4 ms·

What is your point? That he's an imperfect version of the kind of rebellious hero figure people think he is? Very few people have sufficient courage of their

What is your point? That he's an imperfect version of the kind of rebellious hero figure people think he is? Very few people have sufficient courage of their convictions to consider doing what he did. The rest of the psychological portait is noise.

mpyne 14y ago
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?
- lprubin 14y ago
  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.
  - mpyne 14y ago
    > 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.
- jacquesm 14y ago
  > 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.
  - mpyne 14y ago
    Was it a question of conscience though? 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.
    - jacquesm 14y ago
      > 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.
- grandalf 14y ago
  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.
dyno12345 14y ago
The portrait of his unstable behavior leads to doubts about strong moral convictions being the reason why he did it.
- jacquesm 14y ago
  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.
  - dyno12345 14y ago
    So instability makes people more consistently act out their strong moral positions? It seems to me that it would make someone behave more randomly
    - mpyne 14y ago
      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.
      - dyno12345 14y ago
        So it's just something that makes you do good things more?
        14y ago

mpyne 14y ago

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?

lprubin 14y ago
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.
- mpyne 14y ago
  > 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.
jacquesm 14y ago
> 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.
- mpyne 14y ago
  Was it a question of conscience though? 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.
  - jacquesm 14y ago
    > 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.
grandalf 14y ago
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.

dyno12345 14y ago

The portrait of his unstable behavior leads to doubts about strong moral convictions being the reason why he did it.

jacquesm 14y ago
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.
- dyno12345 14y ago
  So instability makes people more consistently act out their strong moral positions? It seems to me that it would make someone behave more randomly
  - mpyne 14y ago
    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.
    - dyno12345 14y ago
      So it's just something that makes you do good things more?
      - 14y ago