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Comment by trident1000 | Hacker News Reader

The reason he will never be pardoned has nothing to do with if his leaks were merited or not merited (they clearly were as the activities of the govt were proven illegal). Its because then you green light a govt leaker in critical programs you open pandoras box for govt secrets spilling out and you can lose control. Keeping employees/contractors in fear that they will never stop chasing you is a good way to stop people from doing this.

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> Keeping employees/contractors in fear that they will never stop chasing you is a good way to stop people from doing this.

This is contradicting to the idea of government existing for people and serving people.

If government uses fear to reduce accountability, it needs to be changed.

"it needs to be changed", as in, someone else should change it but not you

(I am merely pointing out the paradox of inaction. Enacting change is a lot of work, so one must first decide to contribute actual work, then figure out what actual work needs to be done, then do the work and measure the result. Work = force * displacement and if nothing is displaced, no work has been achieved. Rosa Parks wanted change so she did the work. Snowden wanted change so he did the work.)

One of the best levers many of us have is public forums, so this commenter is doing something great - enforcing the idea that the government should be changed in thousands of readers' minds. Once an idea gets enough traction, it often can turn into actual change. You are only reenforcing the fatalism you seem to criticize.

You’re both right.

Colordrops is correct: comments matter because they help shape public opinion.

Dustingertz is also correct: governments & political parties have published processes for changing & enforcing policy. Citizens who read the docs & use those processes can achieve a lot.

Well yes. Personally blowing up a federal building, assassinating politicians, etc is frowned upon and generally produces the opposite of the intended effect. Ridding ourselves of this metastasized illegitimate government will take collective action.

It does contradict that idea, but that idea has long been a farce, so contradictions are not surprising.

Not if you believe that the people want the government to protect them and they are ok with these programs if they enable the government to do that.

I think time has shown that even the people whom the government supposedly exists to serve don't want it to do that. They actively seek to elect and support wannabe dictators, as long as they are dictating things that hurt people they don't like.

If you only "never stop chasing them" when they reveal legal activities, that mechanism still works fine, and still provides an important check against the government attempting to do illegal activities in secret, including rogue government agencies doing things that they aren't allowed to do by other branches of government.

What if the CIA were wiretapping the president, or the supreme court? Well, that would be illegal wouldn't it? Wouldn't you want a whistleblower to feel like they could safely expose it?

By and large, it's the government that decides what's legal and what's not. Even the Constitution can be amended with enough support. So exposing illegal government activities means you're exposing that a part of the government was doing something that it wasn't empowered to do, by the government. There are multiple branches of government for a reason. When the government is doing something illegal, it means an office of the government has either made a serious legal error, or gone rogue and disregarded its legal responsibilities.

That's a serious problem right?

> What if the CIA were wiretapping the president, or the supreme court? Well, that would be illegal wouldn't it? Wouldn't you want a whistleblower to feel like they could safely expose it?

Yeah you're basically describing Watergate here. And I don't think anyone objected to that being made public. Well except for Nixon :D

IMO Whistleblowing has a place in society as a safeguard against the abuse of power.

If the precedent is that you have a green light if and only if the government is committing a crime, that seems reasonable to me. Otherwise we're giving government agencies a green light to keep committing crimes.

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