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Comment by necubi | Hacker News Reader

Really, they haven't. Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers (1971), was also also charged with espionage. In his case all the charges against him were dismissed. Not, to be clear, because of any contriteness on Nixon's part. Instead, it was because the government was found to have illegally bugged his phone and broken into the office of his psychiatrist in order to find material with which to discredit him. Several of those involved were later convicted as part of the watergate trials [0].

If you think things were better in the 70s, you really weren't paying attention.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg#Trial_and_mistr...

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> because the government was found to have illegally bugged his phone

Man, how times have changed. Now espionage charges apply when someone leaks that the government bugged everyone's phone.

Because the lovely government has declared it legal under secret 'patriot' laws.

Uh, here you go: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-107publ56/pdf/PLAW-107publ...

Yes. And that is unfortunate.

I wonder where the Govt found this opportunity and grabbed it without delay..was it the new way of terrorism? First propagating Islam-phobia and then bring in the restrains slowly - one by one? What was it exactly?

> If you think things were better in the 70s, you really weren't paying attention.

Yeah, well I was 3.

Even so I don't seem to recall Ellsberg fleeing the country to escape absolute certain injustice. I don't recall his video interview with a foreign paper while he hid in China. Do you?

Something has definitely changed.

Imagine how things might have turned out differently for Bradley Manning if he had a day or two to get out before his arrest.

Manning was a PFC in the Army. He wouldn't have been able to afford fleeing to Hong Kong or Moscow making less than $30,000 per year. He would have had a much more difficult time evading arrest.

How much money could such a fleeing really take? I mean, 30k isn't much at all, but would he even have been paying for rent or food while enlisted? If he managed to save up a few thousand for a few plane tickets and maybe a few days in a hotel on his own wallet, then that would be enough. I don't think a few thousand is a particularly unreasonable ask.

You're basing all this on a sample size of two.

How many famous whistleblowers are there?

For a broader sample base, you just widen your category a tiny little bit to Edward Snowden, Jeremy Hammond, Aaron Swartz, Bradley Manning and Jacob Appelbaum.

Aaron Swartz was a whistleblower?

That sample set would still be statistically insignificant.

I think the point is not that one should use larger samples, but rather than the conclusion is wrong since the sample is too small. Iow, there's no proof that the situation really changed in the US on the discussed topic.

You must mean, ones who are/were made public right?

>"because the government was found to have illegally bugged his phone and broken into the office of his psychiatrist

Can this not be actual legal precedence AGAINST the entire NSA debacle to begin with?

Seriously, can an IAMAL comment on if this could be used?

IANAL. My understanding of how these things work, however, is that the case against Ellsberg was dismissed by the trial judge, and therefore does not establish any precedent. If he'd been convicted, and the conviction overturned on appeal (and the conviction's having been overturned was upheld in any appeals thereof), then precedent would have been created.

The reason it works this way is that trial courts are venues for finding facts, while appellate courts are vehicles for addressing questions of law surrounding those findings of fact. It's how those questions of law are resolved, so-called "case law", that creates precedents.

IANAL; corrections welcome.

Ellsberg has been saying that things were in fact better back then. He was arrested, released on bail, and spent the next couple years able to tell his story to the media. Manning was arrested and kept in solitary for almost four years before his trial, isolated from the outside world.

Ellsberg was a civilian, employed by the RAND Corporation [1] when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, which was a political report commissioned by a politician (Secretary of Defense McNamara). [2]

Manning was serving in active military duty when he leaked actual military data (albeit historical). There is a huge difference there. When you do something like that in the military, you get court-martialed, which is a different set of rules than civilian court. I do think that 4 years of solitary confinement is beyond excessive, but the military has to court-martial him. I'm guessing it's all spelled out in the military handbook, and I don't think anyone would have expectations otherwise.

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

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_papers

Snowden was a civilian contractor. If caught, do you think he would be treated more like Ellsberg or Manning?

I know how I'd place my bet.

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