
Snowden calls for whistleblower shield after claims by new Pentagon source - randomname2
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/22/snowden-whistleblower-protections-john-crane
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cassieramen
Are there any people not in favor of pardoning Snowden here? It seems like
most of the people I encounter who aren't on his side either don't fully
understand the situation or think the story is so ridiculous some conspiracy
is going on.

Everyone is so gung-ho on getting rid of political insiders, exposing the
wrong doings of the government, and yet we blacklist someone who could be a
bannerman for that cause.

~~~
slg
I will offer the voice of dissent. Snowden is a slightly improved version of
Chelsea Manning and deserves a similar fate as her. Both revealed legitimate
issues that they deserve praise for highlighting. However, both also revealed
information that has little public interest, isn't illegal activity, and can
really only be categorized as releasing privileged material (look to The
Intercept and this weeks SIDtoday releases for the most recent examples of
this). The intentions of both were noble, but you can't simply say the good
outweighed the bad. That isn't how the law currently works or in my opinion
should work. You have to take all of the good and bad into account.

As a nation, we also can't set the precedent that any person with classified
information has the right to release information they morally object without
any legal repercussions. If you are going to ask for whisteblowing protection,
you need to be fairly focused on things that are either illegal or at the very
least objectively amoral. Neither Snowden or Manning did that. They instead
grabbed everything they could get their hands on in the off chance it was
something they were looking for. Isn't that the exact problem we have with
mass surveillance in the first place?

~~~
donatj
I'm going to place the contrarian argument that for there to be a nation of
the people there needs to be total transparency in the governments actions.
Anything less is tyranny.

You cannot possibly make an informed vote when the government is a black box
you cannot see into. The entire inner workings should be public knowledge.
This mountain of secrecy left over from the cold war does not make for a free
society and has no place in a just world.

My argument boils down to the government keeping secrets first place is
inherently amoral.

~~~
slg
>My argument boils down to the government keeping secrets first place is
inherently amoral.

That is an idealistic viewpoint that simply isn't possible in the real world.
Yes, I believe the government should be more transparent about these things,
but they can't be transparent about everything. How do you protect a country
like the United States without any intelligence or military secrets?

~~~
mixmastamyk
You protect it by not picking fights and minding your own business.

~~~
slg
Once again, this is a naive and idealistic viewpoint that doesn't have a place
in real world governing. There is a reason why even countries like Switzerland
have intelligence and military arms. Simply "minding your own business" only
goes so far and isn't a fool-proof protection scheme.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Where did I mention closing military or intelligence? The question at hand is
whether the govt should be more transparent.

~~~
slg
>Where did I mention closing military or intelligence?

Where did I mention closing them? I am just making the connection those are
two aspects of governing that require some level of secrecy. If countries
"minding their own business" need secrecy there, then it isn't a path to the
US abandoning secrecy.

>The question at hand is whether the govt should be more transparent.

If that is your argument, I agree with it. But that wasn't the original
argument. The original argument was complete transparency and "the government
keeping secrets first place is inherently amoral."

~~~
mixmastamyk
> why even countries like Switzerland have intelligence and military arms

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowback_%28intelligence%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowback_%28intelligence%29)

I'm not interested in arguing absolutes, as perhaps the original ancestor was.

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Aelinsaar
It's never going to happen, or at least, not anytime soon. We live in a
country that has its intelligence agencies "Losing" the evidence of their
torturing people for years, and really, that's the least of their crimes.

~~~
mirimir
Pseudonymity is arguably the best whistleblower shield. Drake just outed poor
administrative oversight, and he was ruined financially. Whistleblowers like
Snowden and Manning are lucky to avoid torture and execution.

~~~
awesomerobot
Arguably Manning did face a period of torture.

~~~
Aelinsaar
By any reasonable definition of torture, definitely. Certainly if a foreign
government did what we did to Manning, to an American hostage, we'd call it
torture. The problems with recognizing torture today though, have gotten
harder, not easier. It's fundamentally harder to make people understand
torture that utilizes "soft" methods (as defined by Darius Rejali) such as
electrotorture, solitary confinement, various forms of drowning/suffocation,
drugs, etc... compared to torture that leaves unambiguous physical scars.

~~~
jacquesm
> The problems with recognizing torture today though, have gotten harder, not
> easier.

I don't think it is all that hard.

~~~
csydas
I think the post was referring to it in a legal sense, not a lay person's
sense. I'm making an assumption here, but I'd say by most common definitions,
quite a few common penal actions are likely torture. However, the law, and
specifically the military and government, have very specific idea of what
constitutes torture and what doesn't, and they're very good at spinning public
perception to their side.

Remember the public facing debate in the US whether or not waterboarding was
torture? You had hundreds of pundits and news outlets weighing in on the
matter and making a declaration, and public polls would be split. Of course,
the few pundits that put their money where their mouth is and actually
underwent waterboarding did an immediate 180 in virtually every circumstance.

But it also goes a bit beyond definitions of torture and instead is a problem
of jingoism. One need not look too deeply online to see what some American
citizens feel is the appropriate response to muslims, to black people, to
virtually anyone from the middle east, and so on. When you have a public that,
superficially or not, is okay with thinking in terms of "waste the fucking
[racial epithet]s", it's really easy to bend and flex the definition of
torture in your country, as the US has done so quite a few times.

~~~
mirimir
bad stuff done to people we like = torture

bad stuff done to people we hate <> torture

~~~
Aelinsaar
It's also about bad stuff we can imagine being torture, vs. bad stuff that is
hard to empathize with, unless you have some background in it. The concept of
stress positions only really becomes horrifying if you've ever been forced, or
forced yourself, to try and hold one. By the same token, what is the
subjective experience of being hooded, while someone uses an OTC "stun"
electroshock weapon to jolt your genitals, face, and anus?

Some things are easy to imagine, in the place of another; getting shocked in
the taint is an easy thing to be horrified by. The more pernicious and subtle
effects of sleep deprivation, loss of a sense of time and self control,
isolation, fear, and of course the total loss of self determination and
freedom are hard for a lot of people to grasp.

You deal with people who lack imagination or empathy, or people who imagine
themselves as being far tougher than they are. You have people who think that
anything survivable, that doesn't maim, and doesn't leave someone a gibbering
wreck, can't be torture.

It's always easier to get through to people with scars from a whip, or lost
limbs, than it is with a complicated story of months spent in captivity. If
you're like many torture victims, most of what you'll be able to describe is
the inside of a hood, or the inside of a small, unpleasant cell.

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jasonjei
The thing with IGs (inspector generals) though is that they are also like HR--
they serve to protect the government as an entity rather than the agents, just
like HR serves the company, not the employee.

~~~
diamondlovesyou
Agreed, though, I'd say they act like that because they answer to the higher
ups in the organisations they're apart of, and aren't properly independent.
Thus there is no self-interested incentive to take the rank-and-file's side.
I'm not sure why HR or IGs are ever assigned the task of 'representing' agents
in the first place; it just seems like a conflict of interest.

Also, the plural of inspector general is inspectors general, not inspector
generals.

~~~
jasonjei
I wonder if an independent board could eliminate this conflict of interest. We
have a so-called independent system setup for lots of local policing agencies,
yet they often coverup the misdeeds of the police rather than protecting the
citizenry.

