4 ms·
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
by 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.
- grandalf 14y agoManning 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.