Hold on - you say public good, but who gets to decide what that is? Assange and Manning took it upon themselves to decide that leaking thousands of diplomatic c

Hold on - you say public good, but who gets to decide what that is? Assange and Manning took it upon themselves to decide that leaking thousands of diplomatic cables - which are kept secret by the laws of the United States because they are sensitive documents that govern our diplomatic relationships with and strategy towards other countries around the world, both friendly and adversarial - was in the public good. But those laws are there for a reason. We live in a world of continuously vying sovereign powers who spy on each other and sometimes even attack each other militarily. Not all of these countries are good countries to live in, not all of them respect human rights, not all of them are democracies, and many in fact are run by corrupt, untrustworthy people. There are good reasons for these laws to exist, but Manning and Assange decided - by themselves - that there aren't. So - what if your ethics are wrong? What if you haven't done the work to understand why the laws are the way they are? Are you still being conscientious? Laws are public and the result of a massive concensus-building process that we've built known as representative democracy, by which, if we choose to actually participate, we all have a say in which laws exist and which don't. 'Ethics' on the other hand are personal and subjective and are not written down anywhere and do not govern others' actions and while they might well be right they may just as easily be wrong. I'm not saying that there are no cases of justified civil disobedience. Certainly civil rights protests and the leaking of the Pentagon Papers come to mind. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the laws are always wrong and the whistleblowers always right. Each case needs to be discussed on its own merits, through public debate. And sometimes that means that it turned out the laws were right, and the whistleblowers were mistaken.