I'm not even sure exactly... the Manning case has confused me since it came out.
The biggest question was always why. His supporters claimed it was about war crimes, but it couldn't be that by sheer breadth of unrelated information he leaked.
The motive of getting back at the Army at least made sense, but he makes fairly clear that his NJP was the last thing that happened, not the first.
So an idealistic quandary? Perhaps he wasn't yet sufficiently jaded but he had to have known nothing would change going that route. By leaking indiscriminately, at such sheer scale, and information that's not actually pointing to a war crime or other government malfeasance he opens the government up to many defenses against what the information contained.
But either way, he said he wouldn't. He said further that if he did uncover evidence of wrongdoing that he would report it properly.
I mean let's put it a different way. You provide a SaaS/PaaS /what-have-you to a Fortune 50 enterprise.
What, ethically, would stop you from snooping at their data and leaking it? If you contort your logic enough, as happened to Manning, you could easily flip it around entirely to claim that you had a moral imperative to look for wrongdoing in the emails and documents of these large multi-nationals that affect so many lives across the world.
Presumably we can rely on the tech startups incubated at HN not to do this, but why? Why would it be OK for Manning and not your cloud provider? Why would it not be OK for the cloud provider and OK for Manning?
I guess in the end that's what I wonder most about, even now. Why?
I and probably millions of others have had the opportunity "to start a public debate" if that's all we were worried about, but we didn't. Why did Manning? L'appel du vide? The stress of being LGBT in the military? And how can we balance the need for transparency in military and government with the very real need for INFOSEC to protect the same?
Manning claims he didn't go out of his way to find this stuff and merely came across it in the course of his duties. There are awful things happening all over the world and nobody has a duty to expose it all. But if in the course of your life, evidence of wrongful misdoing is dropped in your lap, if it's horrible enough, I challenge anybody not to lose sleep over what to do about it.
Given that, IMHO it comes down to a moral judgement on just how terrible the actions the company was committing.
Situation A: Working at a SaaS email company, in the course of my work fixing an email bug, I find out one of their low level executives is engaging in some light embezzlement of company funds, say to the tune of $100K.
Situation B: Working at a SaaS email company, in the course of my work fixing an email bug, I find out the company has been dumping toxic waste into a local river which, by the company's own internal admission, is leading to highly increased risks of cancer, birth defects and brain damage for the inhabitants of nearby towns.
For me personally, situation A is not "evil" enough to my moral compass, nor will my exposing it make that big of a difference in the world for me to risk exposing it. However, situation B would cause me to really stop and think about if it's worth risking spending many years in jail to expose what amounts to my moral compass as crimes against humanity. I'd like to think I'd have the courage to expose it.
Privacy policies are just human constructions meant to make human and societal interaction more fluid. But if an individual or group starts to flagrantly break written and unwritten rules of human decency and societal organization, it rings as fair to my mind to fight back. "I won't fuck with you if you don't fuck with me" is out the window once an organization goes too far in the fucking with me department. Especially if it's an organization like a government who writes its own rules and then breaks them.
> Given that, IMHO it comes down to a moral judgement on just how terrible the actions the company was committing.
OK, I would actually tend to agree (and for what it's worth, so would DoD and the law).
But when does the aggregate of those "minor" issues become so large that you'd feel it's a major Sit-B issue? It seems to me that if you simply scoured long enough at a large enough company that you should eventually have enough to feel that you have something major, simply by definition.
So then the question might become, why don't email providers do this (search their clients communications and files)? The threat of the law isn't the answer as everyone would simply remind you that you have a moral imperative to break the law.
I'm not trying to pose these questions to you personally at this point but they certainly bear thinking about, especially nowadays when we're trying to migrate everything to the cloud. At some point (if you're a tech at a cloud provider) you have to think that they only reason you don't see evil on your servers is because you're not looking hard enough.
Manning was applying his training as an intelligence analyst to the big picture factors involved. He is clearly very skilled at synthesizing large amounts of information.
I think the argument can be made that Manning truly believed in the goal of the US war effort, and could not stand to see the US doing things that he viewed as hypocritical. To someone in his position, living every day fighting a war that most of us are clueless about, the idea that the organization he was a part of had some bad apples, or worse that it had structural rot and corruption, would have been dispiriting and infuriating, and something that he was willing to take personal risk to fix.
So I think that to consider Manning's thoughts and actions unusual you have to make the argument that the military is full of cynics who just roll their eyes when atrocities happen or buffoons who drink the patriotism kool-ade and view the US as being capable of no wrong...
Manning had unique intellect, unique skills, and unique access to data. He was also in the small minority of people familiar with Wikileaks and ballsy enough to risk his own life by leaking information. There are probably many people in the military and in various corporate jobs who view Manning as a hero but who lack the personal courage to do what he did.
What would you assume would happen if a whistleblower stepped forward and revealed lies and corruption... I might have predicted initial outrage followed by reforms and the eventual pardon of the whistleblower. Manning's case shows us that the actual result is years in prison without charge, a massive attempted cover-up, and all kinds of shady behavior by the US Government. There has still to date been no reform undertaken other than to prevent information leaks through the methods Manning used.
Oddly the US news media has not called for reforms even as a counter-balance to its coverage of Manning (and its coverage of Assange's so-called rape charges). It would seem to require virtually no courage on the part of journalists to address the question of reforms even as a subtext to the sensationalism and propaganda.
> I and probably millions of others have had the opportunity "to start a public debate" if that's all we were worried about, but we didn't. Why did Manning?
Questions of conscience are usually best answered by oneself. Manning can speak about why he did and you can speak about why you didn't.
As far as I could tell from the statement that was linked, he came to no conclusion more specific than that "war sucks" when leaking the SIGACTs. Good job, but we've known that since before the Code of Hammurabi.
Did he really think that Americans were convinced that no civilian casualties ever occurred, or that a population of hundreds of thousands (that had been a bunch of high schoolers just a few years prior) were 100% "good guys" without exception? Many of those soldiers aren't even old enough to drink. That wasn't an oversight; the public has known, and always have.
That is the big difference from the Pentagon Papers. In that situation it was uncovered that the President had been trying to force the country to war. Here we already know why we're at war (9/11 and Dubya for Afghanistan and Iraq resp.). Manning had nothing to add about why the U.S. was at war. A 'smoking gun' revealing gov't interference beyond what is already known for Iraq would have been useful, at least.
So, if that [war being bad] was his reason for wanting to "start a public debate" it was pointless, completely dead on arrival. And in the event, look what happened. A bunch of people have died in Africa and the Middle East, but the military plans of the U.S. itself were never seriously questioned, let alone altered. The U.S. still goes after Islamists, don't they?
> Manning can speak about why he did and you can speak about why you didn't.
Oh you're so cute, with your Cloak of Superior Morality. Answer this for me: You're obviously skilled with computing, why aren't you extracting the information you need, if it's a moral imperative?
For what it's worth I'm pretty sure that everything I'm holding onto is actually better in the grand scheme of things but by all means, point out my "guilty conscience" to me.
Actually, you are incorrect about knowing why we (the western allies) are at war. 9/11 was carried out by Saudi's and had absolutely nothing to do with Afghanistan, no matter what the spin doctors say. And as for Iraq, what kind of reason is "Dubya"?
For me it's clear that the videos show a breech of International Law and possibly a war crime. Does the United States abide by International Law? Of course not. It doesn't even abide by the Geneva Convention. Nor even by its own constitution. When people look and see a 'republic' or a 'democracy'... this is illusion. It's spin. It's a fairy tale.
And as the ongoing Hedges v. Obama is showing, in all likely hood the US government is already torturing disappeared US citizens in black sites somewhere unknown.
As soon as anyone tries to shine light on these crimes (and they are crimes) they invoke powers that allow them to bury them and bring the full force of their system down on them to send a message to others. None of this is going to work. The more they try and surpress it, the more it will flare up. Bradley Manning is just one of the visible victims. There are and will be many more victims. Not least the many millions of innocents killed in foreign lands.
The western nations are an empire in decline. The middle class is decimated. The economy is toast. The numbers are all fabricated. It's all down hill from here. And as the BRICS rise, do you think they are going to forgive us our trespasses? Of course not. They are going to hold us down and fuck us for a long, long time. And frankly, we all deserve it.
> You're obviously skilled with computing, why aren't you extracting the information you need, if it's a moral imperative?
I'm doing what I can, no need to worry. And I refused to go into the army on penalty of (significant) jailtime, got off very lucky but I would have happily gone to jail to avoid becoming someone else's tool.
No cloak of super morality here, just one guy deciding for himself.
I find it odd that you think it routine for a person to become aware of significant crimes and just keep silent out of loyalty or cowardice.
We're talking about massacres and real loss of life here.
Manning seems to be the kind of person who viewed his role in the institution of the military to be relatively powerless, but who had an appreciation for the power the press wields in shaping public debate and policy.
In my opinion, only a very naive person would assume that Manning would dutifully report his findings up the chain of command and feel relieved of any moral duty once his superiors were notified.
The one has no direct bearing on the other. But if you expose a person that is already internally conflicted to a lot of stuff that is ethically questionable it may be enough to override the normal urges people have wrt self preservation.
Most people have strong moral convictions, but when placed in a situation where their whole future hinges on temporarily shutting those moral convictions down will happily do so. Someone that is unstable at some level could very well act them out because they identify with the basic injustice, even if that will end up hurting themselves.
I can see exactly what jacquesm is talking about here actually.
I think he's talking about instability as in issues with inhibition. Kind of like how people sometimes commit the stark crime of saying what you really think when drunk,
Manning might have taken an action that others merely only think about because that little part of you that says "BAD IDEA MAN" was asleep on watch at the time. If nothing else his "instability" would be consistent with his behavior at other times, before and after he joined the Army.
I would say it's something that makes you evaluate the difference between short-term and long-term good things (e.g. a policy that drives up income in the short term may wreck your business in the long term).
Or alternately, the difference between a good thing, and a good thing with collateral damage.
Very few people have sufficient courage of their convictions to consider doing what he did. The rest of the psychological portait is noise.