I donāt think its going to work. The whistle blowers will get smarter and the leaks will be information tsunamis.
Every journalist needs to be issued a computer security expert just to perform their constitutional protected function. What a sad and pathetic country the US is. This government is no different than China, Iran, or Russia except we have Walmarts.
Big fucking downer.
I think itās going to work just fine. People who are aware of government wrongdoing will shut up and keep their heads down. Journalists will report only what they think the government will allow. Torture and the murder of innocent civilians have been protected this week in the strongest way possible.
Strangest way possible? No, simply the most situationally effective. If they had instead tortured and murdered the people who who talked about the torture and murder, theyād have just been proving their atrociousness.
By dressing things in the garb of criminality and law, by putting Manning into the awful oubliette that is our penal system, they create an example of how they are willing to destroy lives, but give it the veneer of legitimacy and rectitude.
Oubliette - I use that term purposefully. An oubliette is a place of forgetting. The word itself is cognate with oblivion and obliterate. And that is precisely what the government has chosen to do to Manning. Locked away, out of sight, slowly to creep out of mind, to be forgotten, to effectively remove from existence without the outcry that spilled blood receives.
What a strange, terrible, ill world we live in. Much work lies ahead to fix it.
What theyāre not ādeterringā is a freakinā revolution.
Theyāre starting to tick us all off enough that weāre finally getting our collective acts together, arenāt they? I know Iāve gone from āwoe is meā to āfuck these guysā over the last three weeks.
They donāt want all those neurons pointing their way.
No no no, I said strongest way. The strangest way would be to give Manning his own reality TV show with free gender-reassignment surgery, and a pet lobster.
Bonus points for oubilette.
Inflated sentences have done a great job reducing drug crimes. How can this not work?
Iām not sure that 35 years is frightening or crippling (obviously I wouldnāt to go to jail at all) A Life sentence, and I would agree, but 35 years with 3 years time served and parole, not so much. And silenced is far from the truth, he can now write a book, option the movie rights, get a gender-reassignment on the governmentās dime, and continue to be a āpolitical prisonerā for EFF without having to be in Guantanamo.
What Iām trying to figure out is why these whistleblowers, Snowden in particular, are just holding on to the information. By not releasing it they are risking death to keep them silenced (although that sound more like a movie scenario than real life). If you are supposedly wanting to tell people the ātruthā about government wrongdoings, just release the whole thing. Saying you have all this damning evidence and holding it back just seems like blackmail, and to what end? Makes the effort somewhat tainted in my opinion. What do they want in exchange? Money? To not go to jail my not releasing the rest?.. They could have done that by not taking it in the first place.
There are plenty of people in our world willing to sacrifice their freedoms and even life to expose wrongdoing, corruption, evil. Look at China and all the hundreds of oppressive countries that good people are rising up against.
Why are we in the Country of āGive me Liberty or give me Deathā cowering from our, honestly, democratic and fair government, playing āwhistle-blowerā, instead of truly standing up for our rights and being a ātraitorā.
Update: I just read the earlier article about Manningās letter to the President requesting a pardon, where he nobly takes his responsibility for the cause of freedom. Salute.
Wait, jail sentences are supposed to be a deterrent? Coulda fooled me.
Most these guys, Snowden included, have an insurance file that contains all the dirtiest bits of information seeded out to the web. If Snowden is offed, instructions on how to open this file will go out, and ALL the secrets, even the dark ones that he was never going to release anyway, get out.
If he releases everything now, then thereās no value in keeping him alive for anyone anymore. Heās in Russia, under Putinās watchful eye. The only currency he has right now are the secrets. The second he spends that currency , heās of no value to Putin and best case scenario, he gets put on a plane to the US. Worst case, he simply vanishes or takes a cup of laced tea. Thatās kinda what happens to Putinās enemies.
No value in keeping him alive? With no secrets held anymore, heās not a threat. Itās not like heās a super-spy or real terrorist that will infiltrate the NSA again stealing more secrets. Thereās no real use killing him, except for retribution, and with all the news organizations on him, thatās highly unlikely.
They just want to catch him and bring him back to face chargesā¦ And this time, since heās not military, itās going to be a real trial with a jury. What a press field day!
The second he stops spilling the beans, he stops BEING news.
You think glenn Greenwald is going to continue penning articles about Snowden if there are no more secrets to leak? No. Heāll vanish off the media radar, and then heāll vanish somewhere else, and Russia will say heās āentered protective hiding under a new name and passport /etcā Nobody will ever see him again because heād be dead, buried at sea or similar.
See the recent BB post where he denies giving information to the Independent, stating specifically that he does not want to release any information that could put somebody in danger (ie leaking the existence of a secret military base in the middle east). That seems like a pretty reasonable reason to not release everything that he has in his possession. Iām not sure if itās one I agree with or not (I think I do, but I can also see reasons to release the information as well), but itās certainly an understandable one.
Man, donāt you hate when you misread something like that? I sure do. Or did you cleverly edit a typo? Either way, kudos, +1 Internet, all that jazz. 
Yes, I edited your post to insert a typo that I could then mock. It drives the moderators crazy.
Thatās like. . internet god mode. Nice.
As of this moment, youāre on double secret probation.
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