19 ms·

The Banality of Systemic Evil

366 points by Maakuth 13y ago

twoodfin 13y ago
Notably missing from this piece: An argument that valid responses to perceived abuses include massive, indiscriminate data dumps, repeatedly bypassing MIT's network access controls and/or taking laptops full of classified information to Moscow.
- gizmo 13y ago
  This is essentially trolling: you can't start a meaningful discussion with an opening comment like yours.
  - twoodfin 13y ago
    This article is pure hn catnip and I doubt much meaningful discussion will emerge here at all. That being said: The author is setting up a straw man (with an opening analogy to the Nazis to boot!). Nobody thinks Chelsea Manning would have been wrong to continue to fight against or expose a variety of military abuses. Or for Snowden to write his Congressman about NSA abuses. Or for Swartz to campaign for changes to government funded research publication. People like David Brooks are not succumbing to the banality of evil when calling out Snowden or Manning for behaving recklessly. They're arguing that the flaws in our system are not so pernicious as to justify, say, Manning's indiscriminate data dump or Snowden's theft.
    - prof_hobart 13y ago
      >Nobody thinks Chelsea Manning would have been wrong to continue to fight against or expose a variety of military abuses. Or for Snowden to write his Congressman about NSA abuses. I'm pretty sure that there's plenty of people inside the system who think that they would have been wrong to do that. But more importantly, does anyone honestly believe that they would have actually achieved anything by doing this? They've both gone as public as they can with the revalations, but I don't see either the military or congress actively trying to address the issues that these leaks have highlighted. Do you have any reason to believe they would have taken them more seriously if the information had been raised to them secretly?
      - jackgavigan 13y ago
        Senators Wyden and Udall have been all over this shit for a long time but nobody paid any attention. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110922/03520616050/senators-wyden-udall-to-doj-stop-saying-patriot-act-isnt-secret-law-when-you-know-it-is.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110922/03520616050/senato... http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120611/16214719280/wyden-udall-block-fisa-amendments-act-until-us-admits-how-many-americans-are-being-spied.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120611/16214719280/wyden-...
      - twoodfin 13y ago
        Maybe, maybe not. But if you don't like how far they get, vote for the guys who will change the system. That's the way democracy works. You have to come to grips with the fact that most Americans do not feel the way hn does about national security and surveillance. Nobody can make a Snowden or a Manning do something they find morally repugnant, but neither does that give them carte blanche to do whatever they'd like with the secrets they were entrusted with.
        jtheory 13y ago
        Democracy may be better than most other systems, but that doesn't mean it works well. How much money does it take to win a US presidential election? The people providing that money are getter far more leverage than the voters. Snowden/Manning also found themselves in a position to use more leverage, and in those cases it's a separate moral question about whether they chose wisely to take that opportunity or not. (FWIW, I've never seen anyone giving them carte blanche to do whatever they would like with the info they accessed -- that's a straw man). You can't just bypass that discussion by saying "they're allowed to vote, that should be enough for anyone".
        twoodfin 13y ago
        Snowden/Manning also found themselves in a position to use more leverage, and in those cases it's a separate moral question about whether they chose wisely to take that opportunity or not. No, it's not a separate moral question. It's the crux of the discussion. The entire spectrum of possible actions was open to them. "Do nothing" vs. "Do something" isn't a very interesting distinction: "Something" might have been to quit their respective jobs as soon as possible, or post snarky comments about the evils of the U.S. government under a pseudonym on reddit, or flee to Hong Kong, or blow up a building where they worked... Nobody elected Ed Snowden or Chelsea Manning. In fact, the people we did elect put trust in Snowden and Manning to preserve certain secrets. Both proceeded to release not just secrets that exposed malfeasance, but the sorts of things (NSA overseas operations, diplomatic cables) that, by and large, our (inevitably imperfect) democracy has decided are peachy keen. Criticizing that indiscretion isn't giving in to "the system", it's acknowledging that "the system" is one we have built together, and there are certain aspects of its operation that are not subject to the whims or passions of people who had previously sworn to uphold it.
- Ygg2 13y ago
  Oh no, the powerpoint presentation that tells which companies are in bed with NSA will doom us all. Moscow probably knows most of it, this isn't information/news for them. I'd like to see all the men that were killed hurt by WikiLeaks data dumps. I mean cables were fucking benign, nothing people already didn't know or heavily suspected.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
    Also notably missing from current discourse: A valid argument that valid responses to perceived abuses include using the traditional whistle-blower channels. People go to Moscow because there seems to be no other way to blow the whistle any more, not without ending up like Pfc Manning. Snowden said that right from the start; missing that part is either ignorance or disinformation.
- andyjohnson0 13y ago
  You're misunderstanding the purpose of the article. The author is examining the general tendency for hierarchical organisations to require require moral submission on the part of people who work within them. Snowden at al are given as recent, specific examples of people who claim that their "moral compass" requires them to take action. It is entirely possible to disagree with them (and you clearly do) but its much more difficult to argue that dissent based on moral conviction should never be permitted under any circumstances. Then again, maybe you're just trolling and I've wasted my time.
- raverbashing 13y ago
  "or taking laptops full of classified information to Moscow." Well, tough crap. If the gov had not threatened him, he would have returned to american soil or gone to a friendlier nation. Now thanks to this complete and utter SNAFU it's as good as the government handling all the information to Russia.
  - shamshiel 13y ago
    When exactly did the government threaten Snowden? What did they threaten him with? Assuming that they threatened him with prison time (I believe he was already out of the country), is the government not allowed to try and convict people based on the established law of the land if those people are following their personal moral compass? Is "I felt it was the right thing to do" an absolute defense against prosecution? I am also curious as to how the government is responsible for Snowden fleeing to Moscow. Is Snowden responsible for his own actions or not?
    - raverbashing 13y ago
      "When exactly did the government threaten Snowden?" When it punished Bradley Manning the way it did. The government doesn't need to make a direct threat, the existing cases are enough to do that. "is the government not allowed to try and convict people based on the established law of the land" Of course it is. But there are several cases where the government chose not to. "I am also curious as to how the government is responsible for Snowden fleeing to Moscow" If the only place Snowden feels safe is Moscow (because the risk of extradition there is much lower than somewhere else), that's where he is going to go! And if he has something that may be interesting to the Russian government, well, isn't it just lucky...
      - shamshiel 13y ago
        Bradley Manning was subject to military law and treated accordingly. Do you have evidence he was treated unlawfully? And if not, why would he be exempt from the law? Snowden was subject to civilian law, so far as I am aware, so he would not be able to draw on Manning as an example. "Safe", in your world, appears to mean "free from the long arm of the law."
ck2 13y ago
I was reading up on Jeremy Hammond as I knew less about him and this caught my eye: The judge's husband has an email address released in the Stratfor disclosure and works with Stratfor clients, but the judge refuses to recuse herself (while threatening Hammond that he faces a life sentence). Unmitigated gall.
- timje1 13y ago
  This strikes me as unusual - the judge is clearly going to be biased by her husband's involvement, how is it that she gets to judge whether to recuse herself? Hopefully this means any the eventual verdict can be overturned by a future appeal, if necessary.
  - mcherm 13y ago
    If you ask lawyers (and I have done so) then they say that the reason judges rule on their own recusal is because otherwise every trial would get interrupted for a trip to appeals court to decide on whether a recusal is appropriate. The existing system allows an appeals court to decide AFTERWARD whether the recusal decision was appropriate (although the judge is given a great deal of latitude and only egregious cases would be overruled). They can then order a new trial. I am not sure I agree with this: it seems to me that a quick ruling could be made on recusal and that it would arise quite rarely. But I'm not familiar with the system, and the lawyers I have heard from are. I suppose if judges are nearly always making good choices about when to recuse themselves the system should work fairly well.
    - gaius 13y ago
      What happens to the judge if the appeals court finds they should have recused? I'm betting the answer isn't "jail time".
      - mcherm 13y ago
        You are correct. In my jurisdiction (the US), judges have complete, 100% immunity for actions they take in their capacity as a judge. Deciding wrongly is NOT something a judge can be prosecuted for. There are a lot of reasons why this is a good thing and in egregious cases there is usually a different reason that can be found. (Like the judge in my state convicted of sending kids to private jails just in order to receive kickbacks. He could NOT be prosecuted for the decisions he made. But he was successfully prosecuted for accepting bribes and kickbacks.)
tokenizer 13y ago
How about we try to get to the core issues of this systemic risk of authoritarianism and repression, and look at: Ageism: Why can't younger people vote? Because they don't have valid opinions? Some adults don't have valid opinions. This seems to affect our dramatically in our modern era, as many of our older folks are still around and skewing the generational differences towards conservatism. Classism: Why do we feel it necessary to have a political class at all? Bush Sr., Mr. Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, (Ms. Clinton?). To me, it feels weird even asking these people to have differing views. They're all apart of the council on foreign relations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_Council_on_Foreign_Relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_Council_on_Fore...). Control+F either Clinton or Bush. This in my opinion, is why we won't change any neo-con/neo-lib policies anytime soon. Expect less worker rights, more outsourcing, more free trade, more deficits, and more protection of institutions deemed too big to fail (impossible in classical capitalism but not the crony kind). Apathy: The US has killed many people in Iraq since 2003. If you crunch one version of account, it works out to 16 people every day, for 20 years. Yet most Americans are more concerned with their own internal matters. This seems like it could be extended to anything being committed outside of the US to other humans, including torture, enslavement, anything. The American people have already shown that if their bellies are full, then it doesn't matter how many people their government kills. How can anyone fix this? Anyway, this to me seems like the major hurdles we all need to get over...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - tokenizer 13y ago
    Incidentally, I'm sure Men had many reasons why Women wouldn't have been good voters before 1918. Too bad we actually have to allow them to do so before we can actually make assumptions on how they'd act. /s
    - steveklabnik 13y ago
      And women, too... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_the_United_States#Opposition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_the_Unite...
nl 13y ago
I think this is a very powerful & well reasoned piece. I have a feeling that many of those who should read it will be unduly distracted by the gender issues around Manning.
- emhart 13y ago
  I was hoping to send this piece to my Mother, as we've had long, frustrating conversations about each of the people mentioned in the article, but hesitated for that very reason. Then, just now reading your comment, realized that my hesitation is actually a desire on my part not to fight a battle on two fronts. But. It's worth the fight. Sending her the article and I might even stop in for dinner and start the conversation fresh tonight.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
You have to be very careful here about the argument that you're making. If you're effectively saying that any individual has free reign to do whatever they desire with trade secrets, sensitive diplomatic information, and whatnot because of a moral injury they may feel the system is giving them, then you've effectively destroyed any form of organized human activity that involves trust or secrets. Here's why: people get morally offended at all kinds of bullshit. It's totally dependent on the individual as to what pushes their buttons. So yes, good people in bad systems do really bad things. Lots of Nazis were working boring jobs as part of the system that exterminated millions of people. But as a society we generally do not hold these people accountable for such actions. After WWII most of those folks kept right on working boring jobs, this time rebuilding the country instead of operating concentration camps. Whether or not those people are supposed to feel guilt or revulsion at their own actions is a moral question -- a question between each of them and their own standard of what the universe expects of them. Confusing personal decisions with public ones is a good way to muddle your thinking.
- mattmanser 13y ago
  He's not even making the argument you're suggesting, he's simply trying to explain why the media has such a hard time explaining the motivation behind the whistleblowers and why they end up circumventing chain of command.
  - twoodfin 13y ago
    No, he doesn't explain that. There's just some hand waving about "the bureaucracy" and "the system". I think it does a disservice to the many real whistleblowers who believe (often correctly) that by working within the system, or at least by working outside it without breaking the law, they can effect meaningful change. He makes no attempt to explain just what "evil" Manning was fighting by passing along essentially random classified diplomatic traffic, or why Snowden might have felt morally justified in leaking secrets about U.S. spying on strategic competitors. This was not the Pentagon Papers.
  - DanielBMarkham 13y ago
    "You have to be very careful..." Not the author of the piece. People in general, i.e. the HN community
kijin 13y ago
> David Brooks made a case for why he thought Snowden was wrong to leak information about the Prism surveillance program ... “For society to function well,” he wrote, “there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things.” The complaint is eerily parallel to one from a case discussed in “Moral Mazes,” where ... the complaint against the accountant by the other managers of his company was that “by insisting on his own moral purity … he eroded the fundamental trust and understanding that makes cooperative managerial work possible.” Welcome to the hyper-individualistic, hyper-critical, post-communitarian world, where neither tradition nor any existing social institution is taken for granted. Everything is now open to critical scrutiny, and nothing that fails such scrutiny will receive anyone's respect. Gone are the days when "institutions", "common procedures" and "cooperative managerial work", for example, were universally agreed to be valuable things in themselves. Now they need to prove their own worth, or else. Because if they have no intrinsic moral worth, you can't blame others for eroding them. I don't know whether there really is such a thing as Generation W, but if Snowden and Swartz are its holotypes, then I have rather high hopes for it. Not because I expect a whole lot of whistleblowing in the foreseeable future, nor because I think they're particularly interested in politics (they probably aren't), but because they're probably the first generation to ascribe absolutely no intrinsic moral worth to the "System" in "Systemic Evil". The System, whether it's a corrupt industry, a corrupt three-letter agency, or your country, has finally lost the romantic halo ascribed to it by traditional assumptions. It has revealed itself to be just another social convention with some (in fact, lots of) instrumental value but zero intrinsic value. The baby boomers, of course, also had their moment of subversiveness in the form of the civil rights movement. But the U.S. in the 60s and 70s was affluent and egalitarian enough to leave them with lifetime jobs, nice suburban homes, and enough money to watch Fox News on their four-foot TVs for the remainder of their retirement. Those perks are now gone, and with it the last traces of the System's romantic halo. All that is left is a rotting social infrastructure with questionable instrumental value at best. So perhaps for the first time in human history, a large number of people are now mentally prepared to judge the "System" solely on its instrumental value. Instead of asking whether or not their actions will help preserve the System, people can now honestly ask whether certain portions of the System are worth preserving in the first place. Gen W is like the theoretical physicist in that famous story who, when asked how his research contributes to national defense, replies that his research makes the nation worth defending. Only sometimes, it might not be worth defending. Or perhaps even worth destroying. It is no surprise that the Obama administration has a reputation for prosecuting more whistleblowers than (nearly?) every other administration before it. Previous administrations had no need for massive prosecutions, the population behaved itself. But the population won't behave anymore. The only psychological bias that kept them at bay has dissolved away, and I suspect that it's gone for good. And like a lot of people who have warm fuzzy feelings about Snowden, I think that this quiet but irreversible change in humanity's sociopolitical lookout will turn out to be a Very Good Thing (tm) in the long term. Another superstition trampled under the relentless feet of reason.
deleted 13y ago
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detcader 13y ago
Skimming the article I see no mention of COINTELPRO, of which these programs are no doubt a continuation of at least spiritually. This would make sense given that this is the NY Times, and bringing up COINTELPRO would perhaps force them to admit racial/xenophobic dimensions and roots to these recent revelations (e.g. the USG's history of targeting civil rights and anti-war activism), instead of white guys fighting for other white guys' iPad Privacy.. >Swartz argued that it was sometimes necessary to break the rules that required obedience to the system in order to avoid systemic evil. That paragraph would have been a perfect place in which to touch on the Church Committee and its origins. Does the author even know about it? Honestly, most people with social power and influence don't seem to care about the revelations because they don't. They have nothing on the line -- their rights will never be threatened, nor will government programs like the endless War on Terror ever affect them (in ways that they will understand; "blowback" is evidently too intricate of a concept for most). Could that be because they're white men? Perish the thought
coldcode 13y ago
Plato said "The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."
- gruseom 13y ago
  I doubt that Plato said that.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Misquoted. According to Respectfully Quoted, this maxim is unverified. In fact, however, it is drawn from Plato's Republic. Paul Shorey offers a literal translation: "But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule" (Book 1, Section 347c). Since Plato specifically addresses those unwilling to govern (), rather than those who are simply indifferent, the accurate translation unfortunately does not apply as broadly to think-tank work as the misquotation does.
    - gruseom 13y ago
      Thanks! The fact that there's a path back to the original makes that one less spurious than it sounded. There was quite a good article recently about how quotes turn into misquotes and eventually proverbs: http://www.chronicle.com/article/Who-Really-Said-That-/141559/ http://www.chronicle.com/article/Who-Really-Said-That-/14155... There are basically three kinds of Wrongly Attributed Statements. WAS I is an adaptation or composite of a statement or statements from someone or several people, who may or may not be famous. WAS II is a statement that was uttered, as is, by someone, often not famous, that has come to be widely attributed to someone else, invariably more famous. WAS III was never uttered by anyone, at least not that we know of. So this was a WAS I. :) Edit: Actually, this article is better than quite good. It's the best one I've seen on the topic and quite fun and one could even call it definitive. Edit 2: Ok, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6445595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6445595.
washedup 13y ago
"Systems are optimized for their own survival and preventing the system from doing evil may well require breaking with organizational niceties, protocols or laws. It requires stepping outside of one’s assigned organizational role. The chief executive is not in a better position to recognize systemic evil than is a middle level manager or, for that matter, an IT contractor. Recognizing systemic evil does not require rank or intelligence, just honesty of vision." It is natural for ALL systems, whether a political organization, company, terrorist organization, and even biological entities, to fight change and keep the system in tact. We are now at a point where we can critically assess our social organizations from a humanistic perspective and ask if they are really adding value or not. It is very, very exciting. Also scary.
anandabits 13y ago
It's nice to see discussion in mainstream media applying Arendt to the policies and practices of the United States. I've been talking about this for some time now. Spreading awareness of how institutional behavior can lead to evil actions is extremely important. We have learned a lot about power, evil, oppression, etc since the structure of the modern democratic state was created. We can and need to do much better.
tptacek 13y ago
Manipulative. For instance: * The article's entire coverage of Manning revolves around a single incident involving the detention of 15 Iraqis. But that's not all Manning did, despite the wording of the article. Manning fell afoul of the law by haphazardly collecting and releasing to a stranger on the Internet far more documents than any person could possibly have reviewed, many of which had no public interest implications. * The article cites the case of Jeremy Hammond, convicted for hacking and dumping Stratfor. Ludlow famously supports Hammond's actions. But Hammond didn't leak secrets he knew were in the public interest. He picked an organization whose politics he disagreed with, attacked them, and helped circulate the credit card numbers of its subscribers to the Internet. The clear message being sent by Hammond's inclusion in the article is that he is of a kind with Manning, Snowden, and Swartz. The only thing his case has in common with the others is that they they share some of the same political motivations. * The article does the same thing with John Kiriakou, asserting as axiomatic the idea that Kiriakou was motivated by the public interest. But Kiriakou didn't become a "whistleblower" until that label became convenient to his defense, after it became apparent that his conversations with journalists, which related to a book he was selling, had outed an agent who had been in deep cover for over 20 years. I'm left with a disquieting conclusions about the way proponents of Ludlow think: so long as the accused share your politics, it's more important for society to empathize with their motivations than with their decisions and actions. That's what people who blow up abortion clinics think. I'm also a little worried about the phenomenon of generating public support for any mass leak by working with the media to promote those leaked documents that are most interesting/entertaining/important, while working to thwart any effort to evaluate the impact of the leak as a whole. Call it "Greenwaldism", which feeds a careful drip of calculated outrage and then harnesses it to attack anyone who points out any accompanying documents that might have caused harm by their disclosure.
- jgroszko 13y ago
  I'd be curious to hear why you make a distinction between leaking for the public interest and leaking because of a disagreement with an organization's politics? Presumably most people hold their political views because they believe they believe those views are in the best public interest?
EGreg 13y ago
This is why we have checks and balances between three branches of government -- to make sure no one branch gets too much leeway to get disconnected from what everyone else thinks is ok. Similarly, people set up governments for societies but they also have a culture, and an idea of what is "beyond the pale". An insular culture can slowly become disconnected from the rest of the people, even in government which gets feedback through voting and other limited means. Thus, individuals possessing a "moral sense" who are hired to work in the government may in fact engage in whistleblowing. Governments recognize this and many offer limited protections to this activity. Of course, if they are too far gone in how much they disconnect from the people's preferences, then they might seek to screen heavily when hiring new people, to make sure they don't have this "liability". And thus make themselves even more insular. At the end of the day, SECRECY is the source of many of the problems. Secret laws and secret courts like FISA which sometimes complain that they are being lied to by the executive branch -- but only during fortuitous court case does it even come to light. Or this: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/the-secret-memo-that-explains-why-obama-can-kill-americans/246004/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/the-secr... ... nothing changed in the last two years. I am a liberal and I really liked Obama, but I despise his administration's stance on secrecy, and foreign policy, because it sets a terrible precedent. Compare: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOp...
mark212 13y ago
You'll forgive me if I don't put reading someone's email on the same moral plane as the premeditated murder of 12 million people during the Holocaust.
cappsjulian 13y ago
"a statement about what happens when people play their 'proper' roles within a system, following prescribed conduct with respect to that system, while remaining blind to the moral consequences of what the system was doing — or at least compartmentalizing and ignoring those consequences." Like Todd in Breaking Bad, who is in fact a neo-nazi.
jonmrodriguez 13y ago
I think this otherwise-great article is weakened by its praise of Manning. Unlike the heroic Snowden, Manning leaked an enormous bulk of documents that she didn't actually review in detail, which showed little to no wrongdoing relative to the bulk of the texts leaked. This seems useless, reckless, and spiteful. http://www.quora.com/Chelsea-formerly-PFC-Bradley-Manning/Is-PFC-Chelsea-Manning-a-hero-or-is-she-a-villain-Why/answer/Jon-Davis-10 http://www.quora.com/Chelsea-formerly-PFC-Bradley-Manning/Is...

366 points by Maakuth 13y ago

Notably missing from this piece: An argument that valid responses to perceived abuses include massive, indiscriminate data dumps, repeatedly bypassing MIT's network access controls and/or taking laptops full of classified information to Moscow.

gizmo 13y ago
This is essentially trolling: you can't start a meaningful discussion with an opening comment like yours.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  This article is pure hn catnip and I doubt much meaningful discussion will emerge here at all. That being said: The author is setting up a straw man (with an opening analogy to the Nazis to boot!). Nobody thinks Chelsea Manning would have been wrong to continue to fight against or expose a variety of military abuses. Or for Snowden to write his Congressman about NSA abuses. Or for Swartz to campaign for changes to government funded research publication. People like David Brooks are not succumbing to the banality of evil when calling out Snowden or Manning for behaving recklessly. They're arguing that the flaws in our system are not so pernicious as to justify, say, Manning's indiscriminate data dump or Snowden's theft.
  - prof_hobart 13y ago
    >Nobody thinks Chelsea Manning would have been wrong to continue to fight against or expose a variety of military abuses. Or for Snowden to write his Congressman about NSA abuses. I'm pretty sure that there's plenty of people inside the system who think that they would have been wrong to do that. But more importantly, does anyone honestly believe that they would have actually achieved anything by doing this? They've both gone as public as they can with the revalations, but I don't see either the military or congress actively trying to address the issues that these leaks have highlighted. Do you have any reason to believe they would have taken them more seriously if the information had been raised to them secretly?
    - jackgavigan 13y ago
      Senators Wyden and Udall have been all over this shit for a long time but nobody paid any attention. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110922/03520616050/senators-wyden-udall-to-doj-stop-saying-patriot-act-isnt-secret-law-when-you-know-it-is.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110922/03520616050/senato... http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120611/16214719280/wyden-udall-block-fisa-amendments-act-until-us-admits-how-many-americans-are-being-spied.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120611/16214719280/wyden-...
    - twoodfin 13y ago
      Maybe, maybe not. But if you don't like how far they get, vote for the guys who will change the system. That's the way democracy works. You have to come to grips with the fact that most Americans do not feel the way hn does about national security and surveillance. Nobody can make a Snowden or a Manning do something they find morally repugnant, but neither does that give them carte blanche to do whatever they'd like with the secrets they were entrusted with.
      - jtheory 13y ago
        Democracy may be better than most other systems, but that doesn't mean it works well. How much money does it take to win a US presidential election? The people providing that money are getter far more leverage than the voters. Snowden/Manning also found themselves in a position to use more leverage, and in those cases it's a separate moral question about whether they chose wisely to take that opportunity or not. (FWIW, I've never seen anyone giving them carte blanche to do whatever they would like with the info they accessed -- that's a straw man). You can't just bypass that discussion by saying "they're allowed to vote, that should be enough for anyone".
        twoodfin 13y ago
        Snowden/Manning also found themselves in a position to use more leverage, and in those cases it's a separate moral question about whether they chose wisely to take that opportunity or not. No, it's not a separate moral question. It's the crux of the discussion. The entire spectrum of possible actions was open to them. "Do nothing" vs. "Do something" isn't a very interesting distinction: "Something" might have been to quit their respective jobs as soon as possible, or post snarky comments about the evils of the U.S. government under a pseudonym on reddit, or flee to Hong Kong, or blow up a building where they worked... Nobody elected Ed Snowden or Chelsea Manning. In fact, the people we did elect put trust in Snowden and Manning to preserve certain secrets. Both proceeded to release not just secrets that exposed malfeasance, but the sorts of things (NSA overseas operations, diplomatic cables) that, by and large, our (inevitably imperfect) democracy has decided are peachy keen. Criticizing that indiscretion isn't giving in to "the system", it's acknowledging that "the system" is one we have built together, and there are certain aspects of its operation that are not subject to the whims or passions of people who had previously sworn to uphold it.
Ygg2 13y ago
Oh no, the powerpoint presentation that tells which companies are in bed with NSA will doom us all. Moscow probably knows most of it, this isn't information/news for them. I'd like to see all the men that were killed hurt by WikiLeaks data dumps. I mean cables were fucking benign, nothing people already didn't know or heavily suspected.
- SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
  Also notably missing from current discourse: A valid argument that valid responses to perceived abuses include using the traditional whistle-blower channels. People go to Moscow because there seems to be no other way to blow the whistle any more, not without ending up like Pfc Manning. Snowden said that right from the start; missing that part is either ignorance or disinformation.
andyjohnson0 13y ago
You're misunderstanding the purpose of the article. The author is examining the general tendency for hierarchical organisations to require require moral submission on the part of people who work within them. Snowden at al are given as recent, specific examples of people who claim that their "moral compass" requires them to take action. It is entirely possible to disagree with them (and you clearly do) but its much more difficult to argue that dissent based on moral conviction should never be permitted under any circumstances. Then again, maybe you're just trolling and I've wasted my time.
raverbashing 13y ago
"or taking laptops full of classified information to Moscow." Well, tough crap. If the gov had not threatened him, he would have returned to american soil or gone to a friendlier nation. Now thanks to this complete and utter SNAFU it's as good as the government handling all the information to Russia.
- shamshiel 13y ago
  When exactly did the government threaten Snowden? What did they threaten him with? Assuming that they threatened him with prison time (I believe he was already out of the country), is the government not allowed to try and convict people based on the established law of the land if those people are following their personal moral compass? Is "I felt it was the right thing to do" an absolute defense against prosecution? I am also curious as to how the government is responsible for Snowden fleeing to Moscow. Is Snowden responsible for his own actions or not?
  - raverbashing 13y ago
    "When exactly did the government threaten Snowden?" When it punished Bradley Manning the way it did. The government doesn't need to make a direct threat, the existing cases are enough to do that. "is the government not allowed to try and convict people based on the established law of the land" Of course it is. But there are several cases where the government chose not to. "I am also curious as to how the government is responsible for Snowden fleeing to Moscow" If the only place Snowden feels safe is Moscow (because the risk of extradition there is much lower than somewhere else), that's where he is going to go! And if he has something that may be interesting to the Russian government, well, isn't it just lucky...
    - shamshiel 13y ago
      Bradley Manning was subject to military law and treated accordingly. Do you have evidence he was treated unlawfully? And if not, why would he be exempt from the law? Snowden was subject to civilian law, so far as I am aware, so he would not be able to draw on Manning as an example. "Safe", in your world, appears to mean "free from the long arm of the law."

ck2 13y ago

I was reading up on Jeremy Hammond as I knew less about him and this caught my eye: The judge's husband has an email address released in the Stratfor disclosure and works with Stratfor clients, but the judge refuses to recuse herself (while threatening Hammond that he faces a life sentence). Unmitigated gall.

timje1 13y ago
This strikes me as unusual - the judge is clearly going to be biased by her husband's involvement, how is it that she gets to judge whether to recuse herself? Hopefully this means any the eventual verdict can be overturned by a future appeal, if necessary.
- mcherm 13y ago
  If you ask lawyers (and I have done so) then they say that the reason judges rule on their own recusal is because otherwise every trial would get interrupted for a trip to appeals court to decide on whether a recusal is appropriate. The existing system allows an appeals court to decide AFTERWARD whether the recusal decision was appropriate (although the judge is given a great deal of latitude and only egregious cases would be overruled). They can then order a new trial. I am not sure I agree with this: it seems to me that a quick ruling could be made on recusal and that it would arise quite rarely. But I'm not familiar with the system, and the lawyers I have heard from are. I suppose if judges are nearly always making good choices about when to recuse themselves the system should work fairly well.
  - gaius 13y ago
    What happens to the judge if the appeals court finds they should have recused? I'm betting the answer isn't "jail time".
    - mcherm 13y ago
      You are correct. In my jurisdiction (the US), judges have complete, 100% immunity for actions they take in their capacity as a judge. Deciding wrongly is NOT something a judge can be prosecuted for. There are a lot of reasons why this is a good thing and in egregious cases there is usually a different reason that can be found. (Like the judge in my state convicted of sending kids to private jails just in order to receive kickbacks. He could NOT be prosecuted for the decisions he made. But he was successfully prosecuted for accepting bribes and kickbacks.)

tokenizer 13y ago

How about we try to get to the core issues of this systemic risk of authoritarianism and repression, and look at: Ageism: Why can't younger people vote? Because they don't have valid opinions? Some adults don't have valid opinions. This seems to affect our dramatically in our modern era, as many of our older folks are still around and skewing the generational differences towards conservatism. Classism: Why do we feel it necessary to have a political class at all? Bush Sr., Mr. Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, (Ms. Clinton?). To me, it feels weird even asking these people to have differing views. They're all apart of the council on foreign relations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_Council_on_Foreign_Relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_Council_on_Fore...). Control+F either Clinton or Bush. This in my opinion, is why we won't change any neo-con/neo-lib policies anytime soon. Expect less worker rights, more outsourcing, more free trade, more deficits, and more protection of institutions deemed too big to fail (impossible in classical capitalism but not the crony kind). Apathy: The US has killed many people in Iraq since 2003. If you crunch one version of account, it works out to 16 people every day, for 20 years. Yet most Americans are more concerned with their own internal matters. This seems like it could be extended to anything being committed outside of the US to other humans, including torture, enslavement, anything. The American people have already shown that if their bellies are full, then it doesn't matter how many people their government kills. How can anyone fix this? Anyway, this to me seems like the major hurdles we all need to get over...

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- tokenizer 13y ago
  Incidentally, I'm sure Men had many reasons why Women wouldn't have been good voters before 1918. Too bad we actually have to allow them to do so before we can actually make assumptions on how they'd act. /s
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    And women, too... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_the_United_States#Opposition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_the_Unite...

nl 13y ago

I think this is a very powerful & well reasoned piece. I have a feeling that many of those who should read it will be unduly distracted by the gender issues around Manning.

emhart 13y ago
I was hoping to send this piece to my Mother, as we've had long, frustrating conversations about each of the people mentioned in the article, but hesitated for that very reason. Then, just now reading your comment, realized that my hesitation is actually a desire on my part not to fight a battle on two fronts. But. It's worth the fight. Sending her the article and I might even stop in for dinner and start the conversation fresh tonight.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

You have to be very careful here about the argument that you're making. If you're effectively saying that any individual has free reign to do whatever they desire with trade secrets, sensitive diplomatic information, and whatnot because of a moral injury they may feel the system is giving them, then you've effectively destroyed any form of organized human activity that involves trust or secrets. Here's why: people get morally offended at all kinds of bullshit. It's totally dependent on the individual as to what pushes their buttons. So yes, good people in bad systems do really bad things. Lots of Nazis were working boring jobs as part of the system that exterminated millions of people. But as a society we generally do not hold these people accountable for such actions. After WWII most of those folks kept right on working boring jobs, this time rebuilding the country instead of operating concentration camps. Whether or not those people are supposed to feel guilt or revulsion at their own actions is a moral question -- a question between each of them and their own standard of what the universe expects of them. Confusing personal decisions with public ones is a good way to muddle your thinking.

mattmanser 13y ago
He's not even making the argument you're suggesting, he's simply trying to explain why the media has such a hard time explaining the motivation behind the whistleblowers and why they end up circumventing chain of command.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  No, he doesn't explain that. There's just some hand waving about "the bureaucracy" and "the system". I think it does a disservice to the many real whistleblowers who believe (often correctly) that by working within the system, or at least by working outside it without breaking the law, they can effect meaningful change. He makes no attempt to explain just what "evil" Manning was fighting by passing along essentially random classified diplomatic traffic, or why Snowden might have felt morally justified in leaking secrets about U.S. spying on strategic competitors. This was not the Pentagon Papers.
- DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  "You have to be very careful..." Not the author of the piece. People in general, i.e. the HN community

kijin 13y ago

> David Brooks made a case for why he thought Snowden was wrong to leak information about the Prism surveillance program ... “For society to function well,” he wrote, “there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things.” The complaint is eerily parallel to one from a case discussed in “Moral Mazes,” where ... the complaint against the accountant by the other managers of his company was that “by insisting on his own moral purity … he eroded the fundamental trust and understanding that makes cooperative managerial work possible.” Welcome to the hyper-individualistic, hyper-critical, post-communitarian world, where neither tradition nor any existing social institution is taken for granted. Everything is now open to critical scrutiny, and nothing that fails such scrutiny will receive anyone's respect. Gone are the days when "institutions", "common procedures" and "cooperative managerial work", for example, were universally agreed to be valuable things in themselves. Now they need to prove their own worth, or else. Because if they have no intrinsic moral worth, you can't blame others for eroding them. I don't know whether there really is such a thing as Generation W, but if Snowden and Swartz are its holotypes, then I have rather high hopes for it. Not because I expect a whole lot of whistleblowing in the foreseeable future, nor because I think they're particularly interested in politics (they probably aren't), but because they're probably the first generation to ascribe absolutely no intrinsic moral worth to the "System" in "Systemic Evil". The System, whether it's a corrupt industry, a corrupt three-letter agency, or your country, has finally lost the romantic halo ascribed to it by traditional assumptions. It has revealed itself to be just another social convention with some (in fact, lots of) instrumental value but zero intrinsic value. The baby boomers, of course, also had their moment of subversiveness in the form of the civil rights movement. But the U.S. in the 60s and 70s was affluent and egalitarian enough to leave them with lifetime jobs, nice suburban homes, and enough money to watch Fox News on their four-foot TVs for the remainder of their retirement. Those perks are now gone, and with it the last traces of the System's romantic halo. All that is left is a rotting social infrastructure with questionable instrumental value at best. So perhaps for the first time in human history, a large number of people are now mentally prepared to judge the "System" solely on its instrumental value. Instead of asking whether or not their actions will help preserve the System, people can now honestly ask whether certain portions of the System are worth preserving in the first place. Gen W is like the theoretical physicist in that famous story who, when asked how his research contributes to national defense, replies that his research makes the nation worth defending. Only sometimes, it might not be worth defending. Or perhaps even worth destroying. It is no surprise that the Obama administration has a reputation for prosecuting more whistleblowers than (nearly?) every other administration before it. Previous administrations had no need for massive prosecutions, the population behaved itself. But the population won't behave anymore. The only psychological bias that kept them at bay has dissolved away, and I suspect that it's gone for good. And like a lot of people who have warm fuzzy feelings about Snowden, I think that this quiet but irreversible change in humanity's sociopolitical lookout will turn out to be a Very Good Thing (tm) in the long term. Another superstition trampled under the relentless feet of reason.

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detcader 13y ago

Skimming the article I see no mention of COINTELPRO, of which these programs are no doubt a continuation of at least spiritually. This would make sense given that this is the NY Times, and bringing up COINTELPRO would perhaps force them to admit racial/xenophobic dimensions and roots to these recent revelations (e.g. the USG's history of targeting civil rights and anti-war activism), instead of white guys fighting for other white guys' iPad Privacy.. >Swartz argued that it was sometimes necessary to break the rules that required obedience to the system in order to avoid systemic evil. That paragraph would have been a perfect place in which to touch on the Church Committee and its origins. Does the author even know about it? Honestly, most people with social power and influence don't seem to care about the revelations because they don't. They have nothing on the line -- their rights will never be threatened, nor will government programs like the endless War on Terror ever affect them (in ways that they will understand; "blowback" is evidently too intricate of a concept for most). Could that be because they're white men? Perish the thought

coldcode 13y ago

Plato said "The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."

gruseom 13y ago
I doubt that Plato said that.
- tptacek 13y ago
  Misquoted. According to Respectfully Quoted, this maxim is unverified. In fact, however, it is drawn from Plato's Republic. Paul Shorey offers a literal translation: "But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule" (Book 1, Section 347c). Since Plato specifically addresses those unwilling to govern (), rather than those who are simply indifferent, the accurate translation unfortunately does not apply as broadly to think-tank work as the misquotation does.
  - gruseom 13y ago
    Thanks! The fact that there's a path back to the original makes that one less spurious than it sounded. There was quite a good article recently about how quotes turn into misquotes and eventually proverbs: http://www.chronicle.com/article/Who-Really-Said-That-/141559/ http://www.chronicle.com/article/Who-Really-Said-That-/14155... There are basically three kinds of Wrongly Attributed Statements. WAS I is an adaptation or composite of a statement or statements from someone or several people, who may or may not be famous. WAS II is a statement that was uttered, as is, by someone, often not famous, that has come to be widely attributed to someone else, invariably more famous. WAS III was never uttered by anyone, at least not that we know of. So this was a WAS I. :) Edit: Actually, this article is better than quite good. It's the best one I've seen on the topic and quite fun and one could even call it definitive. Edit 2: Ok, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6445595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6445595.

washedup 13y ago

"Systems are optimized for their own survival and preventing the system from doing evil may well require breaking with organizational niceties, protocols or laws. It requires stepping outside of one’s assigned organizational role. The chief executive is not in a better position to recognize systemic evil than is a middle level manager or, for that matter, an IT contractor. Recognizing systemic evil does not require rank or intelligence, just honesty of vision." It is natural for ALL systems, whether a political organization, company, terrorist organization, and even biological entities, to fight change and keep the system in tact. We are now at a point where we can critically assess our social organizations from a humanistic perspective and ask if they are really adding value or not. It is very, very exciting. Also scary.

anandabits 13y ago

It's nice to see discussion in mainstream media applying Arendt to the policies and practices of the United States. I've been talking about this for some time now. Spreading awareness of how institutional behavior can lead to evil actions is extremely important. We have learned a lot about power, evil, oppression, etc since the structure of the modern democratic state was created. We can and need to do much better.

tptacek 13y ago

Manipulative. For instance: * The article's entire coverage of Manning revolves around a single incident involving the detention of 15 Iraqis. But that's not all Manning did, despite the wording of the article. Manning fell afoul of the law by haphazardly collecting and releasing to a stranger on the Internet far more documents than any person could possibly have reviewed, many of which had no public interest implications. * The article cites the case of Jeremy Hammond, convicted for hacking and dumping Stratfor. Ludlow famously supports Hammond's actions. But Hammond didn't leak secrets he knew were in the public interest. He picked an organization whose politics he disagreed with, attacked them, and helped circulate the credit card numbers of its subscribers to the Internet. The clear message being sent by Hammond's inclusion in the article is that he is of a kind with Manning, Snowden, and Swartz. The only thing his case has in common with the others is that they they share some of the same political motivations. * The article does the same thing with John Kiriakou, asserting as axiomatic the idea that Kiriakou was motivated by the public interest. But Kiriakou didn't become a "whistleblower" until that label became convenient to his defense, after it became apparent that his conversations with journalists, which related to a book he was selling, had outed an agent who had been in deep cover for over 20 years. I'm left with a disquieting conclusions about the way proponents of Ludlow think: so long as the accused share your politics, it's more important for society to empathize with their motivations than with their decisions and actions. That's what people who blow up abortion clinics think. I'm also a little worried about the phenomenon of generating public support for any mass leak by working with the media to promote those leaked documents that are most interesting/entertaining/important, while working to thwart any effort to evaluate the impact of the leak as a whole. Call it "Greenwaldism", which feeds a careful drip of calculated outrage and then harnesses it to attack anyone who points out any accompanying documents that might have caused harm by their disclosure.

jgroszko 13y ago
I'd be curious to hear why you make a distinction between leaking for the public interest and leaking because of a disagreement with an organization's politics? Presumably most people hold their political views because they believe they believe those views are in the best public interest?

EGreg 13y ago

This is why we have checks and balances between three branches of government -- to make sure no one branch gets too much leeway to get disconnected from what everyone else thinks is ok. Similarly, people set up governments for societies but they also have a culture, and an idea of what is "beyond the pale". An insular culture can slowly become disconnected from the rest of the people, even in government which gets feedback through voting and other limited means. Thus, individuals possessing a "moral sense" who are hired to work in the government may in fact engage in whistleblowing. Governments recognize this and many offer limited protections to this activity. Of course, if they are too far gone in how much they disconnect from the people's preferences, then they might seek to screen heavily when hiring new people, to make sure they don't have this "liability". And thus make themselves even more insular. At the end of the day, SECRECY is the source of many of the problems. Secret laws and secret courts like FISA which sometimes complain that they are being lied to by the executive branch -- but only during fortuitous court case does it even come to light. Or this: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/the-secret-memo-that-explains-why-obama-can-kill-americans/246004/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/the-secr... ... nothing changed in the last two years. I am a liberal and I really liked Obama, but I despise his administration's stance on secrecy, and foreign policy, because it sets a terrible precedent. Compare: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOp...

mark212 13y ago

You'll forgive me if I don't put reading someone's email on the same moral plane as the premeditated murder of 12 million people during the Holocaust.

cappsjulian 13y ago

"a statement about what happens when people play their 'proper' roles within a system, following prescribed conduct with respect to that system, while remaining blind to the moral consequences of what the system was doing — or at least compartmentalizing and ignoring those consequences." Like Todd in Breaking Bad, who is in fact a neo-nazi.

jonmrodriguez 13y ago

I think this otherwise-great article is weakened by its praise of Manning. Unlike the heroic Snowden, Manning leaked an enormous bulk of documents that she didn't actually review in detail, which showed little to no wrongdoing relative to the bulk of the texts leaked. This seems useless, reckless, and spiteful. http://www.quora.com/Chelsea-formerly-PFC-Bradley-Manning/Is-PFC-Chelsea-Manning-a-hero-or-is-she-a-villain-Why/answer/Jon-Davis-10 http://www.quora.com/Chelsea-formerly-PFC-Bradley-Manning/Is...