It makes sense to me. What Manning did was fairly awful from a dispassionate standpoint. Of course, few people are dispassionate about it, especially around her

It makes sense to me. What Manning did was fairly awful from a dispassionate standpoint. Of course, few people are dispassionate about it, especially around here. :) If Manning had war crimes on file he could have revealed those and only those. What he did instead is at best reckless, and at worst could be said to be the instigator for the onset of the Arab Spring, and the follow-on violence that continues to this day, not to mention the Afghani and Pakistani families affected by the data leaks. On the other hand Swartz can be said pretty universally to be pursuing a noble goal (even those who disagree with some of his specific actions would tend to agree with that), and at worst gained unauthorized network access and downloaded a bunch of files...