Okay, which leaks mentioned in the article are “brave and useful?” Which people deserved to be locked up?
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What’s your position on those whose crimes were exposed by the leaks? Should they go in front of a judge and eventually to jail? Should they get more or less of a sentence than the whistleblowers?
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But building a “resort” in a cold, lonely, isolated place would be so… Soviet.
We need to be different from them somehow.
I know, let’s build our “resort” on a well-populated, subtropical island where the locals are (allegedly) not too idealistically opposed to what will actually be going on there.
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Consider yourself lucky. I tried to knock up a Snark…
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almost completely worthless in a conversation as to whether or not whistle blowers should have more protections
see, that’s where you keep screwing up: you’re trying to make this into a conversation about something it isn’t.
Except the only class you’ve seen in your country recently are the first.
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That is up to wiser folks than myself. That isn’t my point. My point is that Cory’s article implies that leaking information is, in itself, honorable, and that anyone serving jail time for leaking information is being wronged. I think that’s a foolish assumption.
TIFTFY
I wanted to come back to this, in a more specific way than I did earlier.
One of your premises seems to be [quote]Leaking classified materials is a crime, should always be treated as such, and should always be punished.[/quote] If I’ve put words in your mouth, I’m sure you’ll tell me about it, but reading through your posts in this thread, I feel confident in the summary enclosed above.
Whether or not you consider my summary of your premise to be correct, what should we do when the government itself leaks classified information?
Here’s a little snippet, so you don’t have to go read the whole article [quote]It doesn’t really matter which modern presidential administration you decide to scrutinize for this behavior, as all of them are guilty. For instance, President George W. Bush’s administration declassified or leaked whole barrels of intelligence, raw and otherwise, to convince the public and Congress making war on Iraq was a good idea. Bush himself ordered the release of classified prewar intelligence about Iraq through Vice President Dick Cheney and Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to New York Times reporter Judith Miller in July 2003. Sometimes the index finger of government has no idea of what the thumb is up to. In 2007, Vice President Cheney went directly to Bush with his complaint about what he considered to be a damaging national security leak in a column by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius. “Whoever is leaking information like this to the press is doing a real disservice, Mr. President,” Cheney said. Later, Bush’s national security adviser paid a visit to Cheney to explain that Bush, um, had authorized him to make the leak to Ignatius.[/quote]
You might choose to respond by saying that when the government chooses to leak classified material, that it automatically makes the material unclassifed.
But how then are we to explain the curious response to a recent FOIA request?
http://thehill.com/policy/technology/220254-nsa-list-of-authorized-leaks-is-classified
This is the one where the NSA said that the list of authorized disclosures of classified materials is itself classified. I’ll let you wrap your head around that one for a second.
The only way this could be more meta, would be for someone to leak the list of authorized leaks.
Pray, what should be done with that hypothetical meta leaker?
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Really? You get that implication from Cory’s article?
What I get is pretty straightforward:
Despite campaigning partly on a goal of becoming the “most transparent administration” the Obama administration has aggressively prosecuted leakers on a scale that beggars all previous administrations put together.
The only “implication” I get from that is one of hypocrisy.
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Absolutely. I’ve seen dozens of articles from Cory where he’s repeated his favorite saw: that information should be free, and that leaking information is a brave act. I see what you’re saying, but I’m unclear as to why pursuing people who are leaking information is a bad thing. Shouldn’t our government crack down on people who are trying to leak classified information, as a general rule? This isn’t a ‘transparency’ issue, it’s an issue of tightening national security. Not all information should be free.
Should they? Maybe.
Do they? Absolutely not.
I’ve already addressed that question in my reply to fluffitfluffit above.
EDIT: I kind of buried the lede in the post I linked above. Start reading at the phrase:
I think you’re focusing on a subset, because I have an impression of dozens of articles where he’s a strong advocate for the government keeping its nose out of the citizens’ business.
Taken together, that’s someone advocating for privacy for the individual and transparency for the government, not that “all information should be free.”
“Tightening national security” is a really mushy phrase, and subject to wild abuse when only governments are allowed to keep secrets, and bad actors within government are free to declare anything a matter of “national security” without any sort of oversight or advocate for the public interest.
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There’s no evidence that Snowden took or even had access to 1.7 million documents. The NSA spokescritters kept giving out larger and larger numbers, eventually including that one, but they were also in the process of lying to Congress about the practices that Snowden outed them on. Basically, their claim is that their accountability system, which is intended to keep track of who accessed what classified document, isn’t even vaguely capable of identifying who had access to what, especially if they’re a sysdadmin, without of course admitting that if that’s true it’s an abject failure on their part.
I find this extremely annoying. Back in the 1980s, I worked on operating and designing a variety of computer systems for handling classified information. At the classification levels I had access to, we had to limit who had access and maintain a certain amount of accounting; the higher levels that some other people operated had rules about not being allowed to open the safe or get documents out of it unless there were two cleared people in the room.
RFPs for computer and communications projects generally required that the computers follow the NSA Orange Book security rules, usually at B1 or C2 levels, and sometimes required Red Book compliance even though that was mostly research at the time, and I had to spend a lot of time over a lot of years evaluating systems, indicating how much of that we could meet, and explaining the (very limited) options for meeting those cutting-edge-research security requirements at the same time as meeting the specs for GOSIP OSI networking, POSIX compliance, and often POSIX real-time (for NASA) or Ada (for air-traffic stuff), and sometimes the NSA would “help” us by giving us very precise specs for which X.25 options we had to implement, while still using Commercial Off The Shelf equipment that totally wasn’t allowed to be custom even though nobody implemented that stuff commercially.
And now these idiots are saying “Dude, we’ve got no idea what Snowden might have accessed, so we’re going to prosecute him as if he took all of it!”
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I think you’re reading a lot into it. When people provide classified information to foreign countries for payment, that’s spying. We have laws against that and I don’t think it counts as “leaking.”
The linked article merely points out that more whistle blowers have been prosecuted under Obama (after he promised to protect them) than all other Presidents combined. There are good people who, acting in good faith, have had their lives destroyed by the Obama administration. That’s the point of the article.
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Leaking is usually a crime, but leakers know the risk. What they can hope for, but not expect, is that what they leak is sufficiently compelling, and in the public’s interest to know, that they will be pardoned or otherwise receive leniency. That’s the gamble they take. Do you disagree?
What Manning leaked didn’t meet that standard. You might think it should have, but it obviously didn’t.
Now if the President chooses to leak, or authorizes someone else to leak, nothing can be done - the President is fully authorized to classify/declassify anything he wants. That’s simply a benefit of the office. Yes the power can be used for petty ends, but it’s perfectly legal.
I cede the point. Your interpretation is the correct one, mine is not. I appreciate you explaining it rationally, rather than dismiss me as un-American, a troll, or worse.
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There is an interview somewhere with Obama where he says something like “I need to avoid the temptation to believe my own bullshit” and I think that’s what happened to his presidency.
He seems to have believed, based upon his prior career experiences, that he could enact substantive change by the sheer force of his rhetoric and personal magnetism. Obviously, this turned out to be pure-D wrong.
But that’s the point: many times there really isn’t, is there? Despite all the rhetoric, what we see play out time and time again:
- Government does something illegal
- Someone points it out
- That someone is ignored
- That someone goes public, perhaps hoping the rhetoric of “protecting whistle blowers” is true.
- Government is found to be breaking the law
- Whistleblower gets in trouble, perhaps spending much time in jail
Yes, there are rhetoric and promises, but in reality that’s often all they are.
And one of the real ironies is, for example, if you do read Obama’s campaign promises, he encourages people to point out waste, corruption, and illegality, promising to protect them if they come forward.
Guess those promises were just a honeypot…
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While I agree that some whistleblowers have been unfairly treated (not all, definitely not all), I cannot agree with the notion that Obama encouraged people to point out corruption specifically so that he could arrest and detain whistleblowers. No politician is that sadistic.
The internet is often a terrible way to disagree with people. I prefer to do it over drinks and food!
