Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by yarg » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 5:39 PM UTC

gghhzzgghhzz wrote: post #53

alphanullmeric wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suppo…

Putting aside your implied definition of Leftists here. The Palestinian point is broadly enlightening, but maybe not in the way you intended. Armed struggle for the purpose of self determination should be materially supported in Ukraine, but not in Palestine. This is the glowing contradiction, and I'm not sure real leftists are the most guilty party here.

US complicity has permitted the decades long ethnic cleansing of Palestine to continue unabated.

It is truly abhorrent.

However, there's a significant difference between arming a nation under invasion, and arming religious fundamentalists.

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

#152

Post by low_tech_love » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 5:40 PM UTC

penneallagricia wrote: post #119

andrewmutz wrote: post #22

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.

As a non-USAer I'm so glad he went beyond domestic spying. He showed the world how the USA spied on many of its supposed allies. The scope of the system of espionage they built is orwellian and just astonishing. If there is one evil force conspiring for global domination that is the NSA and whichever institution they take order from. Thanks again, Snowden. What I don't understand is the complete lack of response from…

As a non-USAer, I strongly disagree. There are probably a handful of other countries watching you right now (in a broad, abstract sense) and the USA is the least of our concerns. There is a reason why nothing significant came out of it: every other country knows that this is happening (not exactly but roughly) and they know there are much worse problems to worry about, given other strong international players such as Russia and China. There is no ”surveillance free world” alternative. The USA is a very strong and stable democracy (maybe even the strongest) so I think it’s naive to think that removing them from the board would be a good thing.

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

#153

Post by Loquebantur » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 5:44 PM UTC

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]

Why do the agencies not bother to filter out unrelated material? According to you, the responsible course of action would have to be to record only what is related to illegal activity in the first place.

Your talking about legality is a straw-man anyway: the point is mass surveillance being highly unethical. Not even the law reflecting that fact makes the reality of it only worse.

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

#154

Post by drewcoo » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 5:45 PM UTC

lettergram wrote: post #93

andrewmutz wrote: post #22

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.

In a democracy almost everything should be public. Our weapons for sure, perhaps not where they are located, but what we pay for yes.

I'd hope for more than just transparency.

Even public information about our military is not commonly known, so we don't have a well-informed citizenry.

How many Americans are aware of this, clearly public info because Al Jazeera has it?

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/10/infographic-us-mili...

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

#155

Post by cronix » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 5:46 PM UTC

lern_too_spel wrote: post #60

anonym29 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of PRISM's legality, it's deeply unethical and immoral for a government to spy on their own citizens with nothing more than a permission slip stamped by a stamping body that approves 99.97% of the requests that cross their desk, which is exactly what the FISA court is.

PRISM doesn't involve data from US citizens' accounts. Please review what PRISM is before claiming it is illegal or unethical. It is neither. If you are incapable of reading the documents yourself: if the company receiving the wiretap order has any reason to believe that an account belongs to a US citizen or a non-US citizen living in the US, they challenge the order. No warrant is needed in the US legal system or th…

That's the problem. They were bulk collecting all data going in/out of data centers, not specific named accounts. No way for a company to say "Hey, that account is an American citizen" when they are collecting all data indiscriminately.

> The leaked information came after the revelation that the FISA Court had been ordering a subsidiary of telecommunications company Verizon Communications to turn over logs tracking all of its customers' telephone calls to the NSA.

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

#156

Post by boomboomsubban » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 5:48 PM UTC

kodah wrote: post #137

The article only mentions her as a picture (on purpose, I'm sure), but I'd like to take a second to address this: Chelsea Manning is a very bad example of a whistleblower. First, she didn't reveal anything new . All the information that was produced was previously known. Second, she was releasing documents because she was angry that she was deployed. Third, she didn't even attempt to use the whistle blowing process i…

>First, she didn't reveal anything new. All the information that was produced was previously known

Just as a start, the Iraq War logs detailed fifteen thousand previously unknown civilian deaths.

While you can argue we knew our military was doing terrible stuff, without her leaks it wouldn't have been clear what terrible stuff they were doing.

>Second, she was releasing documents because she was angry that she was deployed

Source? While I'm not 100% clear what her motivations were, I've never heard that claim.

As for the third, it was clear what she released was being hidden. I can't imagine what the proper channel would be for something like the "collateral murder" video. "Hey you know that time you killed journalists and lied about it? Well there's evidence you lied about it."

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

#157

Post by zirgs » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 5:49 PM UTC

penneallagricia wrote: post #138

ako wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there was no response because it was expected. Probably all countries spy on all other countries. Especially during the Trump era, it wasn’t clear that USA was still an ally, so I hope other countries prepared for that by increasing their intelligence on the USA, just to avoid inconvenient surprises.

This has nothing to do with Trump per se, it's really a bipartisan issue, as the new pentagon leaks just confirmed. I also doubt European countries have the capacity to intercept private calls between top level USA govt officials.

What makes you think that they don't?

They surely would keep that capability secret.

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

#158

Post by penguin_booze » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 5:49 PM UTC

Whistle blowing policies are not worth the paper on which it's written. Equally worth are HR grievance policies (of all kinds). The sure outcome of invoking either is that (1) you'll lose your job (2) you'll never find a job again.

One difference with blowing the whistle, though, is that it'll lead to your death: you'll be killed if you're lucky. If not, you'll lead a painful life of professional and social ostracization, which will eventually lead to suicide. So, choose your poison.

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

#159

Post by drewcoo » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 5:50 PM UTC

realjohng wrote: post #28

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.

Agreed. He worked with journalists to try the make the leak safe. Let’s focus on impact- Now everyone is at least aware that digital activities are under surveillance including phone call metadata. We have made that trade off for some security. Thank you Snowden.

> Now everyone is at least aware that digital activities are under surveillance including phone call metadata. We have made that trade off for some security. Thank you Snowden.

We've traded away privacy, but whether that increases security remains to be seen.

It certainly increases the money we spend on alleged security. And "creates jobs" or whatever other euphemism we have for pork barrel decision-making today.

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

#160

Post by jhauris » Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 5:53 PM UTC

nmqsxc wrote: post #37

andrewmutz wrote: post #22

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.

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…

> frivolously marked "top secret" in order to increase the perceived importance of bureaucrats.

This is a real problem, but I suspect the reason is more laziness than increasing power. That's no score card on number of classified documents one has access to.

Rather, it is time consuming and risky to determine classification level. No one is going to get in trouble for mistakenly over classifying something, but theoretically risks jail and fines for under classifying a document, not to mention the real harm that could arise from such an error.