Main Paineframe posted:

You're confusing two different types of whistleblowing here, and the distinction is really, really important. There are whistleblowers who circumvent the normal chain of command and report suspected misconduct to a higher authority within the government, and there are whistleblowers who believe that something the government is doing is morally wrong and leak it openly to the public. The Whistleblower Protection Act, the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, PPD-19, and other whistleblower protection laws only protect the first kind of whistleblowing - they're meant to protect whistleblowers from being retaliated against by their superiors for reporting problems and misconduct to their supervisors' bosses. There isn't any US law, as far as I'm aware, that protects the second type of whistleblowing - as far as the US government is concerned, going public with classified information is always unacceptable. And honestly, that makes a lot of sense from the government's perspective. If secrecy laws stop applying as soon as someone who looks at the material feels it shouldn't be secret, then secrecy laws might as well not exist. Nobodies get cracked down on harder because there are over four million people with security clearances, which means it's a lot harder to keep watch on the nobodies than the top rankers, so the government makes examples of them because it knows there's no way it can handle a wave of copycat crimes.

Now, I realize there are people who think that government secrecy shouldn't exist at all, but that's an entirely separate discussion.

NoEyedSquareGuy posted:

How so?

Guy Goodbody posted:

He leaked a bunch of stuff and fled to Russia to hide behind Putin's skirts.

evilweasel posted:

to be fair his first choice of a freedom-loving paradise to call his new home was china

china was less interested in that nonsense

Agnosticnixie posted:

He ran to Russia because he was literally stranded there when his passport was blocked. Assange has been tut-tuting him for being critical of Russia.

quote:

While in Hong Kong Snowden told the Post that "the United States government has committed a tremendous number of crimes against Hong Kong [and] the PRC as well," going on to identify Chinese Internet Protocol addresses that the NSA monitored and stating that the NSA collected text-message data for Hong Kong residents. Glenn Greenwald explained the leak as reflecting "a need to ingratiate himself to the people of Hong Kong and China."

Chomskyan posted:

The NSA's programs were actually illegal under US law, and whistleblowers who had tried to work within the govt before Snowden had their lives destroyed, forcing his hand. These facts are convienently ignored by his opponents.

Yardbomb posted:

Hakimashou has well enough defended/cheerled ethnic cleansing in threads before, as if it's not already obvious enough, they're a weird creep obsessed with killing people with government power.

It's unsurprising to see them pop up lusting for whistleblower death.

evilweasel posted:

and if he'd only revealed those programs, perhaps you'd have a point

botany posted:

he didn't reveal anything actually, he passed the info he had over to respectable journalistic outfits who then independently and in some cases against his judgment decided what to publish in what form.

quote:

While in Hong Kong Snowden told the Post that "the United States government has committed a tremendous number of crimes against Hong Kong [and] the PRC as well," going on to identify Chinese Internet Protocol addresses that the NSA monitored and stating that the NSA collected text-message data for Hong Kong residents. Glenn Greenwald explained the leak as reflecting "a need to ingratiate himself to the people of Hong Kong and China."

evilweasel posted:

evilweasel posted:

and if he'd only revealed those programs, perhaps you'd have a point

Chomskyan posted:

If the US was interested in holding anyone accountable for the crimes detailed in the leaks, rather than a singleminded push to punish the whistleblower, maybe you'd have a point.

evilweasel posted:

That said he is certainly better than Assange, but he made no effort to separate out and leak NSA activities that might violate US law and ones that didn't. I mean, I'm sure other countries were interested in knowing how they were spied on by the United States, but that's not whistle-blowing, that's deciding you don't believe in spying on other countries which is absolutely the job of the NSA.

evilweasel posted:

nope, my point is still valid either way, while yours relies on ignoring the rest of that

Forgall posted:

Oh good, we found the maker of this macro

evilweasel posted:

nope, my point is still valid either way, while yours relies on ignoring the rest of that

Chomskyan posted:

Nah, I'm pretty sure your argument for the rule of law falls apart once we recognize you're only interested prosecuting the weak, not the powerful.

Chomskyan posted:

e: Furthermore, from a broader moral perspective anything that it's wrong to do to a US citizen it's wrong to do to a Chinese citizen. Human rights don't depend on Nationality and Nationalism is a cancer on humanity hth

evilweasel posted:

drawing a distinction between external espionage and internal survellence is a completely normal thing normal people do because one of them empowers a government to act in a more totalitarian way against their citizens and another is states enhancing their security against external threats

Agnosticnixie posted:

Both tend to follow each other rather closely, and paranoia abroad becomes paranoia at home very easily.

Also thank you for establishing your biases, but there is in fact not a lot of rational basis for this divide you're making.

evilweasel posted:

that's a dumb argument by a dumb person

who cares what my interests are, regardless of if you know them or not, they don't change what's right or not it just lets you try to weasel out of being wrong

Chomskyan posted:

Who gets prosecuted and who doesn't matters because a system that applies one set of rules to the powerful and another set to those who oppose them doesn't actually have a "rule of law".

I don't personally care if the NSA surveillance program was legal under US law or not because I look at the matter from a moral, not a legal perspective. I do however find it ironic that people like you will call for Snowden's prosecution but show no interest in holding anyone involved in crimes exposed accountable. It's pretty clear hypocrisy from my perspective

spaceships posted:

it's good that chelsea's sentence has been commuted.

it's even better that there's an entire group of whiny piss babies who want her to die and they simply just can't understand why she has not been brutally and ruthlessly murdered

Archonex posted:

The best counter to them is "because we're not Russia".

Even more so after this election.

evilweasel posted:

man the American public must really have been shocked when Snowden revealed the NSA exists then

Chomskyan posted:

The NSA's programs were actually illegal under US law, and whistleblowers who had tried to work within the govt before Snowden had their lives destroyed, forcing his hand. These facts are convienently ignored by his opponents.

Main Paineframe posted:

Whistleblower protection laws gave him the ability to report any illegal activities to high levels of command, as well as members of Congress. If you think that high-level executive branch officials and all of Congress lack the ability to tell right from wrong or can't be trusted to uphold the law, then fine, but don't expect that massive criminal conspiracy you think is running the entire government to give you clemency after you publicly defy them.