Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Whistleblowers are the conscience of society, yet suffer gravely

covertactionmagazine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 510 posts

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

#141

Post by yarg »

jutrewag wrote: post #114
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.

[flagged]

He didn't defect, he got stuck there.

> Observing that his U.S. passport had been cancelled, Russian authorities restricted him to the airport terminal. On August 1, after 39 days in the transit section, Snowden left the airport. He was granted temporary asylum in Russia for one year.

What would you do? Live in transit?

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

#143

Post by lionkor »

HSNomad wrote: post #69

There is a saying goes like this, "85% of people on earth are followers, 10% are leaders or creators, or manipulators and 5% are observers. The followers need something to follow or believe so the creators capitalize on that and take advantage of their desire to be lead. The observers see everything that's going on and can ruin everything for the 10% but, the 85% label the 5% crazy or plan to get rid of them because…

800 million leaders in the world, and 400 million whisleblowers?

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

#144

Post by kelipso »

mandmandam wrote: post #123
somenameforme wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

It really shows how much effect the media and the social and political environment it creates influence the thoughts and feelings of people, however highly educated and intelligent they are. If you think you are not influenced by media and propaganda, consider yourself very wrong, the best propaganda is when you don't even consider it propaganda, and the US probably has the most effective propaganda machine in the entire world.

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

#145

Post by drewcoo »

esrauch wrote: post #29
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.

The point of sharing it only with trusted established journalists was that their qualified to know what needs redacting. Surely even the documents that primarily concern specifically unconstitutional domestic spying would still have stuff in them that is material to national security and not unconstitutional.

> he point of sharing it only with trusted established journalists was that their qualified to know what needs redacting

Really? I assumed it had more to do with Constitutional protections for journalists, so whatever they did publish would stay published.

IIRC, the US had already called Assange's journo creds into question by then, so Snowden sought out established outlets.

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

#146

Post by xtian »

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]

The government is not a person so your rhetorical device is as nonsensical and irrelevant as your unsubstantiated character assassination. Moreover, a criminal organization can make no claims to ‘fairness’. Criminal governments are no different.

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

#147

Post by Danjoe4 »

andrewmutz wrote: post #22
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 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.

Exposing illegal government surveillance programs is far more important than "national security". His leak exposed US foreign operations; who cares? Maybe don't do stuff that is so illegal and immoral that your own citizens feel compelled to risk everything to expose it.

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

#148

Post by drewcoo »

andrewmutz wrote: post #86
dmbche wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm about 3/4 through the page and it's all related to spying to me.. are you specifically referring to something?

Spying is what the NSA is supposed to do Domestic spying is the controversial/illegal activity he was blowing the whistle on. Dumping info on legal NSA activities (like foreign surveillance), while fascinating to read, is not whistleblowing.

> the controversial/illegal activity

I wasn't aware that it was only one controversial activity.

And I wasn't aware that one could only blow the whistle on illegal activity.

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

#149

Post by kelipso »

gghhzzgghhzz wrote: post #45
h2odragon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The treatment of Assange defies belief, and the hypocrisy is off the scale. The defense from many people who would nominally be appalled by this, seems to rest on the poor character of Assange, so he gets written off. The poor character point may or may not be correct, but is completely irrelevant, and if it relates to civil or criminal offences then it has never been allowed to be tested.

Also it's just insanely easy to malign the character of someone with a few well placed news articles and tweets.

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

#150

Post by fallingknife »

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]

And you actually believe those stories? They also tried to claim that Assange was a rapist.
Post reply on HN