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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

#191

Post by agumonkey »

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…

Supporting whistleblower is very expensive too. Since big structures have means beyond any small group.. every attempt is paid in full by the source.

We tried once on a subreddit, but even after 2 rounds of donation, this poor guy's life was burned to the ground 90%. (joblesness, lawyer fees, potential lawsuits, social anger from people supporting big corps, wife leaving him, no roof at time.. brutal)

If they are to be helped, it has to be done with fine strategies and not a full frontal fight.

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

#192

Post by pastacacioepepe »

nullityrofl wrote: post #190
penneallagricia wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

These are all examples of EU countries doing domestic, not foreign espionage (which is also despicable, by the way).

You can search all you want but there is no evidence or proof whatsoever of EU countries spying USA top government officials.

The question here is how can you call yourself an ally in good faith when you spy on your allies?

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

#193

Post by amrocha »

low_tech_love wrote: post #152
penneallagricia wrote: post #119

Earlier 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…

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

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

#194

Post by stale2002 »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #36
colordrops wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He had to take a quick dump of whatever he could and filter through it later. It's not like he could leisurely spend weeks vetting the docs.

The program he was most interested in leaking (PRISM) wasn't illegal at all. He had plenty of time to figure that out, but he didn't. In order to leak this perfectly legal program, he tried to get asylum in Hong Kong by leaking Chinese systems the NSA had compromised.

The fact that PRISM was legal is exactly the problem, and why leaking it was needed.

It wasn't illegal, therefore going through the proper channels wouldn't have exposed it.

It is only by going through alternative/leaking means that the program could have gotten exposed to the public.

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

#195

Post by nullityrofl »

pastacacioepepe wrote: post #188
nullityrofl wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

You mean like Europe's use of Pegasus?

https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/europe-spyware-scandal-...

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

#196

Post by kodah »

ok_dad wrote: post #175
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…

> whistle blowing process in the military I was also in the military, and can tell you if she had complained no one would have cared and probably would have just gotten her into more trouble. Whistleblowing to the military chain of command is just for stuff like if your CO is stealing money or your LT is coercing a sailor into a sexual relationship, not for stuff that makes the military look bad. The stuff Manning re…

That's not really true, when I was in I was cognizant of a group of Marines that were being charged due to a request mast. They did have to request past their local unit leadership, which the process allowed for.

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

#197

Post by etiam »

With regard to the whistle, Ed Snowden described in his memoirs an old naval system of communication with whistles, and in particular how they could be used to signal that there were things wrong with the ship which put it in danger and warranted it promptly being taken to port for rectification.

I don't really have any independent information as to whether that or this present post's reference to Victorian policemen giving chase is more true for the origins of the whistleblower expression, but Snowden's certainly seems more apt for the act.

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

#198

Post by euroderf »

Aren't weaknesses in current whistleblower laws pretty well understood ? By the bureaucrats that exploit them, and by the journos that report on them ?

So have rewrites been proposed in Congress ? Or by any of Biden's people ?

Or are they ALL in on the whistleblower "protection" scam ?

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

#199

Post by breck »

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…

> it is time consuming and risky to determine classification level

This!

I once had the opportunity to work on a project with DoD folks to help them write software to speed up the declassification process.

I was astonished by the current manual process. Imagine a decision tree 50 pages long that you have to apply by hand to each sentence of a document to determine what can be unclassified or not.

These were such nice people and overwhelmed by the work and genuinely trying to make it better so more information could be declassified, faster.

I realized it was a hopeless task. The only real solution is to move toward a world where next to nothing needs to be classified. To do more in the open. That needs to be the vision. Laws need to be adjusted so that these crazy complicated rubrics don't need to be created at all.

[The end of the story is I opted not to join that project. LLMs provide at least some hope that they can make it somewhat better, lacking the changes at the legal and organizational level that I mentioned]

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