Live data from Hacker News

Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely

covertactionmagazine.com

31–40 of 510 posts

Re: Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely

#31

It’s a travesty that Edward Snowden is still a fugitive in the United States. James Clapper went in front of congress and lied about the scope of surveillance on US citizens. Snowden saw it as his moral obligation to expose those lies, and he did it in the least destructive way possible by leaking the evidence to qualified journalists.

[flagged]

Re: Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely

#32
Just look at this thread of “hackers” saying “well the law is the law.”

It’s an embarrassment the degree to which smart educated leading edge communities have totally and utterly forfeited their own power for the security blanket of these domination based systems.

Actually it’s worse, the official ethos of success in America is now some cynical mix of “If you’re not scamming someone you’re not trying” and “Altruism is for suckers”

It’s like we’ve gotten to the point where even the people who disagree with Ayn Rand Objectvism have given up and just decided to play the same game just with different set of moral criteria

Or maybe this is a venture capitalist forum and of course it’s going to be overrun by people who believe in some version of domination as the right moral philosophy.

Re: Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely

#33

It’s a travesty that Edward Snowden is still a fugitive in the United States. James Clapper went in front of congress and lied about the scope of surveillance on US citizens. Snowden saw it as his moral obligation to expose those lies, and he did it in the least destructive way possible by leaking the evidence to qualified journalists.

[flagged]

The traitors are the ones who engaged in this unconstitutional spying in the first place.

Anyone exposed by his leaks quite frankly deserved worse.

Re: Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely

#34

It’s a travesty that Edward Snowden is still a fugitive in the United States. James Clapper went in front of congress and lied about the scope of surveillance on US citizens. Snowden saw it as his moral obligation to expose those lies, and he did it in the least destructive way possible by leaking the evidence to qualified journalists.

I disagree that he did it in the least destructive way possible. He revealed far more secrets than were necessary to blow the whistle. Just take a look at the list of secrets he revealed. Most of them are not about domestic spying at all: https://www.lawfareblog.com/snowden-revelations If he wanted to blow the whistle on domestic spying, he could have shared documents with journalists about domestic spying.

He had to take a quick dump of whatever he could and filter through it later. It's not like he could leisurely spend weeks vetting the docs.

Re: Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely

#35
post #24
post #4

On the other hand, there are people that look at whistleblowing as a way to propel into fame. They call themselves and whistleblowers when in reality they are just publicly critiquing their company over known facts. They give whistleblowing a bad reputation.

Do you have examples of people who have been enriched by so-called whistleblowing?

I think Frances Haugen just wanted to be famous. She didn’t whistleblow anything really and yet called herself a whistleblower.

Re: Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that he did it in the least destructive way possible. He revealed far more secrets than were necessary to blow the whistle. Just take a look at the list of secrets he revealed. Most of them are not about domestic spying at all: https://www.lawfareblog.com/snowden-revelations If he wanted to blow the whistle on domestic spying, he could have shared documents with journalists about domestic spying.

He had to take a quick dump of whatever he could and filter through it later. It's not like he could leisurely spend weeks vetting the docs.

The program he was most interested in leaking (PRISM) wasn't illegal at all. He had plenty of time to figure that out, but he didn't. In order to leak this perfectly legal program, he tried to get asylum in Hong Kong by leaking Chinese systems the NSA had compromised.

Re: Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely

#37

It’s a travesty that Edward Snowden is still a fugitive in the United States. James Clapper went in front of congress and lied about the scope of surveillance on US citizens. Snowden saw it as his moral obligation to expose those lies, and he did it in the least destructive way possible by leaking the evidence to qualified journalists.

I disagree that he did it in the least destructive way possible. He revealed far more secrets than were necessary to blow the whistle. Just take a look at the list of secrets he revealed. Most of them are not about domestic spying at all: https://www.lawfareblog.com/snowden-revelations If he wanted to blow the whistle on domestic spying, he could have shared documents with journalists about domestic spying.

According to Greenwald there were millions of pages, largely because everything from parking spaces to nuclear weapons were frivolously marked "top secret" in order to increase the perceived importance of bureaucrats.

Snowden gave the pile to the Guardian (Greenwald and another journalist), who decided what to publish, which was a major task because of all the unimportant stuff.

How could Snowden have gone through that pile in a couple of days while on the run and possibly afraid for his life?

Re: Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US also has laws protecting whistleblowers, which to me just highlighted the complete moral bankruptcy of some Republican members of the US Congress when they tried to out the whistleblower who brought Trump's phone call with the Ukrainian president to light, but more importantly, when they tried to impugn his motives. The thing that made me so angry about this is that a huge point of whistleblower laws is that i…

I found the treatment of Julian Assange to be the disgusting poltics; after that its just more of the same, innit?

No, it’s not the same because it doesn’t benefit him this time. Leftists are like libertarians, if libertarians only applied their principles to themselves. Bodily autonomy, firearm rights, private property, taxation, misinformation censorship, death penalty, etc. Whether or not they support it depends not on what it does but who it benefits, and so a left winger can never truly take a concrete position like “I support gun control” when they need to make exceptions for SRA, Natives, Palestinians, etc.
Post reply on HN