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Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely

covertactionmagazine.com

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

#121

Post by vinyl7 »

freetime2 wrote: post #17

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'm not sure I believe much about what Snowden released. I see him as more of a psyop agent than a whistleblower. The govt could have orchestrated that whole ordeal to instill a chilling effect on the population, none of it had to be true for the population to react and self censor

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

#123

Post by mandmandam »

somenameforme wrote: post #101
anonym29 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of the whole Snowden ordeal was not discovering hard proof we've been living in a borderline-Orwellian surveillance state, but the utter indifference of the American people at this revelation.

Look at literally any poll on this issue. Here [1] is one from late 2019 from Pew. 66% of Americans think the risks of government data collection outweigh the benefits, fewer than 25% think they benefit from such behavior. And almost nobody knows what the government is doing with all of this information they're collecting. It's certainly not indifference, it's that our media and democracy aren't really functioning pr…

> these sort of issues where people overwhelmingly feel one way, and the political establishment feels another? Yeah, those are all strangely absent.

I feel that Sanders' nomination campaigns epitomized this divide: He spoke for the people. Many more people donated for him than any other candidate, his supporters were diverse and enthusiastic. He was the number one most popular politician in the entire country.

Yet media - quite openly - gave him far less coverage, were 3x more negative in the coverage they did give, studiously ignored the attacks and cheating from the political establishment, systematically smeared his supporters, and then blamed him when Hilary (number one disliked Democrat in America) lost.

And smart people, rational people with functioning memories, apparently, seemed to just... not want to talk about it.

And then it happened again, with even more obvious collusion, four years later. And we talked about it even less, just relieved that we wouldn't have another 4 years of that.

Bringing it all up now feels like you're reopening someone else's closed scab. People are auto-rewriting their own version history to help themselves feel less abused, it seems. They don't want to hear it. And this is (many of) the people who were even clued in to it all in the first place.

Only Sanders wanted Snowden to be honored for his actions. Hilary wanted him to "face the music". It could all hardly be more obvious. And yet...

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

#124

Post by heresie-dabord »

kornhole wrote: post #85
anonym29 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of the whole Snowden ordeal was not discovering hard proof we've been living in a borderline-Orwellian surveillance state, but the utter indifference of the American people at this revelation.

Ohwellian: When you know you are living in a dystopia but couldn't be bothered to change anything.

Egowellian: When multitudes of people around you are suffering but you are profiting so you ensure that they continue to suffer.

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

#125

Post by bourbonorgin »

bowsamic wrote: post #55

I know a lot of people who take a seriously negative view against whistleblowers, which I find very strange. Do you not want to know the messed up shit that the companies and government are doing? I think people just see it as being a traitor.

isn't that the premise of this blog post

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

#126

Post by HeckFeck »

paulmd wrote: post #71

Whistleblowers act against power structures and that's the ultimate transgression as far as the power structure is concerned. Transgressions in favor of the state are one thing, you'll get a slap on the wrist at most, even personal benefit and promotion in some cases, but transgressions against the state are what will provoke a real response. See, for example, the incredible vigor pursued against the people who relea…

That's exactly the problem. You know they are speaking an essential truth when you look at the feathers ruffled by Snowden, Assange and those who follow in their path.

They will get their due acclaim if we're lucky to have a more moral and free society in the future.

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

#128

Post by anonym29 »

somenameforme wrote: post #101
anonym29 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of the whole Snowden ordeal was not discovering hard proof we've been living in a borderline-Orwellian surveillance state, but the utter indifference of the American people at this revelation.

Look at literally any poll on this issue. Here [1] is one from late 2019 from Pew. 66% of Americans think the risks of government data collection outweigh the benefits, fewer than 25% think they benefit from such behavior. And almost nobody knows what the government is doing with all of this information they're collecting. It's certainly not indifference, it's that our media and democracy aren't really functioning pr…

How much of this do you think is media just not functioning properly as opposed to it deliberately being used as a tool to influence public opinion the way the intelligence community desires?

We know the CIA has commandeered domestic media organizations for the purpose of influencing the opinions of the American public before - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

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

#129

Post by bourbonorgin »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #8
jruohonen wrote: post #2

In the EU we already have a law for protecting whistleblowers: https://commission.europa.eu/aid-development-cooperation-fun... Also companies have emerged for providing secure platforms for whistleblowers. Though, as national security and related things are in the hands of the member states, I am not sure how well this EU law and its national adaptations apply to the cases discussed in this article (probably wholesal…

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…

are there any whistleblowers who keep working in their field in the US?

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

#130

Post by HeckFeck »

jstarfish wrote: post #100
nmqsxc wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

[flagged]

Not all of us can grep as well as we'd like.

Besides, swiping only the most telling and highligy classified documents would've aroused suspicion. He might have been including some line noise to distract a system looking for patterns. Also, including unrelated but genuine documents would make his leak easier to verify because it proves he has access to the source.

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