There is no way a person at Manning's level could be expected to cherry pick effectively. How can he decide what is in the public interest, know what evidence i

There is no way a person at Manning's level could be expected to cherry pick effectively. How can he decide what is in the public interest, know what evidence is enough, know what evidence is dangerous, and so on. Yes to a point, but we must accep that its a highly complex set of decisions that have to be made. For a low level person to whistle-blow the only effective way to do it is to grab as much as possible, and give it to a person or people who can do that sorting for him. Now, in a decent open democracy, there should be such people who do have the authority, clearance and moral independence, who we can all trust to do that for a whistle-blower. But, the problem is two fold, 1) who do we trust, and 2) the content of the documents proves that the US government could not be trusted. So, he had to give the lot to some one he trusted would do morally the right thing, and release what was necessary. At that point in time, wikileaks was big and had a decent reputation. His case was, AFAIK, the first to go wrong, and the first to show that wikileaks was not robust and smart enough to do the job properly. Of course after the even, people slag wikileaks off and say he shouldn't have gone there. In hind sight, yes. With Snowden, I guess that the Guardian and its lawyers are being very damn careful about what they release. I guess they have information that would be dangerous and they are probably rightly sitting on it. But here were possibly see a much better filtering and vetting process. No, not one governments like, but one that give us enough information to point fingers, but not enough to get people killed. But, for a "simple" whistle-blower, they have no choice but to grab all they can, and trust people who know what they are doing to filter the material to a) prove a case or accusation, and b)protect the innocent and vulnerable. In that I include agents and what not legitimately intelligence gathering. Manning's mistake was a reasonable one. He was right at the time to think wikileaks was a reasonable route, but obviously that has since been tarnished. Of course what we really need is this independent, trust-able, official route for whistle-blowers. But Im not sure how that can really happen satisfactorily. Hence the incredible value of decent journalists.