Some whistleblowers are just disgruntled and are not acting out of a sense of moral obligation but are rather whistleblowing as a form of vengeance
Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely
181–190 of 510 posts
Re: Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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The two are not mutually exclusive or opposites on a spectrum. You can have a society which is neither moral nor free. It is possible to have a society which is both more moral and more free than the one we have.
Re: Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely
#183"Truth is treason in the empire of lies." - George Orwell
Perfectly said, it encapsulates America to a tee.
Re: Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely
#184I continue to maintain that Snowden was one of the greatest American patriots in decades. There are many leakers that deliberately act with the intention to harm the state; That wasn't Snowden - he threw away his life to stage an intervention. Why has he been left to rot in a dictatorship? I'd say sign a pardon for the man, but unless he can get out of Russia there's a damned good chance that things would only get wo…
They would need a secret pardon agreement so he leaves at the same time he’s pardoned
Re: Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely
#185Earlier 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…
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>I hear stories of him being a poor performer about to be fired from his job at the time, hence the urgency to mass exfiltrate. If true that makes this a revenge play, not an act of heroism.
Nice comment under an article that specifically calls out state gaslighting (false claims that portray the whistleblower as a bad/immature/insane person, or discredit them in another way).
Re: Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
He probably could have attempted to only leak the domestic surveillance, or at least screen out as much of the foreign intelligence methods as much as possible. Half of it was whistleblowing (domestic surveillance) but half of it was pseudo-treasonous (foreign surveillance).
It gets a bit complicated with the whole 5-eyes mutual back scratching thing though.
> I don't understand why people who make this argument think it's OK for the US government to spy on the private communications of all Chinese citizens but not for it to spy on those of American citizens. Is it OK for China to spy on American citizen's private communications, then?
Because USA is good, so if they are the ones doing the spying, it's just for pretty legit reasons, while chinese people don't speak english so they clearly are up to no good /s
Re: Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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And you actually believe those stories? They also tried to claim that Assange was a rapist.
At face value, no-- my source is government personnel. But it's possible there's more to the story than we've heard from the "victim."
For the same reason, I don't believe Assange was a rapist.
Re: Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> What I don't understand is the complete lack of response from countries like Italy and Germany once they found out being spied by an ally. Because they're all doing it too. Any attempts at retaliation what have been hypocritical and met with callouts. EDIT: Since this is news to some people who seem to think that the entirety of Europe is on a moral high horse, here's some references. There's little morality in int…
There was in fact a small reaction[0][1] and it's naive to think that the espionage systems and efforts USA and European countries have are in any way comparable.
> Because they're all doing it too. Any attempts at retaliation what have been hypocritical and met with callouts.
Source? I can tell you already there is none. We have plenty of evidence that the USA is spying Europe and other allies, none of the opposite.
.0: https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/osw-commentary/2014-01-...
.1: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/09/germany-arrest...
Re: Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely
#189Karl Jung wrote about the social purpose of scapegoats years ago. Feels apropos.
Re: Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely
#190Earlier 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.
It's already well known that many EU nations have capabilities like this.
The French: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/04/france-electro... The Germans: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-arrests-foreign...
Lets not forget that most of the EU is wrapped up in the Pegasus spy scandal: https://www.dw.com/en/eu-watergate-the-pegasus-spyware-scand...
Playing holier than thou with intelligence services is a losing game. There is no holy intelligence service and there is no nation without an intelligence function.