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.
>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?
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.
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".
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.
Are you arguing that because voting was involved, the majority of Americans thus must approve of the things the government claims it doesn't do and/or would never voluntarily reveal?
The press is a hugely important part of democracy, because it's their job (in theory, anyway) to keep the populace informed of what their government is actually doing in their names, vs. what they claim to be doing.
If the government is lying about what they're doing (and doing things that are contrary to principals they're pretending to uphold), whistleblowers are necessary.
I agree that if you live in a democracy, you're going to sometimes disagree with policies the majority things are fine. If I think legal abortion is evil but politicians who explicitly support it are elected, I should not "exert more leverage" by threatening to detonate a dirty bomb if the laws are not changed in 72 hours.
Whistleblowing is different -- it's the act of revealing information that was intentionally hidden from the public. Certainly, it may be breaking laws (and the laws may in general be justified!); that doesn't mean the whistleblower's decision is automatically wrong, or that they're cheating the normal democratic process. On the contrary, in most examples they're exposing others who are cheating (by hiding pertinent information from voters, thus affecting their votes).
> 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.
Your (inevitably imperfect) democracy has also decided the facts of malfeasance to be peachy keen, so that's hardly a justification.
That is the core question: at what point does the conservative argument for safety/caution lose its justifying power in the face of the complete and total ineffectiveness of the normal, organized, accepted methods of dissent and change? At what point has the system so blithely steamrolled its opposition that revolutionary action becomes right?
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.