Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely

Post by zirgs » Mon, May 01, 2023, 8:20 AM UTC

amrocha wrote: post #193

low_tech_love wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Let me guess, you're not from South America or Africa or the middle east or southeast Asia? The US government is the most destructive force in history

Post by goodpoint » Mon, May 01, 2023, 9:40 AM UTC

penneallagricia wrote: post #177

killjoywashere wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, countries know they spy on each other. Sometimes they even use those processes to move information, just a different version of Nixon’s “For god’s sake, would someone leak this already?”

Ok, then why punish whistleblowers so harshly? Countries should consider it a useful public service.

Post by goodpoint » Mon, May 01, 2023, 9:48 AM UTC

jhauris wrote: post #160

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…

> 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 theore…

Post by bombolo » Mon, May 01, 2023, 9:51 AM UTC

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #418

bombolo wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I'm not in USA, I'm in sweden. For me, USA is the more imminent danger, so I don't understand why people aren't equally appalled.

> so I don't understand why people aren't equally appalled the answer here is the difference between "me" and "people"

Post by HeckFeck » Mon, May 01, 2023, 10:33 AM UTC

phailhaus wrote: post #214

HeckFeck wrote: post #126

Earlier 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.

I am not a fan of the idea that "oh, the right people are mad, therefore it must have been a Good thing to do!" The same feathers would have been ruffled if Snowden had leaked our nuclear codes. The point is that he exposed wrongdoing, and the public agreed . There are plenty of people who are punished by the state that the majority does not believe are "speaking an essential truth". For example: domestic terrorists.