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Comment by theworst | Hacker News Reader

The argument that I've commonly heard is twofold. One, Manning was in the Army, so lots of his actions fall under military jurisdiction, where the primary concern is not the rights of the accused.

Secondly, Manning dumped a lot of info without knowing what he dumped. Snowden knew what was in the docs he leaked, and he made sure to protect human lives.

That's what I've heard, at least. It seems to make sense to me, but I'm open to having my mind changed if you have a different perspective.

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For the life of me, whenever I hear someone call Manning a whistleblower, I cannot ever get the person to articulate exactly what he was blowing the whistle against. It's my understanding that most of what was released was nothing more than embarrassing personal cables that harmed diplomatic relations. Snowden revealed legitimate privacy concerns that the American people had not yet been privy to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007_Baghdad_airstrike

Which doesn't really justify 99.9% of the other things that were released.

But that 99.9% (assuming your figure is accurate - I have no idea the proportion of damning vs. embarrassing vs. irrelevant information that was leaked) doesn't make Manning not a whistle-blower.

I couldn't off-hand recall anything, either. But a cursory search reveals: "There were hundreds of classified reports of torture, that continued even after the Abu Ghraib scandal."[0]

The diplomatic embarrassment is what made the news, but whose fault is it that -- and who stands to gain from it? People like a good embarrassing story. And I'm sure governments prefer you think of them as having their diary exposed to the public as opposed to the guys paying thugs to torture people.

[0] http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2013/08/2013...

You seriously never heard of the "Collateral Murder" video?

Manning specifically released that among other information. It was incredibly important.

Unrelated transgender protocol question... When referring to events in the past, do you use the gender the party identifies as now, or the gender they (at least publicly) identified as at the point in time the events occurred? I suspect that might vary from person to person, but in most cases, I expect they would prefer the former...

Usually you use the current gender identity pronouns.

In this case at least, Manning always felt feminine. It just took a long time to personally work that out. The reason she joined the army in the first place was to make herself more manly, because she already didn't feel like a man at the time.

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