Hacker News Reader

Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

Snowden released a large volume of information to well qualified journalists who very carefully combed through the data to find the things most relevant and important for the American public to know. Information that was legitimately classified and had no whistleblowing value simply wasn't released.

Manning released a large volume of information to the public en masse with no regard to it's whistleblowing value. Some of that information was dangerous and harmful.

Manning's battering ram is much different than Snowden's scalpel, even though their base motivations had a lot in common. Snowden knew what he was doing and did it with great care and consideration. Manning was suffering from some serious mental health issues and did something foolish with questionable value at best.

View on HN

> Manning released a large volume of information to the public en masse

No. She leaked the documents to Wikileaks, who decided to publish them uncensored. She had no control over what Wikileaks would do. Other media outlets opted not to release information they considered dangerous.

And, as @mhurron pointed out, there is no record of someone who was harmed by that information being released.

There is no record of any individual being physically harmed, but the leaked diplomatic cables were highly embarrassing, hurt the interests of the US, and were completely unjustified. They weren't exposing malfeasance or war crimes. They should not have been released.

Manning did it wrong, Snowden did it right.

> Manning did it wrong, Snowden did it right.

AFAIK, both Manning and Snowden released large quantities of information without reviewing all of it in detail for public interest vs. potential harm, and released it not to the public but to third parties that managed public release. The difference is that Manning released it to Assange and Snowden released it to more responsible journalists.

Yes, that is completely correct.

Snowden released his information to journalists who carefully vetted each item for newsworthiness with the participation of the US government. Then that data was parceled out over many months, so it would remain in daily news cycles and continue to generate commentary over that time, staying in the public's mind.

Manning gave her data to Wikileaks, who posted it online in its entirety.

When did The Guardian or the South China Morning Post vet anything with the US government?

The Guardian ran everything by the US government first before publishing. Every responsible journalist does. They're looking for a response or comment to the story, to make sure they didn't get anything wrong, and to see if there's a any reason to withhold details (a reason beyond "It's classified so don't").

In fact, in Greenwald's book No Place to Hide, he describes how they held off publishing for several days while waiting for a response from the government. Greenwald was so frustrated with the delays that he considered quitting the Guardian and going on his own. I think that's the idea that eventually turned into The Intercept.

If that's the case, how did they get almost everything wrong? Reading the original stories on The Guardian, I couldn't find any response from the US government.

Why did you ignore the SCMP entirely?

"The difference is that Manning released it to Assange and Snowden released it to more responsible journalists."

Sort of. They're more responsible in the general sense but also foreign journalists receiving U.S.'s spying capabilities on foreign persons. The aiding and abetting concept is quite appropriate given they published all kinds of NSA attack strategies & subverted companies while the foreign attacks & companies... including in their own countries... didn't get the same treatment. Both attack and defense on the other side got a great boost while U.S. companies simultaneously lost market share.

Quite a bit of damage giving stuff foreigners shouldn't know to foreign journalists. I might be happier if there was a Snowden in all 20+ countries involved in economic and industrial espionage. Instead, it was just what mainly two (U.S. and U.K.) were doing outside the many eyes partnership that extends to Europe. Quite asymmetrical.

This is wonderful FUD and misdirection. I will bookmark to use as a reference for when I want to careful discredit someone.

Your comment is simple trolling. Most nations in the Snowden leaks spy on each other with humans and hacking. Only a few had their tools leaked by Snowden. Others, with spy & surveillance programs still running. immediately used that as political and economic leverage. That leaks damaged one set of countries while giving others benefits is a fact.

The real question is whether there is a greater good to that damage justifying it. I think there was for the domestic leaks but not the foreign ones outside a few. Far as that few, the Belgacom attack is a good example where taking down allies' telecoms over bullshit could have consequences for America past the usual info collection the spies do. Americans should have a conversation about that kind of thing before those acting on our behalf do such acts.

>> The difference is that Manning released it to Assange and >> Snowden released it to more responsible journalists.

As we all know by now, it's illegal to read the leaks unless they're on CNN. "Responsible" journalists from CNN told us as much.

Snowden also had hindsight of sorts, "don't release it to Assange" was probably pretty obvious.

Absolutely. Whether you attribute his superior strategy to learning from Manning's mistake or his own native intelligence, there's simply no doubt that Snowden leaked his data in a more effective and less damaging way.

He learned not just from Manning, but also from Thomas Drake and other NSA whistleblowers before him.

The fact that the US murdered innocent civilians was highly embarrassing and hurt the interests of the US, not the fact that Manning leaked that information itself. Punish the murderers, not the messengers. The only people were actually harmed were the innocent children and journalists on the receiving end of US machine guns.

This exactly. Governments do need to be held accountable for secret crimes, secrecy should not be allowed to enable continuing those crimes. Exposing them was necessary, even if it was illegal.

I do think Manning was naive and sloppy for handing the whole thing over to Assange, though in her defense, Assange seemed fairly reasonable and responsible at the time. It's only after this enormous leak that he seems to have gone mad with power.

I can sleep a lot better tonight having read this thread of thoughts after some of the awfulness I just read over at reddit.

With this issue there is a remarkable degree of misinformation, as well as fascist ideology supporting the the surveillance state. These neverending, unechecked powers undermine civil rights and allow human rights abuses to go continue. And it's all wrapped in this package of 'a good liberal just supporting the good guys like Obama and Hillary that evil Assange is trying to destroy.' Assange is far from perfect, but I cannot understand how people do not fight back in solidarity with outrage against human and civil rights abuses.

> I cannot understand how people do not fight back in solidarity with outrage against human and civil rights abuses

I think there is a very sad aspect of human nature which makes humans bow before power.

It's called mortality :) people have X years to live and try to make the best of it and not everyone is ready to sacrifice that time for doing the right thing.

The simple fact that other people are unjustly suffering means that my mortality of x years is not the best. I think this alone should make everyone want to help make the world the best it can be. But empathy and love loses to selfishness and greed.

Thank you for your comments. You have it exactly right, re-affirming my hope that the world is not doomed. Another example in line with what you said, having secret prisons that we kidnapped people and took them to and tortured them during the second bush war in Iraq hurt the US. It hurt because because we had secret prisons.

In my opinion the solution to not being embarrassed is to not do embarrassing things. The person exposeing those things isn't in the wrong, you are.

Keep in mind all of the recent leaks have been from individuals and organizations that have supported domestic spying under the rationale "if you've got nothing to hide". Yet they hide in shadows and evidently misbehave when the public isn't looking.

"In my opinion the solution to not being embarrassed is to not do embarrassing things. "

That was the government's position against Snowden, Wikileaks, etc. Also called the "Safe if Nothing to Hide" fallacy. What secrets can cause damage in what ways is pretty broad and arbitrary. Interestingly, it applies to the government's schemes much like people's, private lives. We have to keep them in check more but that should be done by citizens leaning on various branches of government. Including groups doing something about problems in GAO reports.

Really easy to say, though, to never piss off any important person in any foreign country or company with one's private decisions or actions. Really hard to do, too.

I see what you're saying here but it might not be so simple. These types of countries are all competing doing all kinds of evil stuff to do so. All or most would have to be hit with whistleblowing & often for what you say to matter. What we've seen is large scale whistleblowing in some countries but not others. A few of those crying "Foul!" are almost certainly doing equivalent or worse but benefit from being the moral, high ground.

The result: a whistleblower for one just gives a competitive advantage to the others. So, both the country's policy and the whistleblower shifting people or investments to other scheming countries or companies are each causing damage.

A country is hit by whistleblowers when these people find their government doing things that are against their principles. That's much harder to happen when the people employed has no such thing.

The country is hit by "leakers" when arbitrary people on inside leak secrets for arbitrary reasons. Even the leakers themselves disagreed on morality of various things at various points. The problem is much broader and more subjective than you're hinting at if we adopted a policy of letting anyone leak anything they personally thought was bad. Especially if only one country in a world of nations competing was doing it.

The people of any country where would-be leakers are summarily executed for treason will not know what its government is hiding from them. Sometimes governments hide things for good reasons but, sometimes, the very crimes the government commits in order to protect the country's principles end up undermining those.

I dont disagree. Im pro leaking of evidence of crimes. That's whistleblowing. Manning did a lot more than that, though. So, your point is a strawman better suited for someone like Binney who only discussed corruption instead of huge, raw dump.

Did the diplomatic cables contain information that the US murdered innocent civilians?

The more important question is: did the US murder innocent civilians? It's not about the cables or the messenger or the medium or the style and presentation, it's about the murdered innocent civilians.

The debt we owe Manning for exposing the fact that the US murdered innocent civilians far outweighs the damage she did by releasing the cables. The prosecution couldn't identify anyone who was harmed, beyond those innocents harmed by the US government machine guns, which wasn't Manning's fault.

When I was a kid, they were never innocent. They were all Russian agents and the puppet dictators put in place by the US were protecting their countries from communism.

A people deserves to know what their government did on their behalf.

I was specifically talking about leaking the diplomatic cables-- that wasn't OK.

Chelsea had a moral imperative to leak the murder of innocent civilians by the US military. But she should have stopped there.

Manning intended to remain anonymous. Snowden always intended to take personal public responsibility for his whistleblowing.

They did it different, different tools for different purposes. Comparing them like for like is not a good comparison.

Snowden took personal responsibility for a single reason-- so the news would talk about the leaks, rather than the effort to find the leaker. He didn't want the conversation to be about Edward Snowden. He was largely successful.

When you go around doing reprehensible things, you deserve humiliation and embarrasment.

More over, if some of those reprehensible things you did, you happen to have done to your own allies, it means they are entitled to have second thoughts about whether they will want to continue aligning their interest to yours, or if they should be more assertive in the future to compensate for the cost of doing business with you.

So, you can keep shooting at the messanger all you want, but any bad outcomes comming out of this, you brought to yourselves.

She had this much control over what WikiLeaks would do: she could have given them less.

How much time do you think someone on active duty in Iraq has to sort through data?

Manning was on leave at the time FWIW

A two week leave, that's asking her to check well over 10,000 documents a day.

> How much time do you think someone on active duty in Iraq has to sort through data?

You've clearly never been deployed. You have more free time than you know what to do with.

Think about what you do when you get off shift at your job. Now remember that you have no family or friends that aren't also co-workers to hang out with. No alcohol, limited access to new movies and video games. You are also stuck within the confines of whatever base you're assigned to. If you're lucky there might be a one-screen movie theater or an internet café. You might even be able to get severely bandwidth-capped satellite internet in your tent/third-of-a-trailer-shared-with-a-roommate that you call your room.

Despite what you want to believe about Manning, lack of time was no excuse for indiscriminate leaking of sensitive information that honestly and truly put lives at risk.

And you think you could use that free time to sort through thousands of pages of classified documents without your fellow soldiers or your superiors knowing? Time isn't the only relevant resource.

Maybe I'm an asshole, but the "put lives at risk" line seems like nationalistic swill. Even if it risked American combatants, why should that justify hiding the deaths of possibly fifteen thousand Iraqi civilians?

How does it not justify it? Deaths that already happen vs quite real damage that you cause in the future?

It isn't "quite real damage," it's potential damage. Without revealing and adressing the past deaths, you can expect there to be future deaths. The point of revealing isn't to say "hey we did awful shit," it's to say "we're doing awful shit and it needs to stop."

I'd call the cops on bank robbers even knowing they may get "damaged" during capture because I think the benefits to society outweighs the harm.

Besides, we saw ~10 people blown away in that one video. That's a fair number of eggs you'd get to break by leaking before even being at parity with that one instance, let alone all the others.

Repeating a discussion that is being mad in a neoghbour thread, I don't see any criminal or even incorrecr decisions by US military in that video. Making decisions based on incomplete information, with certain risk of bad outcomes abd collateral damage is a part of war.

> I don't see any criminal or even incorrecr decisions by US military in that video. Making decisions based on incomplete information, with certain risk of bad outcomes abd collateral damage is a part of war.

So to paraphrase "they did nothing wrong and even if they did it would have been okay".

First, they clearly shot civilians trying to take other civilians to the hospital by essentially inventing weapons they didn't and couldn't have seen. Secondly, in most countries when you get the responsibility to fly something like an attack helicopter, which takes a fairly long time to learn, you tend to have to be better than some random soldier. The "war is hell" excuse isn't really viable with the attitudes displayed in the video. But if you're trying to say that these are the kind of actions we should expect when the US invades a country then I guess we are in agreement.

How exactly could've you made out these figures as civilians and not enemy combatants? From POV of the camera, you already have seen one of them with an RPG, and the opposing force doesn't really use uniforms either.

Don't fall for a logical fallacy, and try to view the situatiom from the lens of the information that they actually had, not the hindsight.

International law and the rules of engagement requires you to positively identify enemy combatant as well as not engage enemy combatant that are incapacitated. There's nothing in the video indicating that they person getting picked up by the van or that the people picking him up has weapons.

(from the transcript [0])

05:30 There's one guy moving down there but he's uh, he's wounded. ... 06:01 He's getting up. 06:02 Maybe he has a weapon down in his hand? 06:04 No, I haven't seen one yet. ... 06:33 Come on, buddy. 06:38 All you gotta do is pick up a weapon. ... 06:54 This is Two-Six roger. I'll pop flares [drop flares]. We also have one individual moving. We're looking for weapons. If we see a weapon, we're gonna engage. ... 07:18 Bushmaster; Crazyhorse. We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly uh picking up bodies and weapons. .... 07:36 Picking up the wounded? 07:38 Yeah, we're trying to get permission to engage. ... 07:59 Roger. We have a black SUV-uh Bongo truck [van] picking up the bodies. Request permission to engage.

There's nothing unclear here or anything to be misunderstood. If they had seen weapons they would have engaged already instead of asking for permission. It's just that the crew of the helicopter really wants to shoot them and that they, the US military nor the US public don't really give a shit if they are civilian as long as they can get away with it, which they can.

[0] https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/en/transcript.html

Exactly right. These really were war crimes, and Chelsea did have a moral imperative to leak them.

Let's give you the benefit of the doubt, not necessarily earned as the other poster points out but let's roll with it. You have successfully defended between two and eleven civilian deaths that were not hidden before the leaks. That leaves you merely with the task of explaining the around twelve thousand that were hidden prior to the leaks.

Let's even pretend that the pilots are totally blameless. The military covered this up. They don't get to cover things up, because that's how we get war crimes.

Had this been reviewed properly, yes. A "Mistakes Happen" stamp could probably be used. But by hiding it and lying about it, they turned it into something we can't ignore.

Also, I don't think the pilots are blameless. If they ever hit civilian court that transcript would hang them.

> And you think you could use that free time to sort through thousands of pages of classified documents without your fellow soldiers or your superiors knowing?

Most of the military intelligence Soldiers I deployed with brought their own personal laptops.

You really underestimate how much free alone time is available to you when you are deployed. Remember that Manning was also kind of a black sheep at the time. Spending hours alone on a laptop would not have been seen as out of the ordinary at all.

I don't question the free time, I doubt the ability for someone already under a fair amount of emotional distress to be able to hide reading thousands of pages of classified data.

Even with the route she took, it was only a matter of months for her to make a mistake that got her arrested. Giving it to wikileaks reduced her anxiety, going through it likely would have ramped it up. Additionally, needing to keep a local copy of the data is a huge risk.

This is exactly the sort of thing intellos do all day if they are good. The only covert part was the exfil.

I don't think the war diary stuff made much of an impact, or the apache video. The diplomatic traffic OTOH was the spark into the tinder of the middle east autocracies that set off the so-called Arab Spring.

> She had no control over what Wikileaks would do

Then she should've released it to someone else. She is ultimately responsible for deciding to give it to Wikileaks.

Yeah, focus your outrage on the leaker not the murderers or the cover-up.

Neither reason nor morality made our government listen to criticism from within but maybe the pain of suffering these leaks will.

You're mistaking hindsight for outrage.

Nope, the thing that triggered Manning to leak was being told to ignore evidence and collaborate in framing innocent Iraqis for treason.

"She leaked the documents to Wikileaks, who decided to publish them uncensored. She had no control over what Wikileaks would do."

The first part of your sentence shows why the second part is nonsense. Manning dumped a bunch of classified information on a third party. Manning left the ethical decisions to that third party. That is certainly preventable as many others have prevented it. I've done so many times with confidential information that I make public in a selective way in my writing that protects sources or just details that must be private.

Truth is Manning's mind was messed up due to internal struggles, she also saw messed up stuff in military, and simultaneously was blindly trusting third parties to make the right decisions. The combination led to a damaging, criminal decision to turn all of that over to Wikileaks rather than pure whistleblowing of combing for corruption to selectively leak and/or redact. This is what she was rightly punished for although how the punishment was delivered was cruel and should've been illegal.

Glad Manning is to be released soon but she set it in motion with foolish decisions that had alternatives. It certainly wasn't an inevitable set of cause and effect.

> she also saw messed up stuff in military

Yes, like her supervisor being absolutely willing to go along with faking information against innocent Iraqis that got them jailed and killed.

> damaging, criminal decision to turn all of that over to Wikileaks rather than pure whistleblowing

Ummm, her commanders refused to listen to pure whistleblowing. Didn't you read about the case?

As someone required to report a crime, you aren't required to put in a show of effort and declare it done, you're required to do your best to stop it.

> Manning left the ethical decisions to that third party.

No, Manning made the ethical decision knowing what Wikileaks promised - to get the information seen. And she made the right one.

None of this matters. What matters is the crimes committed by US officials when they illegally classified much of the information in the first place.

Of course Manning (or anyone who leaks) is likely to be an imperfect messenger. It's silly to focus on those details when there is a much bigger issue at stake.

FWIW I wish all of the Snowden data would have been given to Wikileaks. I have great respect for Glenn Greenwald, but the government has utterly failed to respond to the leaks in an appropriate way, which suggests a great lack of respect for the rule of law and the American people.

Instead, they pretended it hadn't happened and that no excesses occurred. I think several top level officials should have been removed and imprisoned and we should have seen footage of all the computers being carted out and put up for sale so that the money stolen to build the apparatus could be reimbursed to taxpayers.

Too much talk about motivations and conscience. Great evils are perpetrated through good intentions and lofty ideals.

But it's clear to me that actions of both Snowden and Manning were moral but illegal.

Regardless of motivation, they both exposed serious crimes. We are all better off because of the risks they took, and there was very little damage to offset the obvious benefits.

The moral yet illegal is exactly what commutation is for. Kudos to Obama for exposing himself to vicious criticism to do the right thing.

> Some of that information was dangerous and harmful.

So dangerous and harmful that it harmed no one.

Dangerous and harmful to the US government?

Also the article states tat manning tried to approach the NYT and washington post, but was refused/ignored.

Manning made some very haphazard attempts to contact journalists within the span of a day or two, seemed highly frustrated when she didn't get a response right away, and declared the matter impossible and gave up.

It's morally-consent now to offer Snowden an immunity deal in exchange for inventorying what was taken. Without meaningful whistleblower protections, the deep state remains deeply corrupted.

I completely agree, but Snowden won't get a pardon for one simple reason-- it would look weak to do so.

Commuting Manning's sentence is magnaminous. She endured 7 years of torture in solitary confinement, tried to suicide several times, and plead guilty in a court of law.

Snowden GOT AWAY. And he went to Russia, where Putin granted asylum as a giant "screw you" to the US.

So yes-- we do have a moral imperative to pardon Snowden, just as much as Manning. But we won't do it.

> Information that was legitimately classified and had no whistleblowing value simply wasn't released.

This is not true. Aside from the domestic surveillance disclosures which lead to reform in that area, most of the Snowden leaks do not appear to have any sort of whistleblowing value.

Recent example of info release with no whistleblowing value: https://theintercept.com/2016/12/29/top-secret-snowden-docum...

I agree that Snowden did it about as well as you could possibly hope for a whistleblower exposing classified information. Manning meant well, but was naive and sloppy. Assange started out with good ideas, but seems to have gone mad with power after the Manning leaks. Still, some of the stuff that Manning and Assange leaked, did need to be exposed. It should have been handled more responsibly, but it still needed to be done.

Well spoken, and spot on!

>Snowden released a large volume of information to well qualified journalists who very carefully combed through the data

Snowden stole a huge amount of highly classified information and gave a tiny amount to journalists to comb through. Now we only have his word that none of it went to Russian intelligence though all signs point to the contrary.

We have "only the word" of everyone with security clearance that they are not leaking secrets to foreign agents.

You don't have to be physically present in Russia to provide the Russians with intelligence.

I don't know why it makes any sense to assume that Snowden is leaking any more than what he gave to the journalists. His entire mission was out of loyalty to the American public, he did not intend to end up in Russia, and he wants to return to the US. America is keeping him out because they will not guarantee him a trial that meets his criteria of fairness/openness.

>We have "only the word" of everyone with security clearance that they are not leaking secrets to foreign agents.

Don't be dense. Those other agents didn't make off with 1.7 million highly classified files, flee to China and then arrange a defection to Russia with Russian officials.

>I don't know why it makes any sense to assume that Snowden is leaking any more than what he gave to the journalists.

Because he has stolen much much more than he gave to the journalists and the stolen data was much more extensive than domestic surveillance programs.

>America is keeping him out because they will not guarantee him a trial that meets his criteria of fairness/openness.

I'm sorry the law doesn't meet his criteria.

He went to Hong Kong. In parent we can see you conveniently call that China, but that isn't the same.

Besides, we have his word, and two (or three) witnesses who saw him destroy the content of the SD card.

> In parent we can see you conveniently call that China, but that isn't the same.

Diplomatic relations are handled by China's foreign ministry. There is no way Snowden's status would not be handled by the Chinese government.

There is still only one reason to say he went to China instead of simply mentioning he went to Hong Kong: to deliberately inaccurately describe and deceive what happened ie. a political reason. Don't resort to such lame rhetoric. It won't fly here.

Oh brother. Neither Hong Kong, nor China is the principal actor in this story. Their role consist of letting him leave despite a passport revocation and an arrest warrant.

Who is trying to muddle the point with irrelevant detail? It won't fly here!!

Also, I'm glad there were witnesses of some SD card being destroyed. Good thing we can trust the word of someone who at that point has already stolen deep operational intelligence in the first place (we're not even talking about information on mass domestic intelligence - just typical intelligence data), that this was the only copy he held or wasn't already compromised. A person who then fled to Russia by way of China. Unbelievable.

You have no proof for any of your conspiracy claims.

Which part? That he stole a massive amount of Intelligence .. not just pertaining to any domestic surveillance program, but deep organizational and operational intelligence? That he defected to Russia? That he met Russian officials in Honk Kong before leaving? That his passport was revoked and arrest warrant was issued before he left Hong Kong, completly invalidating his claim that he ended up in Russia by happenstance? That his defection was sanctioned by Putin and orchestrated by WikiLeaks, both actors now embroiled in an attempt to corrupt American elections?? Those publicaly acknowledged'conspiracy' claims?

Or is it that I just refuse to take his unsubstantiated claims at face value, and that makes me a conspiracy nut?

The guy is the definition of a traitor to his country.

>Snowden released a large volume of information to well qualified journalists who very carefully combed through the data to find the things most relevant and important for the American public to know. Information that was legitimately classified and had no whistleblowing value simply wasn't released.

This is a poor defense of Snowden's actions.

If it was given to a journalist who wasn't authorized to have that information, it was "released" in the only sense that is legally relevant, even if the general public doesn't have that information. Imagine saying what you just did, but replacing "journalist" with "KGB agent".

It's also untrue. Snowden leaked huge masses of data to those journalists. He didn't pick and choose what to give them beyond the most cursory of glances.

The second half of your post seems to be arguing about the word "release" versus "leak". The former is a superset of the latter, both are accurate. Certainly nobody's saying what he did was legal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com