So the guys who murdered innocents in another country using machine guns sitting on top of a helicopter are yet to be tried. While the guys who stood up for humanity and true spirit of serving forces for good is sentenced 35 years. And I know a lot of people would troll me on this opinion itself.
There are always paths to responsible disclosure. From what I understand, many of them are pretty badly broken, and we certainly need to fix that.
But ultimately, you really don't want to set a precedent of "well, if you leak something and you really believe in your heart that it was morally justified, then we won't send you to jail."
Anyway, I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion here, so I shall now let the sea of downvotes wash over me.
All of the above exists. In fact, it's required to exist, along with various access controls in the system depending on the protection level. All is specified in DCID 6/3.[1] That is not to say the requirements were implemented properly, or that the oversight was fully competent. It does, however, exist.
no oversight – how about "insufficient oversight"
no logging – I doubt this is true
…rate monitoring – This gets into a huge, hairy, and probably unsolvable problem called "aggregation". Briefly, I might be allowed access to specific bits of classified information in order to do my job, and each one of these is within my clearance. But, if I were to collect together enough of these facts the collection as a whole would provide more information than the sum of its parts and would need to carry a higher classification marking. Consider, people working at an airport need to know when a cargo plane is going to take off or land, say to plow the snow off the runway. But if I take all the take off and landing data, now I know the material flow, and if I take it over time, I can see what the military is strategically planning. This is the kind of problem that is so complicated that after coming up and derailing a few design meetings the officers in charge will realize that the "pie in the sky" ideas from the contractor will probably cost more than the whole rest of the development and never provide a usable solution, so it gets shelved for later releases and some sort of fig leaf is put in place to cover the mandatory requirement.
… able to wget this massive cache of data – I haven't looked at this specifically, but speaking from similar systems… There may be entities that access the data at high speed, especially reporting and analysis systems. (screen scraping is frighteningly common as a way to interconnect systems in the military) He may not have been an obvious outlier. Or maybe no one was watching. Or maybe he used wget's rate limiting options.
…they would be none the wiser had he not… – This is where the auditing comes in. After fact A,Q, and U are released, someone would probably start processing logs and see who retrieved A, Q, and U. Manning's indiscriminate collection would make him likely the only person that retrieved the union, or at least the only human on a list with a bunch of automated systems. It is after the fact, and too late to prevent damage, but it is possible the auditing would have brought him to the attention of investigators.
If those in power don't want to justify leaks and whistleblowers they should think harder about justifying and covering up murder and other crimes.
The precedent would be, "Go ahead and break the law, if you think your cause is worth serving the time. Then when it is all over and done, we will judge if your cause was worth breaking the law. If your cause was worthy, then we won't send you to jail."
It isn't about what he felt deep down inside, it is about what the result of his actions were. I'd hold guys like Dick Cheney to the same standard - he broke the law because he genuinely believed that terrorists were an existential threat to the US. But what he believed is irrelevant, the question is were terrorists really an existential threat? If not, he needs to do the time. But if he was correct, then walk free with our thanks for making the right call.
On the other hand, if we adopt a policy of exonerating people whose causes were found to be just, the number of people leaking things that really shouldn't have been leaked is pretty likely to increase. And we're talking about information that would possibly put lives at risk in the wrong hands.
I really don't know what the right answer is. But I know it's not cut and dry.
I actually think this is the popular opinion. Most people don't believe the government shouldn't be able to keep certain things secret or that any agent with classified knowledge has carte blanche to share whatever they deem fit.
Lawyers, priests, doctors, and psychologies who is all under strict confidentiality sometimes has to break that rule of secrecy when particular crimes is heard or observed. It doesn't matter how classified the conversation is, or the medical records. If they show child abuse, they must break the confidentiality and call the police.
The system has not broken down yet, even if those people has to make their own judgement calls when to break confidentiality. It is enough that they just suspect that a child might be in danger.
Shouldn't army personal who not only suspect, but can prove illegal activities be under the same scrutiny?
The key point here is that they call the police, not blindly dump thousands of private documents onto the internet.
If I am pissed at my employer and decide to steal and publish all the internal documents I can, and I get lucky and some of them are incriminating, that doesn't excuse what I did. It just means that both I and my employer are criminals, instead of only me.
Would it be wrong if the nurse gave all that doctors patient files the press (given that the officials refuses to act)? If not, then what should the expected behavior be?
When it came to trial, how should sentencing be done? 35 years? What would be appropriate sentencing for the nurse if the number of patient files was in the thousands, but only a hundred or so had proof of criminal activity?
It does not seem unreasonable to me that diplomats need to communicate openly and frankly between one another, even as they say other things in public. In other words, just like we should be free of NSA spying, they ought to be reasonably sure their discussions don't get splashed over the internet unless it's to uncover some heinous or criminal activity. That would actually be whistleblowing. Maybe some of his data dump could be classified that way, but most likely most if it isn't. I admit to not knowing the details.
Then let it break down! Information wants to be free and all that. I would MUCH, MUCH rather live in a world where government secrets are virtually impossible to keep than the world we currently live in. Government secrecy is a poison, anything that weakens it is good news as far as I'm concerned.
As it should. If something requires to be classified to work then it doesn't work.
Specifically:
1) The company had been under fire all morning and the Apaches were called in by a soldier on the ground under attack at the location where the journalists were;
2) Among the group of men the two Reuters journalists were with, there were armed men an AK-47 and two RPG launchers, one loaded (and if you can tell that what the journalists are carrying are cameras and not weapons from the grainy video, in real time, you've got sharper eyes than me);
3) A portion of the tape is missing in which the helicopters engage armed insurgents that are seen running into a building; this portion precedes a section visible on the tape that shows the Apaches firing at the building with a missile.
So no, the soldiers in the helicopter should not be tried. If soldiers are in a theater of war, are called in because other soldiers are under attack, and see people with weapons, they should shoot, and that's what happened here. This was not one of those cases like you saw in Vietnam when soldiers just started shooting up civilians with no threat in sight.
This is not a "shoot anything that moves situation." It's a "if you're called in to the middle of a firefight you resolve doubts in favor of whatever protects other U.S. soldiers."
""" Gabriel Schoenfeld, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute said of the airstrike:.
It is precisely the presence of weapons, including RPGs, that goes a long distance toward explaining why cameramen for Reuters—pointing television cameras around corners in a battle zone—were readily mistaken by our gunships for insurgents. The video makes plain that in this incident, as in almost all military encounters in both Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers are up against forces that do not wear uniforms—a violation of international law precisely because it places innocent civilians in jeopardy. """
Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's never appropriate to second-guess a soldier's conduct in war. But "war crimes" are purposefully malicious actions in the absence of a threat. Not bad judgment calls in response to what you can make out from hundreds of meters away in the middle of a firefight.
This is a war crime: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre.
And you might want to read up exact transcript of the conversation in the chopper [2].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_War_...
06:33 Come on, buddy.
06:38 All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.
06:44 Crazyhorse this is Bushmaster Five, Bushmaster Four break. We are right below you right time now can you walk us onto that location over.
06:54 This is Two-Six roger. I'll pop flares [drop flares]. We also have one individual moving. We're looking for weapons. If we see a weapon, we're gonna engage.
07:07 Yeah Bushmaster, we have a van that's approaching and picking up the bodies.
07:14 Where's that van at?
07:15 Right down there by the bodies.
07:16 Okay, yeah.
07:18 Bushmaster; Crazyhorse. We have individuals going to the scene, looks like *possibly* uh picking up bodies and weapons.
07:25 Let me engage.
07:28 Can I shoot?
07:31 Roger. Break. Uh Crazyhorse One-Eight request permission to uh engage.
07:36 Picking up the wounded?
07:38 Yeah, we're trying to get permission to engage.
07:41 Come on, let us shoot!
07:44 Bushmaster; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
07:49 They're taking him.
07:51 Bushmaster; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
07:56 This is Bushmaster Seven, go ahead.
07:59 Roger. We have a black SUV-uh Bongo truck [van] picking up the bodies. Request permission to engage.
08:02 Fuck.
08:06 This is Bushmaster Seven, roger. This is Bushmaster Seven, roger. Engage.
http://www.collateralmurder.com/en/transcript.html https://www2.centcom.mil/sites/foia/rr/CENTCOM%20Regulation%...
Sure, the guy is eager to engage, but remember the whole context of this is that the Apaches were called in to protect American soldiers under fire in that area.
Oh, I'm sure they won't be. No doubt whatever actions they took are entirely justifiable under whatever legal framework has been whipped up to cover it. Not like there's going to be Nuremberg trials for Iraq.
But at the end of the day, the video shows american soldiers in billion-dollar helicopters calmly killing innocent people in a foreign country they have no real reason to be in. That upsets people. And you can quote as many legal justifications as you want but none of that changes the profound injustice, and rock bottom morality, of what happened that day.
TL;DR: if the outcome of your legal process is profound injustice and innocent people killed without reason or consequence, your legal process sucks.
Also, way to completely ignore the van they shot up with two children inside. Which they knew were inside.
As for the kids, look at this picture and tell me how you think they knew children were inside: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/61/Col....
You keep on repeating "theater of war! theater of war!" like it's some get out of jail free card giving you carte blanche to do whatever you want, for whatever reasons, without consequence. And I suppose, if you're America, it is.
But this is not some WWI battlefield. It's a city filled with millions of ordinary people living ordinary lives, with every right to live those lives in peace. "Theater of war" or not, if you're going to go and shoot up foreign cities filled with innocent people then maybe the burden of proof should be on you a bit that you kill the "right" people.
Everything you say is founded on a presumption in favour of the military. Their comrades were shot at before! Erring on the side of caution (caution for us, of course)! Hey, that could have been a gun! We didn't know there were kids!
Love to hear what all the bloodthirsty war fans would think if those were innocent americans being calmly cut to pieces by some unfeeling foreign gunner. "What's that you say? It's a theater of war? Oh well that's perfectly all right then! Fire away!"
If the law wasn't relevant in theaters of war, we wouldn't have phrases like "war crime".
You're a terrible person, how do you live with yourself?
You are just a coward behind a keyboard hurling insults from throwaway accounts, imagining yourself to be the better person.
Ugh, too much internet for one day.
You're dead on with that comment. The most galling aspect of this entire story isn't that Manning is going to serve some jail time (although that is absurd in its own right), but rather that all of the real criminals are walking away scott free, with no repurcusions for their behavior at all.
This will probably prove to be the case with the NSA situation as well. The people who ordered, and conducted, mass surveillance of people they had not business spying on, will never be punished. And no one will be held accountable even so far as losing their job, or being docked some pay. Keith Alexander and James Clapper and their cronies keep getting paid and probably get nice, cushy government provided pensions and the whole bit. Meanwhile, Edward Snowden is forced to hide out in another country, completely removed from his friends and family, and - for all we know - may ultimately wind up in jail right alongside Bradley Manning.
Tell me something isn't badly wrong with this picture?
Not saying that what they did was right, but I don't think it's a cut and dried case where you can say those guys should be in jail.
I don't think Manning was wrong for trying to get that particular story out there, but the indiscriminate nature of his leak is what destroyed his whistleblower defense.
If someone worked at Lockheed Martin, and had evidence of bribery of defense officials, but then also leaked 100's of thousands of documents that contain the classified schematics of every single weapons system them make, that guy would rightfully be put in jail. Maybe I'm wrong, but if you're whistleblowing on classified or confidential information, then you should limit your disclosure to what is relevant to the actual wrongdoing.
I'm not sure if has to serve a minimum of (35-4)/3 or (35/3) -4, but I suspect it's the later if common sense is applied (which is often not the case).
The question is why would someone end up leaking state secrets at all?: Hint: Those secrets are about wrong doings!
Remember "mens rea"? We HNers all seem to think that's an important concept, except apparently when it's people we don't like (US military).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_War_...
Hundreds and thousands of civilian deaths for what cost? Who paid the price of waging such a war (crime according to some), the taxpayers?
As to measure the 'crime' in the video called collateral damage ... follow the transcript here:
(By the way, I think a lot of people would disagree with you. That doesn't mean they're "trolling" you.)
Can you elaborate why? I am interested in hearing your point of view because maybe I just have one side of the story.
I agree the US overclassifies documents and is too secretive. I agree we need more transparency and I certainly agree we need better whistleblower protection and oversight...But I don't think that gives everyone with access the right to unilaterally declassify whatever they want without penalty. The military can't work like that. No organization can work like that.
The 1.5 gigabyte unecrypted file is in the torrents so you could take a look to see what is inside - if it is legal under your jurisdiction.
Also WikiLeaks didn't released all cables that he gave them against - so he failed on that front too.
He also didn't make a dead man's switch that he could leak additional material in case he is captured or convicted - that to use as bargaining chip.
He called himself Bradass83 as a nickname and approached a hacker on im program.
So - he leaked too much, too nondiscriminatory, failed to it properly and was behaving amateurish.