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Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

Snowden is in no way equivalent to King.

Never in a long run. King stood up to his foes, Snowden ran.

In a world where your "foes" have shown a willingness to torture, kill, and use every sneaky, subversive tactic in the book (c.f. pvt. Manning) across all borders to annihilate those it's decided, wrongfully or not, are enemies, what good do you think would come of Snowden returning to the USA?

Does it take someone being tortured to sate your moral compass?!

Further, him "standing up" as you and so many others seem to want him to do would undermine the whole reason he leaked the NSA stuff and took off in the first place. He'll disappear into some military (or worse) prison somewhere and never be heard from again.

It is pretty offensive to the memory of MLK to suggest that the treatment that awaited Snowden at the hands of the DOJ was in any way comparable to what faced the Montgomery Improvement Association. MIA activists were beaten, raped, lynched, and tortured in public with clubs, dogs, and firehoses.

So we've ostensibly replaced physical torture with mental. The effect on the person isn't any less detrimental.

You think the Montgomery activists weren't tortured mentally as well? Their children were being threatened.

Who said they weren't?! If you put the unaccountable "enhanced interrogation" users at the NSA above threatening children if they think that will get them what they want, you've got a much higher view of these people than most. The point that you seem to be dancing around recognizing is that all torture is bad, regardless of degree.

NSA has no interrogation capability at all. I no longer understand what you're talking about. Regardless, I feel pretty confident that what MLK and his associates faced is far worse than anything Snowden faces, at least from the US. Who knows where things will go in Russia.

If you believe in the concept of "degrees" of torture, at least. It's all wrong on every conceivable level. You don't need to ever lay a finger on someone to break their mind and leave them permanently damaged.

>NSA has no interrogation capability at all.

Dumbest thing I've heard yet today. It reminds me of the scene in Demolition Man where Simon Phoenix cannot kill Dr. Raymond Cocteau so Phoenix enlists one of his ne'er-do-well friends to dispatch him.

What he has gone through is nothing compared to those who fought for Civil Rights. It is beyond lame to make the comparison on any equal terms.

MLK and those like him stood in the face of sanctioned brutality. They marched straight into the face of known violence. They lived everyday wondering when their time would come or their families would face harm.

Claiming Snowden would be tortured or disappeared is beyond stupid. Nutters, 9/11 conspirators, and UFO kidnappers, fall into this hyper paranoid mindset.

He is a public figure, it would be a black mark on the US government that anything violent would happen to him while in custody. There are most likely an uncountable number of rights groups who will sponsor his legal representation

>What he has gone through is nothing compared to those who fought for Civil Rights.

You're right. Thanks to the connected world we live in, Snowden was able to take his fight on the road and place himself out of reach before anything that extreme could happen. That's not to insinuate that being forced to leave your home, your family, your friends, and everything you've ever known, possibly permanently, isn't pretty terrible..

>Claiming Snowden would be tortured or disappeared is beyond stupid.

You mean like Manning wasn't? Sleep deprivation and extended solitary confinement is torture for a reason.

>He is a public figure, it would be a black mark on the US government that anything violent would happen to him while in custody.

He's only a "public figure" because he ran and was able to keep somewhat in the spotlight (partly by continually releasing information). When's the last time you heard anything about Chelsea Manning? She's effectively "disappeared". The leaks are out of the media, efforts all for naught because nobody remembers them anymore.

And as I've spent the last 5 or so posts trying to convey, you don't need to inflict "violence" on someone in order to ruin them. Locking someone in a box with no human contact for 23 hours a day does that nicely.

Think of all of the interviews and articles that he's written since the release of the first batch of materials. If he had been captured.. then been kept naked in solitary confinement for all this time (Manning), certainly not allowed within a mile of a pen or microphone, how much more of the story would the US government have been able to keep quiet?

How does any of that change the fact that Greenwald lives in Brazil?

How does the current location of Greenwald change any of the previously listed facts about Snowden?

Contrary to John Rawls philosophy of civil disobedience, in which disobedients have to accept the legal consequences of their actions, Snowden evaded authorities.

But willingness to accept punishment can be viewed as more of a strategy to bring attention to the cause, instead, and not a qualifier of the disobedient.

For Snowden to reenact the "classic account of civil disobedience" would mean silence of himself in the mean time of his trial.

Why must Snowden throw himself into the system where he is almost certainly going to be crushed, with the inevitable jury make up in the district where charges were filed?

Yes, that is the tradeoff. Submitting to federal justice would be the moral high-ground, and a tactic of classical civil-disobedience. Doing that, however, would effectively silence him; it would be up to others to make arguments on his behalf. Who can say whether that would be more effective than the course he's taken.

At the same time, it's pretty brazen for his critics say that he hasn't sacrificed enough, that if he was sincere about his motivation he would have sacrificed more.

I agree, I find it really odd that there are demands that one cannot be on the moral high ground unless you throw yourself upon the mercy of a system that you directly exposed as being corrupt.

It's as if all those people that escape North Korea to spread word about the abuses there must go back to face the ire of that government or we won't believe them.

As for the immature people out there with sad debating etiquette, I'm not comparing the US government with the North Korean government, it's just an example.

Agreed on the first part, but,

> King stood up to his foes, Snowden ran.

really stuck with me. Correct me if I'm wrong, but M.L. King didn't do anything illegal, whereas Snowden did. Snowden ran to avoid prison sentence which makes perfect sense, and his cause also wouldn't have been helped by his incarceration, whereas King would probably be considered a "martyr", since his stance more requires a physical presence.

^Exactly this.

The are different, agreed, not disputing. But expecting someone who knows what they did will be met with torture, or absolute solitary for the rest of their life, for exposing actual wrongs against the public is ridiculous in the extreme.

You have to be tortured to prove your intent was for the good of the people? Since when?

The Civil Rights Movement did indeed occasional do things that would be breaking the law. But that was typically aimed at laws that were unjust towards them personally. For those they participated in civil disobedience by breaking that law but not fighting it when they were arrested. Doesn't mean there wasn't violence aimed at them for doing it.

But in the end, this MLK and Snowden comparisons are just rather odd because they truly have very little in common.

No, there's nothing noble about the idea that a dissenter should voluntarily submit to be punished. It doesn't take a genius to figure out who benefits from spreading that idea, though.

How do you propose fighting a state apparatus that operates mostly in secret, with the cover of secret laws and a secret court?

Anyone that stands up to that in the open would be a fool because they would face a certainty worse than death: they'd be discredited and then ignored. Massacring wouldn't be necessary, because they'd probably do themselves in.

King's foes were not the US intelligence service.

> King's foes were not ONLY the US intelligence service.

ftfy

Yes, it's two different scenarios:

0. Civil rights of African Americans and others in the 50's and 60's.

1. Digital rights of everyone in 2010's versus a state apparatus.

> Snowden is in no way equivalent to King.

Agreed. King was murdered before he could accomplish most of his goals, and in retrospect was more of an inspiration than a force. Somehow the only thing that seems to be left of him in the public sphere completely ignores his work against the war and for the poor and working people of the world - is some sort of sainthood that defends the imprisoning of the disloyal and vaguely frowns at affirmative action.

Snowden started with a goal of making the public aware of the surveillance it was under, and accomplished it immediately. Whether he's imprisoned at this point is besides the point, because this isn't about him.

>King stood up to his foes

King lay on the ground bleeding to death before his foes. That's only good for people who think that being dead is a crucial quality for a leader; not as small a group as you might think. Dead people don't disagree.

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