Daniel Hale Receives 45-Month Sentence for Releasing Drone Documents
thedissenter.org
thedissenter.org
However, if Hale had spoken to the public about the content of the documents but never taken any of the information, he almost certainly would have still been the target of an Espionage Act prosecution.
Not sure if the writer is naive or obtuse; it's pretty obvious that the judge meant using institutional whistleblowing channels, which would have legally insulated Hale. Of course, it's also that much more likely that the matter would have gone unnoticed by the public and and eventually been buried in red tape.
It’s really hard not to hear the judge’s statement outside of that context.
Let's not forget someone whistleblew on the President amid a highly political environment in recent memory. That's no short order.
Anything else is treated differently. Stuff like waste, abuse, environmental issues, discrimination and the like are usually a different ballgame.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security#Impact_on_ci...
They'll ruin your life either way, at least this way the info makes a splash.
Working within the system to blow a whistle is... risky, you'll end up like Bill Binney, or Thomas Drake, and almost no one will hear about you.
I frankly quite flatly don't believe the judge. The very fact that we know about so many of these crimes, which to my knowledge, none have been prosecuted shines the light of truth on this claim.
And sometimes, to call something like official whistleblowing channels the nonsense that they are, you imoly something very damaging about the whole system. I think it's too much to chew. And it's much easier to profess belief.
It feels the entire thing is really fake in the US and it s just a giant golden cage where debt-laden poor people look at exagerated external events and told that at least in America they can starve while speaking out.
The US just terrifies me these days honestly
Making the Chinese population believe that by enduring the deprivation of their freedoms they would obtain a better economic condition is what has brought the Chinese Communists where they are.
Seeing this model exported to Hong Kong is already quite depressing, it’d be better to consider this kind of argument for what it is, at least as far as any western country is concerned.
"Daniel Hale, one of the great American Whistleblowers, was just moments ago sentenced to four years in prison. His crime was telling this truth: 90% of those killed by US drones are bystanders, not the intended targets.
He should have been given a medal."
HN's audience of all people should be keenly aware of the US government's tendency towards authoritarianism.
So it's just mindless cynicism to argue "more government" / "no less government" / blablabla.
The specific American infatuation with anything that kills is, well, specific. Using all that wasteful killing/incarcerating/surveilling as an argument not against the Military-Industrial-Complex but, yet again, to diminish policies that might actually help people, is part and parcel of exactly the approach that ends with dead civilians domestically and abroad.
America is militarized due to 20th century European "killing/incarcerating/surveilling." Europe perfected these methods.
We replace the dinosaur one time election with a "change your vote whenever you like" system something like a coalition needs 51% to be eligible to take office and less than 40% to lose it.
Salaries should be glorious and the officials shall be [financially] accountable beyond death.
People will not care much and not modify their vote very often until things get bad enough.
The military [for example] can go to war without the usual bribing of senile old men but if you take the country to war you probably wont be in charge of the war effort and if people really don't want the war they will rappidly cycle though different formations until they are rid of it.
Unscrupulous, power hungry liars work just as hard as any of us. Possibly more so because the rewards of power are higher for someone who is willing to abuse it.
If the strategy is to centralise power, there is not a system nor a will in the world that can stop that power being abused. It is really just a matter of how long and how badly.
Terrible government services are hardly ever allowed to fail and disappear
13 Baltimore City High Schools, Zero Students Proficient in Math:
Baltimore is 2nd in per pupil spending:
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-05-21/news/bs-md-ci-ce...
If you want to see what violence the private sector is capable of, look up the Nisour Square massacre : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nisour_Square_massacre
Anyone acquainted deeply with American history would be aware that yes, the government can tend towards authoritarianism, and often goes fully into it. But the American private sector is even more enthusiastic to commit atrocities and enforce the authority of the few on the many.
> But the American private sector is even more enthusiastic to commit atrocities and enforce the authority of the few on the many.
Shows a keen misunderstanding of American history. The US government commits far more atrocities on a yearly basis than the private sector ever has. I could fill up this whole page with links describing absurd infringements on our constitutional rights by the US government, many of them ongoing to this day.
I spoke of enthusiasm, not volume. The private sector commits less atrocities insofar as the government prevents them to. If you want a good historical example, recall that one of the main reasons for the American Revolution was that the private sector was angry at the Crown that they couldn't commit as much atrocities and steal as much land from the natives as they wanted to.
Never heard that one. Sources?
Also during the Revolution, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullivan_Expedition lead to atrocities against the natives and the later acquisition of a large amount of land for American settlers.
I wouldn't consider this in the top 10 motivations for the American Revolution. (In fact that complaint was the 27th of 27 complaints.)
But as a motivation, it was not exactly absent either. And the economic consequences of this particular item did prove, in hindsight, to be immense.
This is one of those claims that's basically impossible to prove. I have no doubt you could link hundreds of constitutional infringements, but at the same time some reports suggest ~25% of workers regularly encounter some form of wage theft.
Or let's use this stories drone strikes as an example. Hale's revelation was that the military vastly underreported the number of civilian deaths to drone strikes. But I don't think private contractors would even be required to publish a bs number of casualties caused (I can't find any reporting requirements, but my search was hardly thorough.) Many private injustices can be very effectively hidden.
This is one of those claims that is self-evident after taking a highschool or college level US history class.
Also, wage theft is not nearly on the same scale as literal war crimes.
It really isn't. That class should also bring up the Pinkerton's, which is just an example of what shady shit the private sector engages in.
I brought up two examples, wage theft and private military contractors. One of the two very much is the same scale as literal war crimes.
Let's not compare which class of entities is more evil than the other.
We can't ignore that East India Company which ran drugs worldwide or I.G. Farben (maker of Nazi weaponry & Zyklon B), which later became Monsanto (maker or Agent Orange, DDT, etc.), Bayer, BASF. How about Corporate Sponsored "Tobacco Science" extolling the virtues of smoking? What about the various industrial complexes supporting the even more evil government?
With the Government infiltrated by agents who are connected with corporations & vice versa, is there any difference anyways? Are corporations & government inherently evil or are there contexts of corporations & government that are more evil than other contexts? Can criminal factions gain power over the government & corporations? Would corporations & government be less evil if honest people ran them instead of criminals?
Perhaps it's social phenomena, that we all participate in. Of course much if this phenomena is instigated by various cartels managing systems and hacking human consciousness & desire to consolidate power & curtail individual freedom & rights.
Im sure a lot of Americans have no idea what their government has been doing to other sovereign nations. Even Obama went on a world tour to disarm smaller nations like South Africa of their Nuclear Weapons. He certainly didn't go to Russia or China or North Korea. After South Africa made that deal about 2011~2012 - an influx of American imported food ravaged the local food production industries bringing one of the biggest poultry producers in the SADEC region to it's knees. Thats not a conspiracy theory. Thats just politics.
If you have 3 hours to spare, this is a good Epistemological explanation...
The espionage act which got used against Daniel Hale is also what the US is using in Assange's case.
Damn the private sector and their evil ... of wait the government was stumping up the cash. Was the government perhaps acting in its private capacity when hiring mercenaries to "support democracy" in oil rich nations?
This is not even particularly a private-public thing (look to the East India company for what a private company is capable of, although the situation was complicated). The invasion of Iraq wasn't a private enterprise. There were private interests involved, but I think most people would agree that is curruption.
Obviously foreign invasions were not purely private enterprises. But American history is full of private interests pushing for war, the American Revolution itself was caused in large parts by the American private sector being much more enthusiastic to ethnically cleanse the land from natives and steal their land than the crown.
Private interests lobbying the US Government isn't really corruption, it is the way things are sadly intended to work.
My point is that the reason these atrocities are made by the government and not private companies is only that the government prevents the private sector from committing them. So giving power to the private sector instead of the government in general is not a good course of action despite these events because there is no reason to believe it is any less enthusiastic to do atrocious things.
You're putting up evidence that they are also hiring vetted thugs and sending them over to massacre people - also indiscriminately. Again, it is probably illegal at some level to report on how many massacres actually happen so presumably this case is more common than people think.
And the take away here is that the government is protecting us from private sector malfeasance? The private sector would never get funding for this sort of insanity! The only reason money is going to this is because paying taxes is mandatory. A tiny minority of people support this bloodshed. They just happen to have plum positions in DC. And even then, only because it isn't their money being used to vaporise brown people.
That doesn’t follow, if the private sector decides to do something of it’s own volition then that’s on the private sector.
It’s the same deal here, the company is 100% at fault, the government might also share some responsibility or not depending on the specifics. As to drone operators, “I was only following orders” isn’t a free pass though I was given bad information might be, the government can also be responsible at the same time.
Which isn’t to say these drone operators are going to end up at The Hague, but they and their superiors should at least be invested.
Did Trump pardon them in his capacity has a private sector businessman?
It doesn't look like these are rogue agents. It looks a lot like the government (and, specifically, the military) is supporting their actions at the highest levels.
The 'oh they're private contractors, nothing to do with the US military here!' line doesn't really fit.
To not put any blame on the US government for giving these companies the reach that they have is to turn a blind eye to the source of the problem. Not to mention that these mercenary companies are made up to a huge degree by ex military.
When you hire a Hitman to do your dirty work, sure, the Hitman is responsible, but the guy who hired him at least shares some blame.
It is, but this isn’t a US trait. Look at the UK and it’s record. The British East India company were truely outrageous and set the standard for centuries of brutality and immense profit. Pretty much everything else is small fry in comparison.
> "People in the U.S. seem able to recognize that China’s censorship of the internet is bad. They say: “It’s so authoritarian, tyrannical, terrible, a human rights violation.” Everyone sees that, but then when it happens to us, here, we say, “Oh, but it’s a private company doing it.” What people don’t realize is the majority of censorship in China is being carried out by private companies.
> Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN Bureau chief for Beijing and Tokyo, wrote a book called Consent of the Network that lays all this out. She says, “This is one of the features of Chinese internet censorship and surveillance—that it's actually carried out primarily by private sector companies, by the tech platforms and services, not by the police. And that the companies that run China's internet services and platforms are acting as an extension of state power.”
> The people who make that argument don’t realize how close we are to the same model. There are two layers. Everyone’s familiar with “The Great Firewall of China,” where they’re blocking out foreign websites. Well, the US does that too. We just shut down Press TV, which is Iran’s PBS, for instance. We mimic that first layer as well, and now there’s also the second layer, internally, that involves private companies doing most of the censorship."
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-matt-orfalea
Agreed. If only HN collected a fee to read comments... /s
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28011353
> Tor Browser might help with mass data collection by businesses like Google, but it's the worst choice for threats by government or by others who have extra-legal powers: First, it signals that you are hiding something; it attracts attention: not everyone using Tor Browser is a dissident, but the proportion of dissidents among the Tor Browser population is much higher than among the Chrome and Safari populations. Second, it is based on a relatively insecure browser, Firefox, and then it is modified by a team that simply lacks the resources to design and implement proper security. Again, security is complex, expensive, and difficult. The obvious tactic for the attacker is to infect every Tor Browser visiting dissident resources.
> Seeing as how can very obvious to your ISP when you use Tor, I would take this advice with caution. I agree that you should download Tor Browser and get used to using it, but also think hard about whether it would be a problem if you were found to be using it, say from home.
So not sure how good the Tor advice is?
Linking to a private company that was killing for the government isn’t really a great example.
Let’s just say Amazon and the government are both equally evil. You get to pick one to have more power. Are you going to pick the one who has given us the wonderful invention called the dmv, or the one who will let me order whatever I want and get it to me in a reasonable time at a reasonable price. Amazon does a better job at serving the populace than the government does. They both act like rulers, but at least one gives you something worthwhile for it.
"Government power", "private power" -- it's power that's the problem, not what we call it.
Why are we still so wrapped up in this Reaganite semantics about "government" decades later?
because no one is calling for more private power but a ton of people are constantly calling for more government power
Many discussions about gov't control are usually within the context of private power already existing. Of course those same people insist on a hyper-atomization of the topics to make it less clearcut. That's why context is important folks
You think you can start an LLC and bomb people in Afghanistan?
You're right. He did it as a soldier, then as a contractor.
> You think you can start an LLC and bomb people in Afghanistan?
If you're an elite, then yes, absolutely. Spoiled rich kid and SEAL dropout Erik Prince and his buddy started a two-bit training seminar company for red state keystone kops that was on the edge of going under when the USS Cole was bombed in 2000 and the firm scored its first federal contract. 9/11, Afghanistan ... the Pentagon turns on the money spigot and a few short years later Blackwater is murdering civilians in Iraq at a steady clip with not only zero lasting consequences but increasing success.
It's not an exaggeration to say that Prince is a mass murderer, but he walks free today, a billionaire without a care in the (not to mention a self-proclaimed "libertarian" who's spent the bulk of his adult life profiting off taxpayers). Not a bad run!
So it goes to show: if you've got a silver spoon, a decent rolodex, and some good timing, you can kill whoever you want in this world after filling out some forms on LegalZoom.
Don't leave thoughts unfinished, if you have something interesting to add you should share with the rest of the class.
What is especially galling about it is that the entire monstrosity was constituted specifically in order to maintain the structures of private power and profit and has never deviated from that goal. The entire murder machine exists to benefit the corporate power that you absurdly imagine as some kind of countervailing force.
How do you account for the fact that military and CIA involvement overseas is systematically in the service of imposing minimal-government orthodoxy, from Chile 1973 to the Contras, Grenada, Iraq, Cuba, etc?
https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/
He's paying the price for bringing you the truth; the least you can do is read the articles containing the info he sacrificed so much to bring to publication.
None of us are morally above reproach. Sure. But we all feel like we draw the line somewhere and say, yep, too far, won't do it.
Killing people, knowingly committing war crimes, covering it up, supporting it, enacting revenge on those who can't play along and want it stopped? That's not the way I think of American citizens. How has it happened? Is it fixable? It must be, surely, right..?
reminds that recent story where police damaged the shoulder joint of a frail woman and were recorded re-watching that bodycam footage at the station joyfully celebrating and congratulating themselves on that popping sound of the joint being damaged while they kept the woman right around the corner waiting for 2 hours for the medical attention.
They're just as disillusioned as any one else.
The only people that drink the coolaid are a subset of the high school dropouts in the military, who actually need the military as the opportunity, singular. That system - even dropping out of high school - is basically tailored for non objective thinkers searching for a missing support system.
Polarized two-party politics makes some strange bedfellows.
This has been the case for a long time and those surrounding states have large Republican portions especially where many of the Universities are located in the middle of nowhere. But higher education is heavily Democratic, and doubly so in that area.
But the 2010s don't have much to do with aspirations in the intelligence community, mostly undermining those aspirations with the whistleblowing.
So even a tongue in cheek response like that is still trying to make a relation thats tough to make.
One big improvement would be to build up a much larger number of special forces troops to operate these kinds of targeted attacks. They would be much more precise than missile attacks, killing far fewer unarmed women and children (see: the Bin Laden raid).
The trade off is that we would lose a lot more soldiers, but that would be a worthy trade off. These troops could be made up entirely of volunteers. If we're not willing to risk our soldiers, we're probably not confident enough that the enemy is a target worth attacking.
The U.S. military never should have resorted to bombing unarmed women and children in WW2 and beyond. It's time to stop even targeted strikes where unarmed women and children will knowingly be killed.
There's nothing wrong with attacking people who declare themselves deadly enemies through words or actions. But let's have our soldiers go into combat against them head-to-head (with much better gear, of course) and fight it out like an honorable and brave people should.
As low as is currently feasible to get it at the point of this theoretical war, and lower once we have the capabilities to make it lower.
Because this is an evolving standard based on our current capabilities and the stakes of the theoretical moral war you propose, there is no single universal answer, we'll always be paying attention to the context and we'll always be adjusting. It is thus very important that the public have information about what the current casualty rate is for civilians. There is no easy, universal numeric answer to what is an acceptable casualty rate, but in no world is a secret percentage of collateral casualties acceptable. The public needs some level of access to what is going on so we can have informed debates about whether what we're doing is justified.
The Intercept's original coverage of this leak wrote:
> The implicit message on drone strikes from the Obama administration has been one of trust, but don’t verify.
> [...] Additional documents on high-value kill/capture operations in Afghanistan buttress previous accounts of how the Obama administration masks the true number of civilians killed in drone strikes by categorizing unidentified people killed in a strike as enemies, even if they were not the intended targets.
How could the public have a meaningful debate about the morality and acceptability of drone strikes when we didn't even know what their effects were, when they were being misrepresented to us by our own government? You're asking for a single, universal number of what is and isn't acceptable. I'm asking just to know what our current rate is, and to not have the government lie to me about that rate. We can't debate whether or not our results are acceptable if we don't even know what our results currently are.
There are possible wars that would only be moral if, and only if, we could ensure some level of collateral damage or less. Perhaps it would be moral to wage war over X, but only if we could guarantee there would be no collateral damage. Conversely, if some country of psychopaths were doing some unspeakably horrible thing Y then it may be moral to stop them even if stopping them would require us to kill them to the last man, woman, and child. We would need very different casus belli to justify a moral war depending, in part, on the amount of collateral damage prosecuting that war would cause.
You will now perhaps attempt to argue that this does not constitute “intentional” killing of innocents, which has a similar problem with relevance. Indiscriminate killing is highly immoral.
As dumb as it might sound, I feel the US still has a big share of honest good people, compared to what I have seen abroad. Sad to watch.
Sad indeed. US intelligence agencies have gone rogue and public doesn't really care.
Watching the intelligence community go full nuclear to undermine and destroy a democratically elected interloper president in coordination with the media is something that can't be unseen to many Americans.
It is becoming a less controversial view that an inappropriate amount of power is consolidated in the permanent unelected government employees.
I know you'll and half the US will never accept it, but Trump was only destroyed by his mishandling of COVID and his fulminating paranoid conspiracy theories about the election. He stood a chance at re-election, otherwise. There was no deep state/intelligence community/media conspiracy against him, his real enemy was always himself and his own ego.
I mean, if it was successful, you wouldn't even know.
If the short/midterm/longterm response from "many Americans" is to be at all coherent/effective, then what they believe they saw had better jibe with reality.
Universe One: a cabal of chess hustlers cheat by surreptitiously moving a piece to their advantage. An anon films it and sends it anonymously to all the other chess players in the park.
Universe Two: a cabal of chess hustlers cheat by surreptitiously moving a piece to their advantage. An anon films it, then the film becomes part of a conspiracy theory that the players wearing red hats only ever lose because the non-red-hat-wearers have rigged the game against them. Anon creates an anon podcast that fuels the conspiracy theory for the half of the players who wear red hats.
In which universe would you guess the players have the best chance of banding together to throw the cabal of cheaters out of the park and return peace to the chess community?
Or an even simpler question-- if you were a chess hustler who cheated by subtly moving a piece, which universe would you choose to maximize your chances of escaping unscathed?
Why does everything have to be about Trump? Public’s lack of support for Snowden, Assange and Manning was well before Trump.
The public can't do much because it has given too much power to intelligence agencies already. Today, the left and right almost unanimously hate intelligence agencies, but their power is entrenched.
Case in point: the Constitution is irrelevant to intelligence agencies. They genuinely believe they can operate completely outside of it and face no punishment, so they frequently do. What can an American citizen do at that point?
And who even wants to speak out against an intelligence agency if it'll put you on a list?
They can elect someone that can give the agencies a hard time. I guess every time that happens though, we get a one term or less president.
The fact that they suicide people is basically a running meme. There is nothing to hide. Everyone knows that intelligence agencies pull this shit. It surprises no one we all know they will continue to do it.
Why? What/who will stop them and how?
Do you know have examples of situations like this? Most controversies that I am aware of have been enabled by Congressional facilities (e.g., PATRIOT act) or Presidential executive action (e.g., various executive orders).
Sobering, disillusioned, and morbid. A heavy weight, a bolder. Reality for a few, but shelter for the many. Or is it?
Anyone care to share what he gave up his life for?
I'll just say, we are so desensitized to murder and violence that a video and additional information can allow us an inexcusable am out of brazen apathy for innocent lifes.
> [Judge Liam] O'Grady responded, “You’re not facing prison for speaking out about the drone program injuring and killing innocent persons," and, "You could have been a whistleblower and garnered all this attention without leaking any of these documents, frankly.”
O'Grady has a fair point here actually.
Well, speaking as an American citizen, I want unconstitutional surveillance against me to stop now, not 10 years from now.
So the idea that I should be upset that Snowden took a shortcut rather than letting my rights get trampled while he struggled impossibly with bureaucracy -- I just have a hard time figuring out why that would be good for the American people.
I understand that the government would prefer that only official channels are considered legitimate. That's the whole reason why the Espionage Act exists, that's why whistleblowers aren't allowed to bring up public interest during trial. And I get that motivation, I understand why the government wants complete control over how it can and can't be held accountable for violating my trust and violating my rights.
But I don't understand why I should be on the government's side in making it harder to hold them accountable and harder for whistleblowers to let me know when my rights are being violated. Getting mad about taking a shortcut is very strange to me, I'm not sure how to process that sentiment.
Looks at how the PRISM leak worked. It turns out in hindsight it was a poorly kept secret and people just dismissed the evidence because it was new and there wasn't documentation.
What this looks like to me is while being a whistleblower is legal, owning a whistle, putting your lips to a whistle and exhaling vigorously into a whistle are all illegal. And suspicious noise pollution regulations for disturbing the peace with unnecessarily piercing sounds.
Most people don’t have an established prior relationship with an investigative reporter. I wonder what other stuff he leaked.