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Comment by rebuilder | Hacker News Reader

Is it treason to expose abuses of power and illegal practices?

Yes it is.

Anyone who works in a classified/borderline field signs multiple documents that skirt around this, limit rights, and especially allow some form of nonjudicial prosecution.

As for that being right or wrong on either side, that is a long and frustrating argument.

Not really. There can be whistleblower protections that supercede other laws and contracts. There can be illegal contracts, which are not valid regardless of whether you sign them. Do you believe every issue is governed by a single law that is set in stone for eternity?

Are laws set in stone for eternity? No.

Must acts that are committed now be judged by the laws that exist now? Yes.

How do laws change? Are the changes ever retroactive? Do laws ever exist on the books longer than they are enforced or considered moral? Seems like everything is black and white for you, but reality rather disagrees.

Anyway, there already are whistleblower protection laws in many places.

I hold this comment to be untrue. It is clear in common-law that our peers may find a law to be untenable.

Whistleblower laws haven't been working well. A wrong step could get you excluded from protections, put you in a situation where you can't defend yourself, you could be in a field where other organizations can bully their way in making everything more complex, if you're lucky you could just get kicked out with black marks on your records (with any information related sealed), if you do everything right it could end up pretty much ignored (or lost in paperwork) and similar.

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