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Comment by rsp1984 | Hacker News Reader

rsp1984

> There is a huge difference you're ignoring... Snowden, however, violated numerous amounts of laws

The difference that you are ignoring is that it's in the government's power to legalize or even incentivize whistleblowing on a company while at the same time it's equally easy for the government to outlaw whistleblowing on the country. The government of a country sets the laws. It defines what's lawful and what's not.

Therefore when it comes to whistleblowing on a country it becomes borderline irrelevant whether some laws are broken or not as long as the whistleblowing otherwise aligns with universally accepted human values and ethics.

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Loyalty to your oaths is part of "universally accepted human values and ethics".

The problem is that loyalty to your team (Team NSA, say), and loyalty to your oath, may sometimes conflict with loyalty to your country, which may itself conflict with loyalty to the human race. When that happens, you have to decide which loyalties you hold higher. Snowden did, and I can't say that he chose wrongly. But there are no "universally accepted human values and ethics" that determine what to do in that situation. It's often the stuff of literature precisely because the normal values and ethics are at war with one another.

I would argue that Snowden acted in a manner completely loyal to the United States and the Constitution, though disloyal to the NSA. If one believes the oath of allegiance (or the constitution) is more important than an employment arrangement, Snowden seems to be in the right.

Snowden didn't break an "employment arrangement", he knowingly broke the law that everyone with a TS/SCI clearance is given. This isn't a one-liner you sign and date the day before you start. Getting a TS/SCI clearance is a long process, and you very clearly know you are not supposed to talk about it, no matter what you hear or see.

Now, Snowden might have still be right, I'm not debating that, but chalking it up to a breach of employment contract is naive.

Okay, he didn't break an actual employment contract, he broke a glorified employment contract. Happy?

Good point. The goal of a good propaganda systems is to make individuals believe that disloyalty to the team is disloyalty to the oath "you betray us, you betray your own country / Constitution / Foundng Fathers etc."

At some point people tell that story to themselves, because it makes it easier to function and reduces cognitive dissonance.

Often I think we take these oaths without full knowledge of what is happening. Would Snowden have taken an oath of loyalty if he knew everything the NSA was doing? Highly unlikely, that's exactly why he broke it.

I think that people are often too slow to break ties with their 'team' when immoral behavior is at play.

Snowden never took an oath of loyalty. He did swear an oath to of enlistment, which is to the constitution, but that's one of the few things that makes America actually exceptional vs many other countries. Now, when you get a security clearance, you sign what is basically an NDA with the gov.

To be clear, the oath to the constitution outweighs an NDA every time, due to the nature that the constutiton is the supreme law of the land.

> Loyalty to your oaths is part of "universally accepted human values and ethics".

Not at all. It's part of some human values and ethics, but definitely not universally accepted.

In fact, when I took an extra-curricular class in Ethics, it was literally the textbook example of a situation when Kantian and utilitarian ethics differ about what is right and wrong.

What if someone doesn't violate "whistleblower laws," but illegally accesses personal/private information in order to obtain the information to leak?

Like what if someone not affiliated with the company illegally hacked into Monsanto's servers in order to find information to then "whistleblow" on?

Ends, means, etc...

To repeat: "as long as the whistleblowing otherwise aligns with universally accepted human values and ethics".

Does it complicate your scenario if the private information the whistleblower has illegally accessed was itself illegally accessed, as is the case in the Snowden situation? Doesn't it make the government's position ironically untenable, to want to prosecute someone for doing on a relatively small scale what they've been doing on a massive scale?

I would be interested what these "universally accepted human values and ethics" are.

Well, we can obviously start with my personal set of values and ethics as a template ;)

Ok, here you go:

  1. That which is hateful to you, do not do to another.
  2. Do unto others what you would have them do to you.
  3. Never levy a punishment greater than the harm of the offense.
  4. Avoid direct conflict with anyone who will kick your ass.

> Do unto others what you would have them do to you.

What if you're suicidal? Wouldn't that make murder cool under this set of ethics?

Murdering someone would prevent them from committing suicide. Being suicidal is not quite the same as wishing to be murdered.

As far as I know, suicide (or self-euthanasia) does not have a settled, common ethical ground. Some cultures abhor it, and some expect it. A few have some problems with the occasional suicide-by-murderous-rampage. Thus, any "universal" ethics would not be able to answer any questions about it in a consistent way.

Suicide is a corner case, anyway. The above 4 rules can probably handle at least 80% of ethical dilemmas without much additional thought.

Certainly, if you think you would like to know whether a government or multinational is acting against your interests, and you discover evidence of it in your employer, you should sever your relationship by rule #1, blow the whistle by rule #2, and try to remain anonymous by rule #4. Additionally, the worst retaliation you should fear is to have your own bad behavior outed to the public, by rule #3. But you already know your employer is unethical, so who knows what they might do to you?

The world would probably be a better place without rule #4, but that's describing what we are, not what we wish to be.

3. Never levy a punishment greater than the harm of the offense.

Incentivise hard-to-prove offenses that benefit the offender as much as they harm the victim (e.g. theft), because at worst they'll be back where they started...

Punishment is distinct from restitution.

If a thief takes your MacGuffin, and gets caught, he must return it to you to make you whole, and then might also be required to forfeit an amount up to its value as punishment for thievery.

At the point when the cops nab him, it may appear that he stands to lose double what he stole, but that's only because what he stole never belonged to him in the first place.

This is why "treble damages" are a big deal, as 3 times the provable harm goes beyond what Lex Talionis normally allows.

If you steal a loaf of bread and get sentenced to 20 years in the galleys (like Jean Valjean in Les Miserables), that is quite clearly an unethical punishment. Simple restitution would mandate that the thief produce no more than one loaf to make the baker whole, and Lex Talionis would mandate that if the punishment were not to produce another loaf of bread, it should still need to be a tenth the magnitude of the punishment for someone caught stealing ten loaves of bread, and that in turn would be a thousandth the magnitude of the punishment for someone caught stealing a car.

Sounds more like your ethics than "universal" ethics to me.

Those rules are more commonly known as the silver rule (rabbi Hillel Sr.), the golden rule (Jesus), Lex Talionis (Hammurabi), and an amalgamation of appeasement, deterrence, and mutually assured destruction. That one hasn't been around quite as long, and isn't quite as glamorous, as it covers the value of bullying and cowardice, so might be debatable as to how pervasive it is. But it is the ethical basis for both the weaker-side tactics in asymmetric warfare and nuclear deterrence, so is followed more by national military policy than by religions. It might have been first put into print by Sun Tzu, maybe?

My personal ethics are far further from universal than the list I proposed.

Rabbi, Jesus, Hammurabi doesn't look very universal to me. All three are based on the same tradition of Abrahamic religions and looks mediterianian centric to me.

Universal for me would include people in Asia, Australian Aborigines, South America, Inuit etc.

Those are just the references I am most familiar with.

The Wikipedia page [0] shows many other references, but unfortunately does not currently distinguish between silver rule (don't be a hypocrite) and golden rule (be an exemplar of your own virtues).

The limited, proportional punishment maxim also has a page [1]. The origin is undoubtedly Middle Eastern, but migration, empire-building, and colonialism has spread it around the globe. It is not quite universal, but it may have more adherents than any other incompatible principles regarding punishment and revenge.

It is not surprising that concepts originating in the Middle East have spread far and wide. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are the #1, #2, and #6 religions. Religions from India are #3, #4, #5, #7, and #9. Confucianism is #8, and Shinto #10. In addition to the religions, there have been at least a dozen empires that spread from or through that region.

Universal, for me, is a supermajority (>= 80%) of the economic power on the planet, which also makes a supermajority of the military influence. It's nice to throw non-influential cultures a bone every now and then, out of charity, but their children will be influenced by the cosmopolitan, global-market culture to a far greater extent than they will influence it in return. The cosmopolitan culture pushes itself into every corner of the globe with its mass-market broadcast media, and only pulls out the stuff that can be sold. It's like a "greatest hits" compilation album of every culture, heavily weighted by the history of world conquests.

The Australian Aborigines, for example, got to export the boomerang and the didgeridoo. South America gave everyone chocolate, cocaine, and samba. Jamaica gave everyone ska, reggae, and jerk chicken. If you wanted to get your core ethics in there, you should have built your empire sooner, or maybe invented the printing press or radio first.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_for_an_eye

this implies the government is a monolithic entity that decides everything.

This is why we have elections and a separation of legislative and executive branches. This is why Congress holds hearings on intelligence. The Church Committee happened, after all. And the courts can tell the NSA to not do things, and it (mostly) happens.

The incentives are mostly aligned, but the people being voted in seem to disagree with the idea that government whistleblowers need as much protection.

> The government of a country sets the laws.

In this case, it's an elected government. It's fixable.

I'm not sure where I'm ignoring any of that but you seem to be saying that because a country can make laws preventing you from whistleblowing that therefore it's borderline irrelevant whether you're doing something illegal or not in order to whistleblow.

That is far too general of a position than what I'm comfortable with. Seems somewhat anarchist to me.

The reason the government incentivizes whistleblowing and protects those that do so is because without those laws there is a legitimate fear of retaliation. In order to protect itself, the government makes sure that that fear is actualized when whistleblowing on it.

I have to agree with the GP that when pointing out breaking the law is breaking the law, there is a loss of legitimacy.

Laws are usually theoretical until they are broken and tried in court. Even then they are still subject to revision.

This is not anarchist in any sense of the word, colloquially or academically. It's hundreds of years (or more) of legal practice.

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