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Comment by temphn | Hacker News Reader

Let's say this Anon's action inspires other Anons within the federal government to take in a USB key and torrent a few GB of internal emails. Then it's a huge win. Any Anons with sysadmin skills will now join the federal government (they're always hiring), turn off logging, bundle up a tar, cover their tracks, and put it on the web. Nothing will take down a .gov faster than shining some sunlight on their Pentagon Papers. If caught, each Anon can invoke federal whistleblower statutes and dare the courts to jail them and spawn one hundred more Anons. Some will no doubt be jailed, but the power to administer computers is now the power to hold unjust institutions accountable. This is information war.

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Ask Bradley Manning how that whistleblowing thing works out. I think it's important to realise doing things like that, whether ultimately for the good or the bad, comes at a huge personal risk.

To be fair Bradley Manning was prosecuted because he bonded (they had very long chats) with the guy who was supposed to relay that information. If you read the chat transcripts you can tell that Manning was very troubled at the time and wanted someone to talk to. IMHO this does not necessarily apply to someone who works at the DOJ and uses an anonymous channel to submit confidential documents to e.g. Cryptome

It worked out with the Arab Spring didn't it?

"Manning and WikiLeaks were credited as catalysts for the Arab Spring that began in December 2010, when waves of protesters rose up against rulers across the Middle East and North Africa after the leaked cables exposed government corruption" [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning

Manning and WikiLeaks may have been credited by some as catalysts for the Arab Spring, but they were not.

Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation was the catalyst for the Arab Spring. It's not as if Tunisians needed anyone to tell them how corrupt their government was. Once Tunisia looked like it might fall, revolutionaries in other countries started planning their own protests.

Have you got any references refuting this claim then. "but they were not" just isn't that convincing on it's own.

Amnesty International are one of the organisations that credit Wikileaks as being a catalyst for the Arab Spring.

"One example highlighted by Shetty was Tunisia, where WikiLeaks revelations about Ben Ali's corrupt regime combined with rapidly-spreading news of the self-immolation of a disillusioned young man, Mohamed Bouazizi, to spark major protests." [1]

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/13/amnesty-internat...

Preamble: I'm not saying anything one way or another about who or what was or wasn't causal to the Arab Spring movements.

That said, you really need to learn the difference between proximal and ultimate causes.

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