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Comment by boomboomsubban | Hacker News Reader

Snowden's method of whistleblowing was leaking documents to the press. He is both.

It's all semantics, he revealed valuable knowledge to the public about how the government was unConstitutionally surveilling them at every opportunity without remorse or apology

It's not semantics.

If you killed someone committing their own separate crime, you'd be both a killer and potentially a hero.

It is important to make clear he both committed a very serious crime and potentially blew the whistle in act of bravery.

Not if they were breaking into your house and it was self-defense. Then you're technically a killer, having killed someone, but you're more a hero, and not criminally culpable at all.

Was the Pentagon Papers a leak or whistleblowing? Seems like we have a precedent for this.

Both

Using "leaker" instead of "whisteblower" is not necessarily wrong, just politically charged.

Using "leaker" means you are ignoring that what he did was to blow whistle on illegal activities and only focusing on him.

Leaking was the method. It is a statement of fact that he was a leaker. It’s a statement of values/opinion that he was a whistleblower.

Grey comments like this are a reminder that the american tech industry has reached a point where you're only allowed to advocate for one set of ideas out loud (what a coincidence considering where SV and SF are). Nothing this person said is wrong or phrased in a hostile manner but the comment is going grey for simply acknowledging the nuance of the topic. As someone who grew up as a dem during a time when dems were the ones preaching tolerance, it's weird that we're the censorship party now.

Ditto.

Agreed

It's good manners to avoid calling somebody a word they don't call themselves, and in this case I'd personally defer to The Guardian's articles from 2013 that say "whistleblower": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hLjuVyIIrs

If I witness a robbery in progress, and I call the cops, am I a leaker?

Only if you worked for the robbers and they thought you wouldn’t tell.

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