could actually keep releasing documentation (including survival, or keeping the public interested, or in unrealistic worst case, frivolousness, arrogance or else), which are radically different from the reason of mass surveillance, which boils down to power.
I'm generally in favor of what Snowden did, but I agree that he should have been a lot more selective in what material he handed off to the press. In dumping everything he could get his hands on without exercising any discretion, he definitely neglected one of his basic responsibilities as a whistleblower.
The situation calls for a nuanced approach, but it seems neither side has the capacity for it, with one side hailing him as an infallible beacon of justice and the other as a traitor that must be punished and made an example of, due process be damned. I'm sure at this point Snowden himself would be happy to return to his homeland if he could just be granted a fair and open trial in the court of law, but that seems rather unlikely in our current political environment.
He certainly did things that in general people shouldn't do, and that the law doesn't allow for; but he did them for reasons that, we'd contend, outweigh the reasons he shouldn't have. Absolutely, the law doesn't work in a "does the good outweigh the bad" fashion, but morality often does (namely, if we ascribe to the view of moral utilitarianism, which is extremely popular both in everyday intuition and academic philosophical circles.) So morally speaking, there isn't necessarily a serious problem with Snowden or Manning's grab-everything approach, either- the damage from what they shouldn't have released can be judged less important than the benefit from what they wouldn't have made available if they were going more carefully.
Snowden getting pardoned would be an individual act of some politician(s) intervening on the legal system, and different from institutionalized whistleblower protection as discussed in the article. The latter is an attempt to get the law back into sync with morality, both directly and through allowing a legal channel for individuals to spur changes to existing immoral systems. There's definitely a tension between whistleblower protection programs that would satisfy both the demands of morally-minded government agents and also the necessities of secrecy-centric government capabilities.
Neither are you - unless you're working for Russian intelligence and can actually prove anything, it's just conjecture.
Whistleblowing on say, corruption at the EPA is clearly in the public interest. That is illegal and everyone can agree it is illegal and bad. But what the NSA was doing was, at least nominally, authorized by congress and the executive branch. You and I may think it is wrong for them to be doing it, but it wasn't necessarily against the law.
What this means is that he was leaking classified information on the basis of his own personal moral judgments. If we accept that people should be able to whistleblow under such circumstances, how do we argue against people who take such actions who's morality does not comport with our own?
To craft a somewhat awkward hypothetical, let's say the Obama administration negotiated better human rights for women in Iran as a side deal in lifting the trade sanctions against them, but this was kept secret until the deal was finalized because it wouldn't make it through if it was known by the more fundamentalist elements of the government. And then let's suppose someone in the administration 'whistleblew' on this and leaked it because they morally objected to women having such rights.
How do you differentiate that from what Snowden did? Both individuals believe that what they did was in the public interest, we just happen to agree with Snowden and not the other guy.
It seems to me that the only objective criteria for whistleblowing might have to be criminal behavior. If you can't prosecute someone for it, you can't whistleblow on it. Because if you don't make that the standard, then what is?
I'm not sure it can be any other way. The government has to protect itself, and for the most part, that's a good thing. The only authority that can set limits on that self-protection, to keep it from going against the public interest, is the public itself.
I too support pardoning Snowden. He risked his life and his future to bring us critically important information about the activities of our government, and he did so in as responsible a manner as I think he could have under the circumstances. This Guardian article certainly speaks to that point.
It is quite plausibly unconstitutional but without anyone knowing about it there is no one to mount the constitutional challenge. And the same applies to the legality in general -- anything is legal if the only people who know about it claim it is and it consequently never gets before a judge in an adversarial proceeding.
> How do you differentiate that from what Snowden did?
You don't. Neither of those are the sort of secrets the government should be keeping. If you want politicians who support enacting some particular policy then you have to elect them, not have the executive branch keep secret from them what is actually going on.
A slightly better example might be the development of nuclear weapons. Leaking not just their existence, but detailed plans of how to construct them and refine the uranium on the basis that 'it is immoral for one country to control such powerful weapons'.
That is a plausible moral position that would have catastrophic consequences and would not be revealing illegal activity per se.
Do we prosecute someone like that?
The following might be a good dichotomy. Suppose you learn the allies have broken the Enigma machine during WWII. Disclosing this is not in the public interest, because the public knows the allies would have a program to break Nazi cryptography and the fact that it succeeded doesn't allow the public to do anything differently, but would allow the Nazis to switch to some other cryptography.
But now suppose that the NSA breaks AES or RSA today. That would be completely different because we use it. The American people would need to stop using the broken cryptography and come up with something better (or use longer keys), and the government keeping it a secret that it's broken is the thing putting the American economy and American lives at risk.
The obvious problem with all of this is that the edges are fuzzy. There are cases in the middle where there is a certain amount of public interest and a certain amount of harm and balancing them is a subjective exercise. But if there was ever a case for a jury to be useful for something, this is it. Making factual determinations like that. Because then you would have to be sure enough in your correctness to be willing to throw yourself on the mercy of 12 ordinary Americans.
The problem is the law doesn't allow that. There is no public interest defense. You're not allowed to make that argument to the jury. So what are you supposed to do, seek asylum in Russia?
Snowden thinks the law should not apply to him. He denies it, but he has demonstrated it by his actions, particularly by the fact that he ran away into the arms of a dictator.
Also, he didn't plan to end up in Russia.
If the US didn't want him to be in Russia we could easily let him come home.
But if we're in the realm of the hypothetical, what would be much better than a pardon is to have a serious whistleblower program than Snowden and others could count-on to avoid prosecution in the first place.
from your definition its pretty much anything someone wants to take offense at. which in turn pretty much causes a lot of people to tune the issue out. Manning is fine, its the people we don't know about that we cannot be sure of.
I don't think it is all that hard.
Remember the public facing debate in the US whether or not waterboarding was torture? You had hundreds of pundits and news outlets weighing in on the matter and making a declaration, and public polls would be split. Of course, the few pundits that put their money where their mouth is and actually underwent waterboarding did an immediate 180 in virtually every circumstance.
But it also goes a bit beyond definitions of torture and instead is a problem of jingoism. One need not look too deeply online to see what some American citizens feel is the appropriate response to muslims, to black people, to virtually anyone from the middle east, and so on. When you have a public that, superficially or not, is okay with thinking in terms of "waste the fucking [racial epithet]s", it's really easy to bend and flex the definition of torture in your country, as the US has done so quite a few times.
bad stuff done to people we hate <> torture
Some things are easy to imagine, in the place of another; getting shocked in the taint is an easy thing to be horrified by. The more pernicious and subtle effects of sleep deprivation, loss of a sense of time and self control, isolation, fear, and of course the total loss of self determination and freedom are hard for a lot of people to grasp.
You deal with people who lack imagination or empathy, or people who imagine themselves as being far tougher than they are. You have people who think that anything survivable, that doesn't maim, and doesn't leave someone a gibbering wreck, can't be torture.
It's always easier to get through to people with scars from a whip, or lost limbs, than it is with a complicated story of months spent in captivity. If you're like many torture victims, most of what you'll be able to describe is the inside of a hood, or the inside of a small, unpleasant cell.
Edit: The Staatsschutz did that to save their own skin because they had moles inside the neo-nazi groups and probably wanted some info to be buried deep. What the BND destroyed and was made public not that long ago were something called "selector lists" for mass surveillance in partnership with the other big brothers.
Also, the plural of inspector general is inspectors general, not inspector generals.