John Raines, 84, Who Evaded Capture in an FBI Break-In, Dies

Your question comes down to a nuanced "how to Snowden & Greenwald feel about WikiLeaks, given how the latter has changed so much," which is not criticising anyone, and valid since their opinions on the matter probably would give insight into what is really going at the moment.

Yet you have been downvoted for asking this. What's more confusing: you don't seem to actually criticise or praise anyone. You might appear to criticise Wikileaks, but even then "seem to be" should make it clear that this your impression, and that you are open for changing your view if you get more information.

People really have strong feelings about this topic.

> There was very little in their revelations that was new and things dramatically worse were reported previously without gigantic data dumps of completely unfiltered and unrelated data. None of these things set the internet ablaze, despite being far more serious.

Even when accepting the premise that Snowden and Manning are mostly heroes to "people who don't read the news," that begs the question why they don't read the news. If the answer is (implicit) assumption that they are just ignorant, this reveals more about our own biases and ignorance.

First of all: it was not just "the internet that was set ablaze". Even if there were reports on these and other larger issues before, the amount of attention the media gave to the things (re-)revealed in the leaks is far larger.

There are many stories that journalists or papers don't dare to break, because of the risk to their reputation if the claims get disputed. There is a reason the panama and paradise papers take so long to unveil. Now the data was out there anyway, so they could safely comment on what was in it. There was no media doing information gatekeeping, and the question of whether the media was holding things back was also verifiable.

Which leads to my next point: the fact that it was unfiltered (and as a side-effect, often unrelated) was undoubtedly part of why it grabbed the attention of the public. It was seen as the untampered "truth", which made it more believable in the eye of the public. Another comment mentions that Snowden released "gigabytes classified documents the vast majority of which had nothing to do with anything questionable", which may be true, but we would not have known this otherwise. And again: this matters to the public perception.

Sure, this could be seen as a disservice to good investigative journalism in a way, except for the aforementioned gatekeeping problem being bypassed.

The full transparency aspect of these leaks makes the way it was perceived and handled fundamentally different. Whether you agree with the results is a different question, but to ignore all of that is doing the discussion a disservice.

I'm not sure I follow this. Ignorant people are the fault of... ignorant people? We're not talking about something on the 17th page reported between lines here. These were massive , widely covered stories in their own right. NSA was engaged in post-9/11 wiretapping (vs metadata collection) - this was found illegal by courts, nearly led to a mass resignation of the leadership of the DoJ. Abu Ghraib, black extradition sites, torture, the very incident 'collateral murder' describes: all covered extensively before that one video. You literally have to have not read the news to have been unaware of these things.

In light of the responses, I re-considered whether it was best to keep such information here, but you've simply made things more difficult for me with a false representation of a removed post, that I cannot remove and to which I do not wish to respond.

It was my mistake for deciding to share what was posted here, but it would have been common courtesy to let it go (and not revive the comment in interpretive form), since it was removed by me. You could have contacted me privately to discuss further, as a courtesy to me.