
Bradley Manning Takes "Full Responsibility" for Giving WikiLeaks Government Data - cyphersanctus
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/02/bradley-manning/
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bdcravens
I can't deny that he violated the trust placed in him by the military. That's
a scary game, and one that I can't honestly take a position in, as I've never
served.

However, I feel that service is more than to your branch, commander, or unit.
What is a soldier? Someone willing to sacrifice themselves for a greater, to
defend those who can't defend themselves, to bring honor to their service. A
US soldier serves the people first, the government second. Manning realized
the risk he was placing his life in, and like a true soldier, he didn't let
that knowledge deter him. In taking responsibility, he's holding his head
high, not cowering behind attorneys and HTTP proxies.

I can't say if he's right or wrong, but I can say that he showed courage
befitting his title.

~~~
slurgfest
Getting disgruntled and indiscriminately dumping whatever you find on
sensitive internal networks, in violation of the military law you agreed to be
governed by when you VOLUNTEERED for the US military, is not an honorable
self-sacrifice.

If we believe that, then we should believe that any employee of any startup
has an honorable sacrificial duty to leak that startup's code along with a
dump of its databases.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
So if a volunteer army is committing mass atrocities in the name of protecting
state secrets, nobody should blow the whistle because they volunteered for the
position before they knew what they were going to be doing?

I'm just wondering where the line is drawn here.

~~~
MysticFear
Someone mistaking video journalists when they are peaking around a corner with
a video camera as enemy combatants that recently shot at a convoy, is not
"mass atrocities". Lets draw that line.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
I am making no implications or analogies; I am simply asking a hypothetical
question in response to the parent post. Why does volunteering to follow some
code make it morally wrong to blow the whistle?

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austingunter
Full responsibility. Let's break that down.

Full responsibility, on the surface, means that Manning is taking full
responsibility under the law, and is not shying away from the legal
consequences of his actions. He knows that according to the laws and the power
structure, he's accountable for his actions which threaten said laws and power
structure. Those self-interested parties will react in the appropriate way to
defend the status quo.

Full responsibility to history means something else entirely.

Full responsibility to history means that Manning doesn't shy away from the
responsibility he has in challenging a corrupt power structure, and fighting
for the rule of law. He's accepting responsibility for standing up for truth,
in spite of the legal consequences. He's accepting full responsibility for
being part of something bigger than himself.

 _Salutes_

~~~
dmm
> the responsibility he has in challenging a corrupt power structure

What's the corrupt power structure and how did he challenge it?

~~~
Karunamon
... you can't be serious. What exact part of that sentence are you taking
issue with? The corrupt-ness of the US military and/or government, or the fact
that releasing this information was a challenging act?

~~~
dmm
Bradley Manning is probably going to spend the rest of his life in prison.
He's only 25! Holy shit that's a long time.

He intentionally and indiscriminately released thousands of classified
documents in direct violation of his duties.

What specific instances of corruption did he uncover that justify what he did?

Look, he was clearly unhappy. From what I've read it sounds like he was
lonely, confused, and unstable. But he was given significant responsibilities
and he violated that trust in a _very_ serious and criminal way.

If he was unhappy there are many, many other things he could have done than
release those files.

What I see is this thread is just a bunch of platitudes. Yeah! he stuck it to
the man! But what did he actually achieve? All I see is a fucked up young man
making a _huge_ mistake.

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smogzer
Manning was just a kid, playing games, never thought he was doing something
that these skeletors of society would pursue him in the future for.

And again, something that had no consequences gets a kid to suffer the rest of
his life, just to keep military and courts and other "serious people" all of
which that could also be seen as criminals of bigger crimes such as inflicting
pain for a living (military instead of farmers and abundance, lawyers and
judges instead of friendship and disputes in games and drinks). And these
military go to war with the mote to spread freedom and democracy, what for ?
to arrest kids for life ?

Skeletors of the world... grow up, relax, have a beer and life for the swords
to plow shares or tanks to tractors, or drones to aerial seed planters!

------
dromidas
Today a criminal... in 100 years a hero.

~~~
gnosis
He's already a hero to many.

~~~
sigzero
A hero to the stupid maybe. He is scum and a traitor.

~~~
DigitalSea
Yeah, you're right. How dare a guy risk his own life for the sake of doing
what's right and telling us about the injustices of the United Stated
Government we otherwise would have never been told or heard about. How dare
someone like Bradley Manning stand up for the people, how dare he stand up for
the truth... If the Government are killing innocent people and leading the
public astray unless they tell us, we don't have the right to know the truth,
right? This guy is only looking at spending the rest of his life in prison for
the sake of letting people know what was happening, no big deal.

I'll be back later, just going to turn on my TV and watch some Fox News. You
like that channel too? So informative and they always tell us the truth, who
needs Wikileaks when we have unbiased televised news? Maybe we can watch it
together sometime, eat some genetically modified corn, polish our military
grade automatic guns and sip on fluorinated water, it'll be great.

~~~
MysticFear
News alert to the uninformed about military conflict. Innocent people die when
you go to war.

Bradley Manning just leaked one instance of human error that caused innocent
people to die. Now he will spend much of his life in prison.

No idea why people call this guy a hero. If you read any history of any war,
innocent people die because of human error.

~~~
nym
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant" --U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis
Brandeis

Would we really go to war if we knew the true extent of human suffering?
Maybe, but visibility to such suffering at least allows people to feel
sympathy, instead of simply being ignorant to suffering.

~~~
MysticFear
So we should have updated detailed progress on our investigation of Osama Bin
Laden and other criminals? Upload our latest nuclear technology as how-to
videos on youtube?

"Sunlight is the best disinfectant" --U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis
Brandeis

Look a Supreme Court justice agrees with that because I put an out of context
quote from him.

------
mpyne
I am so, so, _so_ disappointed that the narrative of the facts has been warped
into something that isn't true. I expected it on Reddit, but not so much here.

Given that I actually serve, let me explain why: He did the INFOSEC equivalent
of dropping a nuclear bomb.

Whistleblowing is going, "Hey, I have evidence of War Crime FOO, I should leak
this to somebody and blow the whistle". Not, "Oh, look at all this data I have
access to, let's just FTP this shiat up to the latest foreign national to hit
the news".

In the DoD whistle-blowing is actually a thing, believe it or not. For
instance U.S. soldiers committed a horrible atrocity in Iraq involving murder,
rape, and arson [1]. The world was alerted to this by an Army soldier (of all
things) , Pfc. Justin Watt, who revealed it to a mental health practitioner,
who got U.S. Army investigators involved. Notably, Pfc. Watt suspected his
chain-of-command would not believe him or would try to cover it up, and yet he
still managed to alert investigators without revealing an entire CD-R's worth
of classified material.

Pfc. Manning did none of this. He didn't alert U.S. Army CID, the U.S. Army
Inspector General (IG), the DoD IG, an American friend back home, a fellow
soldier, or even the American media (as the Pentagon papers had been
revealed). _Edit_ : Turns out that Pfc. Manning almost managed to inform the
media, but ran out of patience (or coffee, or something).

But all of this is assuming that Manning had details of a set of war crimes (1
or many). Even _this_ ends up being more favorable to Manning than reality
though. Manning didn't leak "war crimes", he leaked _whatever info he could
download_ , without verifying that it was all actually evidence deserving of
whistle-blowing. Much of those "evidence of war crimes" were instead the most
mundane types of reports (e.g. diplomatic cables describing how Putin and
Berlusconi were buddy-buddy, or patrol reports describing how soldiers
patrolled a certain area to verify the safety of an Afghan informant). However
nice it might be to peek into diplomatic traffic from the outside, it was
still classified, it was not evidence of war crimes, and Manning never read it
all anyways before he leaked it to a foreign national over an unsecure
network.

"But what about all the good stuff he was trying to do?", you might ask. Turns
out he even had an ulterior motive to be mad at the Army, he had recently been
demoted from Specialist for physically assaulting a fellow soldier. I'll bet
Pfc. Manning doesn't even know how much of his exfiltration job was to get
back at the Army, and how much was to "blow the whistle". And either way, you
don't do horrible things just because it turns out well for a few people
(unless you're a Wall St. banker, I suppose).

The saddest part is that prior to 9/11 Manning wouldn't have been able to
dream of having access to the information he had access to.

9/11 exposed deep flaws in the U.S. government's ability to handle
intelligence agencies amongst the various agencies. It was better for FBI to
hoards its intel, CIA to do the same, and etc. all down the line. After 9/11
it was finally realized that this wouldn't work when trying to defend from the
kind of terrorism which kills thousands of people at a shot, and so
interagency cooperation became the watchword.

The thinking went, if we can trust a soldier enough to die for his country,
have his own weapon, and have him analyze the workings of an Islamist group in
Iraq, then surely we can trust him if we give him all the intel he needs to do
his job, right? Right? I mean really, who's the bigger threat here, Al Qaeda
or Pvt. Garcia?

But it only takes one disgruntled soldier to prove otherwise.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmudiyah_killings>

~~~
scoofy
I'm sympathetic with what your saying, but the types of things we learned
about our military via these leaks were unbelievable. That our military is
perfectly okay with opening fire on reporters and children should not be
classified. I, for one, learned that my military's definition of 'atrocity'
vastly differs from mine. Was it the right way of doing things? Probably not,
but it doesn't seem like there is a way of showing these types of things to
the public when most media outlet won't even show the coffins of the soldiers
we've lost.

~~~
mpyne
Please keep in mind that there is an ocean-sized gulf between "Manning did in
fact leak classified material that he should not have" and "everything the
U.S. military and government have ever done is A-OK".

This is also a common refrain among some of Manning's supporters, but I try to
treat people and arguments on their own merits. The enemy of my enemy is not
necessarily my friend.

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samstave
How many waterboardings did that take?

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jarin
Looks like they finally broke him.

~~~
malbs
He's spent a good % of his life in prison, he's facing spending the rest in
prison. Admirable that he is attempting to try and take the heat off of
WikiLeaks/Assange, even after the incarceration he has already suffered (and
likely to suffer into the future).

If only more people were like him. Hell, how many people do you hear about,
who, when charged with a crime put their hand up and say "Yes, I did it". Not
many, even for simple things like traffic violations.

~~~
slurgfest
Pleas are actually very common. If he refused, then there would be people
posting on how admirable it was that he stuck to his guns.

