When Chelsea Manning was arrested, Daniel Ellsberg would remind everyone that the stuff he leaked had a higher classification than whatever Manning leaked.
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is a great documentary about him.
Fun fact: Mike Gravel was an Alaskan senator. When he heard Daniel had the papers, he convinced Daniel to send them to him. Then Gravel went on a filibuster to prevent funding of the Vietnam war, and he chose to read the Pentagon papers aloud in the filibuster. By doing so, he ensured that they would legally be accessible to the public, because they were now part of the congressional record.
This sort of political courage is sorely lacking nowadays. Instead we get ersatz versions of it, where lawmakers claim ignorance of or incompetence to assess facts already in the public sphere, while damning their political opponents on the basis of documents whose existence is merely rumored by unspecified individuals whose whereabouts have been unknown for years.
The Obama Administration absolutely persecuted the shit out of any and all whistleblowers and journalism sources. His use of the Espionage Act was absolutely unprecedented.
If you think people lack courage, you don't have to look far as to why.
Reading Pegasus[0] about Nso groups 0 click exploits used against any dissident journalists in regimes like Morocco, saudi arabia, (was on khashoggi and his partners phones), mexico, france, everywhere. the only thing protecting any of us is those with enough money to purchase software like pegasus don't deem us worthy of the license fee.
Soon as anyone rises above that fee your phone is basically live reporting to anyone with enough money. Doesn't lead to a restful nights sleep that book. They fricken built a turing machine out of pdf interpreter components to escape the encapsulation/vm for incoming files.[1]
Exactly. Now the system essentially filters out all the honest and/or courageous candidates before they even get to the primaries. Any candidate you hear about is almost certainly a compromised individual who can be 100% controlled by the corporate elite. The 'evil puppet' selection process is so pervasive, it has spread beyond government and through many large companies. I think many of us have experienced this. If you're an honest person, you will be punished for it. On the other hand, if you show that you're a cheater and a liar, you will be rewarded and will progress through the system.
I remember several moments in my career when a boss or an investor literally tested me to see if I was a cheater. I suspect I failed these tests and it's why I wasn't promoted and why I didn't receive funding.
It used to be that elite status was acquired through bravery, intelligence and integrity, but these days, not only are elites not self-made, they are actually selected for having the exact opposite characteristics.
Ok so in this case he was not a moral person but at least it sounds like he may have had the other two characteristics.
I think a major difference between now and then is that the world was a far more adverse and chaotic place for many reasons; people died frequently from all sorts of diseases, there were more wars and invasions, traveling to other countries was potentially life-threatening (e.g. you could be killed by the natives or succumb to previously unknown threats like exotic diseases, spiders, snakes, lions, tigers, poisonous plants, etc... Not to mention the substantial difficulties involved in communicating with locals in a foreign language). There really wasn't any support or fallback if one's plans failed; you would just die, no second chances.
The elite of today couldn't hold a candle to those who came before them. Today, they're mostly a bunch of spoiled brats who inherited a lot of wealth and never faced any real adversity in their lives (which wasn't of their own making to begin with)...
> FDR’s grandfather made his fortune selling opium in China.
Horrible as that sounds, think about it from the other side's perspective. The one-way trade of silver was putting huge strain on the global economy. Opium was the _only_ thing people in China would buy with silver (illegally, obviously). They didn't have alternatives as China wouldn't circulate silver back out of the country. What Warren Delano was doing was in most nations' interest at the time.
Heavy trade imbalances almost invariably lead to wars throughout history.
They tend to be evened out in aggregate with different imports/exports. Also we're not talking an apples to apples comparison here.
Back then economies were extremely dependent on silver for international trade and only so much of it came from so many places every year. Trade depended on recirculation of silver.
The closest you could get to that today would be one country hoarding the shit out of US dollars and somehow the US being unable to print more.
If you look back to the 90s/00s when the US was heavily importing from China and China had no local buying power, the trade imbalance was combatted by the US Treasury creating debt instruments for exclusive buying by China. This diplomatic/economic tool benefited both sides at the time.
It's not binary: bosses and investors want to know who will obey the rules as you see them for a variety of reasons. They'll fund / promote based on the needs of the projects you will likely face.
Very little has actually changed about the quality of politicians in the US. People are just prone to forgetting the bad. Not that long ago - the 1970s - the south was overflowing with ignorant, racist politicians that were outright fans of the KKK and aggressively pro segregation. And so on it goes if you keep going backwards in time.
What has primarily changed is the quantity of levers and how massive the levers are at their disposal. The surface area of potential corruption has radically expanded in the US over the post WW2 era (part of that expansion of power was the military industrial complex and the superpower bureaucracy that went along with it). The larger and more complex the government, the more laws it has on the books to utilize, the greater the corruption, inevitably.
Oh, and now every idiot has easy access to an epic scale bullhorn via social media. That's amplifying the stupid, which would not have received much press time or public discourse time in past generations.
I might catch heat for this, but I disagree. I am an investigative reporter who covers law enforcement and crime. While I have uncovered and exposed serious wrongdoing, my general experience is that an overwhelming majority of those in power are decent human beings who are trying their best to improve the communities they serve.
I often receive tips from police officers regarding what they perceive to be misconduct. I always investigate those tips.
Sometimes, it's bad. And sometimes it's really bad. But oftentimes, it turns out that everything was fine, and the tipster didn't have all the information necessary to understand what was happening. I'd be happy to share an example if you'd like.
I am not an apologist for bad actors. I have exposed them and I am will continue to do so. But I have to acknowledge my full experience. I interact with government officials and agencies every day, and the more insight I have into government, the more confident I am that power does not corrupt nearly as much as some people think.
I think the more accurate way to interpret that proverb is: The pursuit of power corrupts.
It's a warning that if your goal is having power and nothing else then you are susceptible to corruption. It's also a warning that having power tends to reveal how useful it is and thus tempt you to schedule more of it.
I think it's more likely to be the case that only the corrupted are given any power so it is an inversion of cause and effect.
The idea that power corrupts is probably just a narrative to demoralize people so that they don't bother revolting... No point changing the system because, look, whoever you give power to will become corrupted and it will all have been pointless. It's nonsense. If it were the case, then the degree of corruption would be proportional to the degree of power held by various governments... Yet clearly it is not.
What probably happens though is that there are some very corrupt people in power who attentively watch any political movement and they take steps to corrupt them by infiltrating them up with corrupt individuals under their control... That way when these political movements reach their climaxes, they have completely deviated from their original course and have become totally ineffective as a political tool for change.
I think that's oversimplification. The chase for power and then continued effort to hold one might, but there are very few cases where some perfectly honest individual is suddenly given massive amount of power.
Even inheritance can be argued as the kid was most likely raised by corrupted individual in the first place.
Ellsberg initially stood to spend the rest of his life in prison, with the max penalty for what he was charged with of being 115 years. And with something this big, the possibility of him never even making it to trial would certainly have crossed his mind. And he had no way of really knowing how any of this would work out. Courage is about doing something because it's right, in spite of potentially severe consequences. Without that latter component, you're just being a decent human being.
Ellsberg himself has commented on this extensively as well. Wiki [1] mentions moment where he finally decided to do it:
--------------
[Ellsberg] experienced an epiphany attending a War Resisters League conference at Haverford College in August 1969, listening to a speech given by a draft resister named Randy Kehler, who said he was "very excited" that he would soon be able to join his friends in prison.[12]
Ellsberg described his reaction:
And he said this very calmly. I hadn't known that he was about to be sentenced for draft resistance. It hit me as a total surprise and shock, because I heard his words in the midst of actually feeling proud of my country listening to him. And then I heard he was going to prison. It wasn't what he said exactly that changed my worldview. It was the example he was setting with his life. How his words in general showed that he was a stellar American, and that he was going to jail as a very deliberate choice – because he thought it was the right thing to do. There was no question in my mind that my government was involved in an unjust war that was going to continue and get larger. Thousands of young men were dying each year. I left the auditorium and found a deserted men's room. I sat on the floor and cried for over an hour, just sobbing. The only time in my life I've reacted to something like that.[citation needed]
Decades later, reflecting on Kehler's decision, Ellsberg said:
Randy Kehler never thought his going to prison would end the war. If I hadn't met Randy Kehler it wouldn't have occurred to me to copy [the Pentagon Papers]. His actions spoke to me as no mere words would have done. He put the right question in my mind at the right time.
The New Yorker has a short overview[1]. The ACLU has a more complete list[2]. The American Prospect and Cato Institute have some articles if you search around, but I'm not a huge fan of their work.
The top hits for 'Obama whistleblowers' for me are from Time, Politico, The New Yorker and The Nation. I don't see a conservative-leaning site (Cato) until the middle of the third page of results...
it's really interesting where this comes from, and why this seems to some such an easy "gotcha".
first off, that these come up doesn't mean they're wrong, though it does likely mean they're shallow.
more deeply, this is an old, well-known dynamic often decried by the left. the left will dig deeper into often pretty obvious social dysfunctions and pioneer a social critique, analyzing the political and economic structures and systems that underpin it, and turn it into a challenge to existing authorities. This challenge is complicated, it hinges on teaching you political economy first, before it can even start to tell you what the systemic problem actually is. but it touches on real problems people feel every day.
The conservatives make a media thing out of it. Now, mass media, forever, has made their money by selling your prejudices back to you; from entertainment to news, they all basically work this way. Conservatives work this way as well (making for that sweet synergy between the two): it takes a run-down, stripped-down, dumbed-down version of the criticism, strips all political economy analysis from it (can't have them blame capitalism!), frinds some easy scarecrow figures - Gates, Soros, whoever (not that they're not horrible people, but that's not the point really), ascribes "debauchery and corruption" to them (because then the SYSTEM is fine).
In the end, when people then google the problems, they find these easy stories, which makes them associate the identification of the problem with these dumbed-down assaults. Then even mentioning the problem becomes that.
I agree that the "Obama war on whistleblowers" is shallow, and that is a more accurate statement of what I was trying to convey. A "red-meat" "feels good to hate" story than any actual news.
Conservatives will document how a lack of principles means that a mechanism in society will converge to something damaging, to have Progressives shout about how they’re “istaphobes” without that even being a relevant complaint.
They’re particularly vicious about that when conservatives point out that the proposed systemic solution converges to a breakdown in society or worsening of the situation — eg, trying to use systemic bigotry to “solve” systemic bigotry.
These shallow bullying articles get spread around a network of blogs, small media outlets, YouTube channels, etc. and then dominate search results.
I'm curious, what would be some examples where conservatives warned that some "lack of principles" would lead to a "breakdown of society," and were actually correct? Certainly not same sex marriage, abortion, or any thing that conservatives have fought against during my lifetime.
It sounds, to me, a lot like the "degenerate" label that the Nazis loved to throw around.
I gave one in my post — using systemic racism to “fix” historic damage from racism hasn’t worked and has worsened the problem over the past few decades: the failure to follow principles (ie, equality) has resulted in bad outcomes. We see the same problem with systemic misandry in education: sexism in schools is now worse than when Title IX was enacted.
They were also correct about the problems with social welfare destroying families and lax enforcement leading to a breakdown of cities, eg Seattle and San Francisco downtowns.
> It sounds, to me, a lot like the "degenerate" label that the Nazis loved to throw around.
Implying that I’m a Nazi while failing to address the specific example in my original post is exactly the bad faith responses we’re discussing in this thread. That kind of shallow ad hominem is corrosive to meaningful dialog.
You click on the downvote arrow. However, you need to have sufficient karma for the downvote arrow to appear. You do not appear to have passed this threshold yet.
Also, if this was not a honest question but just a rethorical one: please read and take to heart the HN guidelines [1]. Essential part: It is better to explain why you disagree with the parent poster than to post snarky comments that do not contribute to the discussion.
In a democratic system, civilians take responsibility for the actions of their military, and if the military conscripts are being used for stupid foreign war games, the civilians step in to change the political leadership that authorized that idiocy via the democratic process. Of course, America is no longer a democracy, it's a kleptocratic oligarchy in which the politicians are little more than puppets of their billionaire donors, so that system has been short-circuited.
> You can be ordered to take chemicals or medications which have not been FDA approved, and you can be put in jail for refusing.
It's sort of like that and not at the same time. Under the UCMJ, refusing a lawful order can put you in the brig, or a variety of punishments applied (NJP, loss of rank, loss of pay, etc.). Under most circumstances, forcing a service member to ingest an unknown drug is not a lawful order. Under official civilian authority you can be highly encouraged to take an untested vaccine or some such, and refusal, while not disobeying a lawful order, can end up with you receiving unpleasant treatment. (You are there under contract for a set period of time, after all, so a long period of time of unpleasant treatment can be motivation enough to do things you wouldn't normally want to do.)
I was able to avoid the anthrax vaccine around 2000 by refusing to sign a waiver. I ended up getting transferred to a new command shortly thereafter which was scheduled long before this anthrax vaccine situation, but I can't be certain that there were going to be any repercussions regardless of my decision because most of my fellow service members at that time were unwilling to be test subjects as well.
>most of my fellow service members at that time were unwilling to be test subjects as well.
The information I have been able to find suggests that anthrax vaccine refusal rates were very low.
"An analysis of active-duty personnel deployed in an area potentially at risk to biological warfare reported just 5 out of 10,000 soldiers refusing the anthrax vaccine. Most of these cases were personnel that did not desire to stay in the military. While official records of total vaccine refusals are not available, it was reported that Pentagon statements estimated 350 servicemembers had refused the vaccine between 1998 and 2000."
> The UCMJ was established by the United States Congress in accordance with their constitutional authority, per Article I, Section 8, which provides that "The Congress shall have Power . . . to make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval forces" of the United States.
Not their human rights, but many of their civil rights, yes.
A good example - the Sikh believe that men should maintain their beards, and should wear a specific head covering. Freedom of religion/expression laws in the US prevent schools, or public institutions, from requiring those men to remove their head coverings or to shave. However, for the longest time, Sikhs who wanted to serve in the US armed forces had to chose between being religiously observant,or being eligible to serve (saying "no" in boot camp when they come by with the clippers does not a happy career make).
Even now, there's a dispensation for Sikhs, but in times of war/necessity, that goes out the window. (Tangent - the reason the armed forces have facial hair regs for men is a) conformity but also b) so that gas masks/CBRN protective gear can get a good face seal. Additionally, and this sounds dumb but it's true...helmets aren't designed for people to have a lot of hair under them, which is something women in combat conditions she had to encounter as well)
No, the difference is Ellsberg came forward to make his case and accept the consequences. He expected to spend the rest of his life in prison, and beloved that it was worth it.
Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner both accepted the consequences, by that measure. William Binney attempted to go through channels, with little success.
Snowden (veteran though acting in a civilian role) has had far more impact.
What Ellsberg and Snowden both managed to do was to make the story compelling and the information unescapable.
Consequences (your argument) or civillian status (raised elsewhere) are both exceedingly red herrings.
While I admire the principle in some ways, why would deciding to become a martyr make an important difference?
Both took a courageous step in leaking documents they knew could lead to their execution for simple moral convictions. That alone makes them more alike than not to me.
lol, there is no difference. They both did things that benefited the public and should be celebrated for it. There is no "but". The military state has goals that are not aligned with your well being and making moral choices based on what the killing machine declares secret makes no sense.
> You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.
The full quote is much more impactful and is something I come back to when I think about more mundane things like moving up in roles in a company:
> “Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.
> “I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even _existed_. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.
> “First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.
> “You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t….and that all those _other_ people are fools.
> “Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the _New York Times_ can. But that takes a while to learn.
> “In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to _learn_ from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And _that_ mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues….and with myself.
> “You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.”
> ….Kissinger hadn’t interrupted this long warning. As I’ve said, he could be a good listener, and he listened soberly. He seemed to understand that it was heartfelt, and he didn’t take it as patronizing, as I’d feared. But I knew it was too soon for him to appreciate fully what I was saying. He didn’t have the clearances yet.
This is making a strong argument that the more highly classified a piece of information is, the more likely it is to be bullshit, because the fewer people who know the subject matter have had the opportunity to dispute it.
Naturally human nature is to think the opposite, that the most highly protected secrets have been carefully evaluated because they're so important, when the relationship is actually the inverse.
Maybe there should be a maximum period of time that any given information can remain classified, and maybe it should be short.
Many types of information do not require any experts to validate it.
Person X committed crime Y.
Prime minister blah is having an affair with bleh.
There is a secret base at location T studying V.
Most pieces of juicy information aren’t like secret scientific studies for anti gravity machines. They are just mundane things with excitement because of who is doing them and who it’s happening to.
It's all still susceptible to the same principle. You think Prime Minister Blah is having an affair because the French translators with the highest clearance you're using haven't been watching a particular children's television show and so are unknowingly mistranslating the references to it in the transcript. If the tape had been released on the internet some schoolteacher in Canada would have pointed that out.
You’re overthinking it. Information is rarely that complex. “Here’s footage from a hidden camera in a private jet of a prime minister banging his mistress”.
Information is always that complex. "Intelligence" is a bunch of rumors and innuendo that get mushed together into an analyst's report.
Even when you have what you believe to be incontrovertible evidence, because this is spy shit you have the possibility of a foreign intelligence service finding your hidden camera and using it to feed you whatever they like. And the fewer eyes you have on it, the less likely you are to discover the inconsistency with reality.
But… all of the things you mention, like much in life, are susceptible to misinterpretation.
Do you know, or does it just appear that way to the best of your knowledge. The black/blue, or white/gold, dress is a good example of seeing something doesn’t make it true, or false.
The much bigger, much more critical, secret is knowing someone did something because you, or more likely someone under your direct command, was involved in the action. In which case the secret is the culpability more than the action itself.
The experts in this case are the analysts whose job is trying to figure out the sorts of things you mentioned from intel that’s almost always patchy, misleading, simply wrong, gathered from different, often conflicting sources. Sure, there’s also a lot of simple factual information, but the juiciest, most classified parts are likely intel reports that are by necessity a result of interpretation.
I think it’s so true - I remember when I first read that and suddenly huge amounts of geopolitics and political decision-making suddenly made sense.
Unfortunately, I feel that a lot of political leaders, bureaucrats, intelligence analysts, etc. never reach that stage of realising that much of our intelligence is mistaken, wrong, incomplete, misleading etc. - so they’re always operating in that ‘can’t learn from anybody who isn’t in the club, just pretend to listen while immediately dismissing anything they have to say, no matter their expertise’ stage… And it affects democracy too - from their perspective, why listen to the will of the people, because they don’t know what we know.
And let this be a warning whenever you read something from an unnamed ‘intelligence source’ or ‘Government source’ in the press…
> “Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the _New York Times_ can. But that takes a while to learn.
This is a part that would be good to remember in UFO discussions. You have no idea of what supposedly all this secret information about UFOs are, or about the context that is being suppressed, or even how much there is as opposed to Chinese whispers recirculating the same exact original datum, wikiception-style, slowly rising from some garbage better discarded to 'the intelligence community has reports'...
Thank you for sharing that. It's a beautiful set of ideas. I read it aloud to my wife and we're talking about it now the implications for all knowledge levels. Fascinating thing to share.
And used every resource he had available at the time to discredit him.
People telling the truth are anathema to people trying to take advantage of them.
Niall Ferguson had a more balanced view of Kissinger than Christopher Hitchens.
He was not an honorable man.
He's advocated for an AI arms race, written a biography praising Nixon, and I find his view on foreign policy just as dishonorable as in the 70's, it just has less influence these days.
The next time I encounter a genuinely intelligent person "debunking" a conspiracy theory because it "is" "impossible" to keep a secret among too many people I'm going to post a link to this and then observe how they post-hoc rationalize to protect their locally generated version of reality.
I think all corruption ultimately runs on ignorance of this simple phenomenon.
As someone afflicted with holding on to junk that might be useful someday, myself, I often pity Trump on the matter of the “boxes.”
It’s so clear that he has 1) desperately insecure compulsions to exploit information asymmetries, but also 2) a shallow bombastic character that probably rarely ever has had access to truly advantageous facts or the subtlety to effectively exploit them.
All the little glimpses into his overactive engagement with those boxes are so intimate and so pathetic. Stepping down from all those secrets beyond even what he always suspected other people had squirreled away, but also that he hasn’t been able to exploit like he always assumed he would…
It’s just a sad sad scene. Well, and also very embarrassingly stupid.
People who think they know everything and don't realize their blind spots are big enough to drive a semi through... that's the national intelligence agencies for you. I mean how can you know everything? What scientist would ever claim to know everything? That's the kind of BS you feed to politicians to make them afraid of you, I suppose.
I met Ellsberg when I attended a live recording of the podcast Philosophy Talk in 2019. It was called "The Doomsday Doctrine", it was about the policy of mutually assured distruction. I remember he talked about the difference between "their bomb is in the air, so we're launching" and "their bomb has exploded, we're launching". Politicians vacillate between the two, when history shows us that they are very, very different. Airplanes and bombers encourage the latter, while missile silos encourage the former. This makes missile silos a severe liability, as they encourage first-steike launches.
I remember talking to him briefly after the talk. It impressed me how decisive, opinionated, and well-thought-out he was, at his age.
He liked my T-shirt, which said "Statistics means never having to say you're certain."
I'm glad I got a chance to meet such an important and positive figure in US history.
If anyone has not read Ellsberg’s 2017 book “The Doomsday Machine”, I highly recommend it. It covers his work and knowledge regarding potential nuclear war within US policy which was the main reason he wanted to become a whistleblower. Within the book he discuses numerous problems with US command and control procedures for launching nuclear attacks and even calls the movie “Dr. Strangelove” a “documentary” (tongue in cheek) because of its satirical yet accurate highlighting of these issues. It’s a captivating, informative, and frightening book.
His story about his attempted nuclear whistleblowing is pretty amazing.
Aside from the Pentagon Papers he copied thousands of pages on US nuclear war doctrine, which was horrific. Decided to release the Pentagon Papers first, because he figured nobody would even care about them in the wake of the nuclear documents. Hid them in a black plastic bag on the edge of the town dump, then a freak storm washed that whole section of the dump down a hill. He and his brother spent a year looking for it and finally gave up.
He said his wife considered the storm a gift from God, because he certainly would have gone to prison for life if he'd released that stuff.
The really shocking (at the time!) part of that book is not just the level of destruction, but the fact that any small number of bombers or a rogue commander could have started the entire process off. It is an absolute miracle we survived the cold war. It's hard to imagine we would survive it twice.
Worth noting that UK nukes apparently don't have PALs - the crews of the UK Trident submarines have all they need to launch. Of course, being the UK the ultimate guidance on what to do if Radio 4 goes off air (thus civilisation ending) is in the form of hand written letters!
The Guardian reported in 2016 that the options are said to include: "Put yourself under the command of the United States, if it is still there", "Go to Australia", "Retaliate", or "Use your own judgement". The actual option chosen remains known only to the writer of the letter.
Well.. if there's any truth to that reporting whatsoever.. blimey....
I second that recommendation. I'd also highly recommend Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser, which discusses similar C&C issues as well as nuclear accidents, and efforts to efforts to make nukes safer and more reliable e.g. PALs and insensitive explosives, and more and it inter-cuts with the story of an "incident" at a Titan missile silo in Arkansas.
Honestly, that book was pretty meh. I liked Schlosser’s earlier work, but you could have summed up command and control in about 40 pages.
I’d recommend “Soldiers of Reason”, which is about the RAND corporation and the thought process behind the madness.
Hearing about how military bureaucracy does stupid and incompetent things is a given… understanding how a lunatic like LeMay was in charge of and restrained from initiating a global apocalypse is more enlightening, if not terrifying.
...and for some lighter reading, anything by James Mahaffey, in particular the "Atomic Accidents". Both insightful - and bizzarely entertaining to read.
"The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts.
I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to."
He also notes that Finland would have been completely destroyed by the US strike and 100 million would die in Western Europe from the effects of US weapons.
> "The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts.
In retort - "Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks."
Another scary thing in that book is the delegation of use of nuclear weapons to relatively junior commanders - the public statement that only the US president can authorise the use of nuclear weapons being completely untrue at the time.
That is probably why Ellsberg referred to Dr Strangelove as a documentary...
Ellsberg very eloquently articulated the fallacy that juniors were less trustworthy. I don't think their junior status is an issue. I think perhaps the bigger concern is their quantity. I'll leave it to probability and game theory experts to discuss whether it is better or worse to have more people capable of wielding such a weapon.
I wonder if it's still true. I'd assume there still has to be some delegation in order to keep a second strike viable, otherwise the entire nuclear arsenal can be rendered useless with a decapitation strike, or the person with the 'nuclear football' jumps off a bridge or something.
I can only presume there's some delegation of authority still, in case of circumstances like that. The Russians can delegate command authority to a system called "Perimetr" [1], which uses sensors to detect nuclear detonations to ensure a second strike can be (correctly) launched. Still doesn't give me that warm and fussy feeling inside knowing that there's either a rogue system or rogue commander that can launch.
What's interesting about that system is the question of the motivation - it ensures a nuclear holocaust even in the event of a decapitation strike, but it also was said that it could give 'command elements' time to consider to not retaliate in the event of false alarms etc. so that "cooler heads" might prevail.
In the relevant timescale the Soviets were far less of a strategic threat to the US than they would later become. However, they did have lots of weapons pointed at Western Europe.
In many respect the Soviet leadership was terrified of the West and a first strike - later it was Reagan who was eventually persuaded of what a risk that fear was and de-escalated.
Different yes, less catastrophic no. Soviet plans (to the extent that they've been declassified) generally assumed that nuclear weapons would be used in support of tank warfare in Europe.
I read "To win a nuclear war: the Pentagon's secret war plans" by Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod last summer. I had thought I was very well-informed on military matters, WW2 history, nuclear strategy and SIOP. After almost every chapter, I would look up at the ceiling or out a nearby window and think that a madness had overcome the US government and military after acquiring and using the atomic bomb against Japan. This weaponry combined with the apoplectic fear of the USSR and communism has shaped the modern world in ways that are hard to overestimate.
I think that it should be required reading at all the US military academies.
OK, the media overwhelmingly mentions his activist achievements. But, can I point out it is the same Daniel Ellsberg as in "The Ellsberg paradox" [0]?
I have an urn with 30 red balls and 30 green balls. You can pick a color, and you get 10$ if you guessed the next ball I pull out of the urn correctly.
Alternatively, I have another urn with an unknown amount of red and green balls in them. You could also choose to use this urn with a color of your choice, if you want?
Which of these 4 options do you pick?
It turns out that people overwhelmingly prefer the first urn. They have an aversion to epistemic uncertainty, even though from utility theory, all 4 options are equivalent. Even weirder, if we would have played this game repeatedly, the second urn is clearly preferable. Then why do we have this intuition?
The experiment from his paper is slightly different and (in my opinion) harder to understand, but the sketch above illustrates the same paradox between what utility theory tells us is the best decision, and what we intuitively decide.
Do note that he was working at the RAND corporation at the time, where they were running probabilistic simulations of the cold war, the so called Cold War games. (People were literally throwing dice all day to run the simulations of the various nuclear war scenarios). His paradox was a critique to that method, as we don't actually know the probabilities involved in these nuclear scenarios, in the same way as we don't know the amount of red and green balls in one of the urns.
Therefore, we might want to discredit decisions based on scenarios where we don't have good estimates of the probabilities of the outcomes, in favour of scenarios where we do know them.
Like many "thought experiment paradoxes" I think this makes perfect sense if you get out of the habit of thinking too abstractly.
The mathematical assumption is that for the urn with the unknown number of red and green balls all distributions are equally likely and so P(red) = 0.5. But why should I assume they're all equally likely other than that it is part of the problem construction?
The reason I prefer the known distribution is because this is a contrived game and my experience with contrived games has conditioned me to expect a "trick" such that I am somehow disadvantaged to lose in a way that is not clear to me. Perhaps whoever set up the game knows my favorite color is green. In probabilistic terms I have a Bayesian prior influencing my choice.
In order to answer this paradox "correctly" I need to rely on my experience contrived problems like this to recognize I'm expected to abstract the problem and pretend that my prior does not exist. I find if you resist the urge to abstract in this way a stunningly large proportion of philosophical paradoxes cease to be paradoxes.
You can't get away from the problem by assuming that my subjective P(red) ≠ 0.5. It only seems like this because the example was simplified.
Look at the "one-urn paradox" version at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellsberg_paradox. This clarifies that there is no subjective probability that can rationalise people's behaviour. If you prefer betting on red to betting on black, you should also prefer betting on red or yellow to betting on black or yellow.
IMO the one urn problem does nothing to get away from this.
Recapping the one urn problem: 90 balls in one urn. 30 are red, 60 are black or yellow in unknown proportion. Users must pick a set of gambles called a scenario, then pick a particular gamble. All balls are equally likely to be pulled. I'll list out the possible probabilities based on possible ground state truth:
Scenario 1:
Gamble A: Receive $100 if you draw a red ball P(0.33~)
Gamble B: Receive $100 if you draw a black ball P(0)-P(0.66~)
Scenario 2:
Gamble C: Receive $100 if you draw a red or yellow ball P(0.33~)-P(1)
Gamble D: Receive $100 if you draw a black or yellow ball P(0.66~)
Per my earlier argument, this scenario triggers my "someone is trying to trick and/or scam me" heuristic which creates an expectation that my choice of scenario will be predicted somehow, and that the color distribution will be chosen to maximally disadvantage me. I think most people would feel the same way and so I'd assume that most people would prefer gambles A and D respectively and that's exactly what happens.
Right, but note that you've made two arguments. The first was "you can explain this simply using 'P(red) ≠ 0.5'". The second is "you can explain this using a heuristic".
The difference is that the first argument saves standard expected utility theory. The second does not. Someone who has this heuristic is violating expected utility. Maybe you didn't believe EUT to start with. But many people did, and so this paradox still resonates.
Apologies if I was not clear, but I only intended to present the "heuristic" argument.
> The second does not. Someone who has this heuristic is violating expected utility. Maybe you didn't believe EUT to start with.
I did not think this was the case, but I think I disagree with any utilitarianism that did not allow me to weight probabilities via epistemic uncertainty.
Another way to frame my argument here that people have a justified belief that the prima facie probabilities for these gambles are misleading in a way that disadvantages them. If you allow this to change the probabilities then EUT would seem to explain the behavior e.g. if I believe Gamble A has P(0.33~) and Gamble B is weighted down to P(0.3) due to epistemic uncertainty the experimental results match up with the math.
If we allow the above calculation I think we're still in bounds for EUT.
Sure, but you can't simultaneously hold P(red) = 0.33 and P(red) = 0.3. Yet people asked to make two choices will strictly prefer "red" but also strictly prefer "black or yellow". If red is a better gamble, then red or black must be a better gamble too! It's the same urn.
You're right in general that uncertainty aversion has been put forward as an explanation. But to model it, you have to break EUT.
> Even weirder, if we would have played this game repeatedly, the second urn is clearly preferable.
I don't think that's the case?
Edit: I get it now, under repetition the probability distribution of the second urn could be inferred, and the gambler could use this information to bet on the more frequent color. However, the Ellsberg paradox only says we prefer known distributions to unknown ones, and under repetition the distributions of both urns would be known. So it doesn't say people would prefer betting on the first urn in the repetition case.
It is the case if the balls are being put back. As you play more games, you would figure out the proportion of red and green balls in the second urn. Therefore, you would figure out which is the better colour.
Repeated games under epistemic uncertainty actually allows you to get an edge by extracting information and reducing that uncertainty, in comparison to a game which is guaranteed to have no edge for you.
Yes, but why do we intuitively avoid epistemic uncertainty, even though it is something which can only _give_ us an edge here?
To make clear: playing this game with an urn which has an equal amount of red and green balls, is the worst case scenario when you get to pick the colour that wins. The second urn can only be the same or better, whether or not you can figure out any information about the balls in it.
It can only give us an edge in the repetition case. And the Ellsberg paradox doesn't apply to the repetition case. Ellsberg doesn't say anything about people preferring the first urn in the repetition case. In fact, I see no evidence that they do.
Reducing the uncertainty does not give you an edge vs having certainty a priori though.
For instance, you are not better off discovering that the urn has a 50:50 ratio than you would be if you knew that 50:50 ratio ahead of time.
If you're saying that you could discover a better ratio, then the thing that gives you the edge is the better ratio itself; if you knew the better ratio ahead of time, the epistemic uncertainty would only harm you.
I think the second urn is preferable in the repeated case because for really unbalanced ball setups there is a high correlation between the color that gets drawn each time. You can just guess that the next ball will be the color that was most common among previous drawings.
With the 30/30 red/green urn, on the other hand, you don't really have a much greater edge than 50%, at least in the early phases. In the later phases, perhaps you could count balls to get an edge, unless the balls are put back in the urn after being drawn.
The first option makes sense to me. Both choices have the same expected value; I understand that, but I also feel it's more likely I have misunderstood something about the second option. I'm crystal clear on the first.
Literally any tiebreaker for "which of these options with all the same value" seems fine, I do have to make a decision after all. And I think I'd be slightly skeptical that the experimenter is trying to trick me in some way with the second option in the unlikely case that I've misunderstood it.
But presumably people would pick the first urn even if it had a bit worse expected utility than the second. Say, the green ball wins, and you can choose between either drawing from an urn with 29 green and 31 red balls, or drawing from an urn with an unknown number of red and green balls. The Wikipedia article says that people have active ambiguity aversion, not just that they use ambiguity as a tie breaker.
I agree this seems to be the reason. The second urn has a more uncertain return in the same way that I'm uncertain about the 98th digit of pi. It's not a random event, but my certainty around it is related to the deductive effort I put in. It's immediately clear that they're the same-ish, and also immediately clear that the first urn doesn't have a gotcha.
Yeah, because utility theory is not how people think. Give most people a puzzle that allows for significant gain if you answer correctly, or simply not being harmed if you answer suboptimally, and most people try to escape what they correctly intuit as a trap. Not choosing the best answer is wrong, you don't assume you are smarter than the other person, so opt out.
The second option is better.
To win you have to bet that the second ball is the same color as the first ball.
The second option could have 30 and 30 (worst case) or it could have 59 and 1(best case), so almost any ball mix is better or equal than the first option when you only have about 50% chances of wining.
Why would 30 and 30 be the worst case? You could have drawn a statistically improbable first ball, no? E.g. in your 59:1 example, you could have drawn the 1 rare ball.
One draw isn't enough to establish a frequency anyways. You want to draw a few times and then pick a strategy. Of course it's important to differentiate with this between worst case urn composition and worst case draws.
Wow, that is super interesting. It amazes me that it's not a universal American principle that we should, as a country, at least aim for a world where these information asymmetries don't exist. We should strive for zero classified documents; zero special access programs.
Of course, I need to think more deeply about this, because who's to say information asymmetries aren't essential (for some reason). But the perspective shared here is very interesting.
I don’t really understand how this would work. Classified information seems like a law of human nature as long as there is competition: trade, geopolitical, military.
As a metaphor imagine if a game like chess required zero classified information: every move you make you need to disclose all your thinking and future moves to your opponent. You would be at a disadvantage.
I wish there was more thinking along these lines. Almost all governments must publish there secrets. Total transparency can help in many situations. I wonder what political maneuvering would be like.
The anecdote is definitely „food for thought“. It became kind of a ritual for me to revisit the article every time a new US president gets into office.
>But on the eve of jury deliberations, the judge threw out the case, citing government misconduct, including illegal wiretapping, a break-in at the office of Mr. Ellsberg's former psychiatrist and an offer by President Nixon to appoint the judge himself as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
Wow, never heard of this, I wonder if a Judge these days would do the same?
It's been years since I watched it but I remember thinking that https://www.mostdangerousman.org/ was a good documentary about Ellsberg. It also included his personal and family life in unusually interesting ways.
While Ellsberg is widely regarded as a hero, it's important to remember that the only reason he escape prison is because the government mishandled his case, which led the judge to throw it out. That other whistleblowers have been demonized while he is (rightly) venerated shows there's still a lot of bias and propaganda surrounding how we view whistleblowers.
Let us not forget that right now Assange is still roting in a UK prison and is about to be extradited to the United States. A discusting witch hunt against an individual which the US managed to turn into the bad guy in the publics view.
Shame on the United States and it's allies enabling this grotesque injustice!
He is not a US citizen and will be tried under US law for things he did outside of the United States. Let everyone judge for themselves if that is just.
The extradition treaty between the USA and the UK prohibits political extraditions. Assange's extradition is plainly political. His lawyers argued this point in court. The judges explained that a treaty is not a law so it is irrelevant to an English court. In Britain you literally have no right to challenge an extradition for being contrary to the treaty that enables it.
Reading how the judge at his trial threw out the case because he was offered the role of fbi director by the Nixon administration to sway his mind makes me think how impossible it would be for a whistle blower to receive the same treatment today. Snowden would have been locked away for life if not found dead in his cell from "suicide". The protection for whistle blowers is a sham unless they're embarrassing the governments opposition now.
I got to meet him once at a protest at the nuclear test site — back in those days when we were still setting off bombs in holes in the ground. Took a couple of pictures... https://social.kernel.org/notice/AWl7MdCuvetRLGReEq
I wonder. Following the latest advancements afforded to total surveillance as well as never before possible profiling-depth of people based on everything they've ever done since their teens, how will this change gov-level secretive organisations? Would someone like Ellsberg be weeded out even before his first interview or would he be detected and neutralized at the very first step outside the lines?
Gov can now scrutinize candidates for secretive organisations en masse for even the lowest positions and effectively weed out anyone who's ever shown even a hint of dissent, morality or adherence to principles who've proven to be any kind of risk against total obedience.
Gov can now also monitor employees' every heartbeat, every step, sleep patterns, stress levels and every spoken word (literally true for all of these), let alone their actions.
The risk of getting someone like Ellsberg past the door, let alone at any meaningful level, can now be crushed at previously unthinkable values.
How would these improved, airtight, secretive organisations operate and what would be the consequences? It feels like all these advancements in tech placed us on a one way superhighway towards returning to empires, aristocracies, eternal ruling classes & eternal commoners.
The previous US president took classified war plans with him, kept them in cardboard boxes in a bathroom at his residence which is also a public club, showed some of the papers to members of the public, and then lied about them when the Feds came calling.
Having an airtight recruiting funnel at the bottom is useless if the top is wide open.
More like: “You can imagine your clearance system is impenetrable and the elite’s secrets will be forever safe, but you’re not actually prepared for black swan events like a president who simply enjoys dispensing state secrets to random people at his own golf club.”
I know this an odd thing to thank someone for, but his book "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" is the only book I've ever read that actually gave me nightmares.
Talk about the butterfly effect. The Pentagon Papers should’ve just embarrassed the Johnson administration but Nixon lost his mind. Watergate. Everything. Truly a pivotal historical figure.
Ellsberg was one of the greatest Americans of my lifetime. He was a true believer working in the belly of the national security state and had the courage to both admit that he was wrong and to make his proof public.
"We weren't on the wrong side. We are the wrong side." -Daniel Ellsberg
And yet, nothing changed, as the dead bodies all over the middle east caused by direct US warfare or indirectly instigated color revolutions illustrate. The public forgets, and the machine still functions by the same rules and mechanisms as it always did.
I think the machine will come to a halt only by its own increasing disfunction, similar to the UDSSR.
Ellsberg is in many ways to mold from which modern day whistleblowers were cast. Edward Snowden said in an interview recently that when he was debating internally about whether or not he should become a whistleblower, knowing the ramifications it would have for his life, Ellsberg was what gave him the courage to do so. It was nice to learn that while in exile Snowden was able to get connected with Ellsberg and develop a friendship with him. Unfortunately Snowden and other modern day whistleblowers seem to have suffered more than Ellsberg who got off on something of a technicality.
"Many people compare Edward Snowden to me unfavorably for leaving the country and seeking asylum, rather than facing trial as I did. I don’t agree."
Also, Snowden was trapped in Russia by the U.S. government while in transit to South America, enabling the smear that he went into the arms of the Russians.
And further from Ellsberg:
"I went underground with my wife, Patricia, for 13 days. My purpose (quite like Snowden’s in flying to Hong Kong) was to elude surveillance while I was arranging — with the crucial help of a number of others, still unknown to the FBI — to distribute the Pentagon Papers sequentially to 17 other newspapers, in the face of two more injunctions. The last three days of that period was in defiance of an arrest order: I was, like Snowden now, a 'fugitive from justice.'"
He doesn't rebut the argument at all; he rebuts a subtly but significantly different argument that wasn't made here. The fact is that Ellsberg stayed and faced the consequences of his actions, and Snowden fled and later because a Russian citizen.
Again: you can believe that doesn't matter. I don't care, fine, people can disagree. But you can't say "Ellsberg thinks Snowden was justified" refutes the original argument. It is perfectly coherent, reasonable even, to assert that Ellsberg has some moral authority about the ethics of whistleblowing, and also that authority isn't transferrable to leakers Ellsberg favors.
I don't bring in Ellsberg for his moral authority or to rebut or refute anything, but because he is himself the subject of the comparison. He addressed this exact comparison in a Washington Post op-ed.
Surely Ellsberg's own comments on Snowden v. Ellsberg and consequences are worth seeing in a thread on that very subject.
Simplifying it for the sake of the thread, Ellsberg says that Snowden was justified in handling his situation differently from Ellsberg himself, because the circumstances were different. Reasonable people can disagree about whether Ellsberg is right, and Ellsberg is no more entitled to make that argument than anybody else is: Ellsberg isn't the judge of Ellsberg-ism (for lack of a better term), history is.
This doesn't simplify Ellsberg's argument but mischaracterizes it. He directly addresses the claim that his own and Snowden's actions were different, and offers specific, concrete examples of how they were in fact alike in important ways that go to the heart of the comparison.
Of course Ellsberg isn't the final word and I'm confident no one here thinks that. I assume it's okay by you if discussion continues rather than wait forever for "history" to tell us what to think.
Your view of Snowden is fairly well-known round these parts. If you're concerned about Ellsberg's name having outsized influence on the subject, it seems more in keeping with the spirit of HN for you to tell us why he's wrong in this op-ed rather than roll eyes at the idea of hearing Ellsberg's own response to Snowden v. Ellsberg.
A wonderful thing about history is that it's never really finished: No presumptuous authority can tie a ribbon on a topic and close it.
> Also, Snowden was trapped in Russia by the U.S. government while in transit to South America
Snowden fled to Hong Kong first, then from there to Moscow. He was certainly never "in transit" to anywhere else, nor was any of this under the control (even indirectly) of the US government. He fled to nations which he knew would not extradite him.
It's likely true that he had other destinations in mind. Nonetheless he couldn't get it arranged, and he ended up in Moscow because Putin viewed him as useful and extended an offer of residence that China was apparently not willing to make.
Let's not spin here. Snowden isn't a Russian stooge (though obviously his freedom to speak freely about his host country is extremely limited), but let's not treat with conspiracy theories about this being America's Plan All Along.
He was in transit to Ecuador, which was going to grant him asylum. The U.S. government revoked his passport, trapping him in the Moscow airport.
One may believe that Snowden's location at the time the U.S. revoked his passport was chance, but it's obvious that it was then used over and over to smear him as a Russian stooge. And we can see this smearing continues to this day.
"Obviously his freedom to speak freely about his host country is extremely limited"
Do you think the Russian government would prefer that he not say things like this?
Don't kid yourself, by now, Russia is a full-on fascist dictatorship. They don't let him say stuff like this because they have rules about freedom of speech or something, the let him say stuff like this because it is more useful to them that he retains some kind of credibility. It makes it more effective when he later tweets antisemitic caricatures about American Jews fueling the war in Ukraine.
> He was in transit to Ecuador, which was going to grant him asylum. The U.S. government revoked his passport, trapping him in the Moscow airport.
So the American Plan To Trap Snowden In Russia For Propaganda Purposes comes down to.... revoking a passport for a wanted criminal, something we do hundreds of times ever month or whatever? Not much of a conspiracy.
That's not how that works. If Ecuador was willing to grant asylum, Ecuador could easily have arranged transportation or issued their own passport. They still could, today! They didn't, and won't. Obviously you can spin that part too as part of a nefarious American Plan. But... Ecuador didn't want him either. It's as simple as that.
And he's in Russia, equally simply, because Russia was willing (frankly eager) to antagonize US influence and interests.
(FWIW: your last example of Snowden's seeming independence from Russian interference is a half decade stale. Please. What does he think of the shooting war his host country started?)
Just don't spin this. Snowden broke US laws, fled the country, and ended up being hosted by an enemy. No more complexity need exist.
Fidel Narvaez the Ecuadorian consul in London helped Snowden get out of Hong Kong to the Moscow airport on the way to Ecuador with the purpose of getting him asylum (which had previously been granted to Julian Assange).
Joe Biden (then vice president) told the president of Ecuador by phone that relations between the U.S. and his country would "strongly deteriorate" if Snowden was given sanctuary there.
So sure, at that point "Ecuador didn't want him either."
I really don't care whether or not the U.S. planned for Snowden to be in Russia the moment they revoked the passport. The point is that he was trapped there by the actions of the U.S., and this was then used endlessly to insinuate all kinds of things about his motives and distract attention from the substance of the leaks.
You're invoking an ethos argument (appeal to authority). Basically, it's only valid if you accept US law as supreme, which in the very act of leaking documents showing how legislators and executive agencies abused their positions actually invalidates the very rule of law you apparently are so willing to kowtow to.
In a more uncouth context, it's the kind of argument that would lead to one being deemed a "bootlicker", but we can stick with an apophasis to such for now.
Ellsberg is a more gracious person than I am. No one forced Snowden to fly to Russia, he made the decision himself in full awareness of the risk that he might get stranded there.
Please don't cross into personal attack on HN. If another comment is wrong or you feel it is, it's enough to respectfully explain why. Either that or just chalk it up to the internet being wrong and move on.
> Also, Snowden was trapped in Russia by the U.S. government
Snowden was trapped in Russia by the Russian government. If you think the Russian government cares about Snowden's travel documents, I've got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.
"Edward Snowden is 'under the care of the Russian authorities' and can’t leave Moscow’s international airport without their consent, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa told The Associated Press Sunday...."
> Analysts familiar with the workings of the Ecuadorean government said Correa’s claims that the decision was entirely Russia’s appeared to be at least partly disingenuous. They said they believed Correa’s administration at first intended to host Snowden, then started back-tracking this week when the possible consequences became clearer.
Nonetheless, thank you for the reminder. It's a fair point.
Though Ellsberg was a smart guy, he wasn't a technologist; so he was probably less familiar with what Snowden leaked than Snowden was, which is saying a lot.
> It sounds like you believe Mr. Snowden didn't understand what was leaked by Mr. Snowden?
He very clearly did not. He thought PRISM was the most important program in his leaks, and he demanded that WaPo publish the slides immediately. Instead, as anybody who works on Internet technology could tell you after reading the slides, PRISM was a nothingburger — a simple ingestion pipeline integration with the FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit, which handles electronic wiretap integration with Internet companies. The ingested data came from targeted Section 702 data requests for the accounts of specific foreigners living outside the US, which is completely legal.
Snowden, being the high school dropout SharePoint admin he is, thought the PRISM slides showed the NSA could read anything on these Internet companies' servers, which is hilariously wrong.
Ellsberg was by all accounts a genius, and he had the credentials to show it, including membership in the ultra-exclusive Harvard Society of Fellows.
Funny you would use the word genius for Ellsberg, as you attempt to demean Snowden. Snowden was remembered by his colleagues as "a genius among geniuses."
"Sharepoint administrator" was a tiny part of his role. But please, do explain how the data from "specific foreigners living outside the US" was segregated during ingestion by the "nothingburger" pipeline.
> But please, do explain how the data from "specific foreigners living outside the US" was segregated during ingestion by
It didn't have to be. That was the only data that existed in the Section 702 wiretaps. The government cannot use Section 702 requests to ask a company for a wiretap of an American's account.
> "a genius among geniuses."
LOL. Probably a quote from the Lotus Notes server admin. Remember, this is the guy who repeatedly failed an analyst test before finally passing it by looking up the answers on the SharePoint server. This is a guy who failed an open-book test on Section 702, so no wonder he misinterpreted the documents he leaked so badly. https://www.thedailybeast.com/either-edward-snowden-is-lying... has some choice quotes from an analyst.
Ellsberg was a strategic specialist who worked at RAND and various other high level postings. He had a wide view and understood what he was leaking and why. Ultimately his secrets were only secrets to regular people - the Soviets knew what was going on.
Snowden was by all accounts a SharePoint administrator. He released a wide array of stuff, probably got a few agents of the US killed, and in all probability traded more information for his current accommodation.
That doesn't make it right, it just means he can empathize. MLK, in his Letter form a Birmingham Jail addressed this very clearly:
"I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law."
Disobeying a law and accepting a penalty is to protest the unjust character of a law. Disobeying and fleeing means disregarding the law altogether. Not only is that wrong, it's also going to greatly diminish whatever goal you had in mind with your protest in the eyes of others.
"Willingness to accept the penalty" means you accept the possible consequences of your actions and choose to carry on anyway. It doesn't mean you're supposed to literally martyr yourself for the cause by literally walking yourself into jail so they can torture you.
He was arrested for organizing black workers into a union. That was illegal and resulted in his trial and conviction. The consequence was part of the activism.
Lots of other examples. Freedom riders were killed for defying Jim Crow. While they didn’t wake up with a desire to be murdered, that was a consideration and their martyrdom was part of the movement.
"He was arrested" is not the same as him literally giving himself up and walking himself into jail to be punished for his actions. I have no doubt he knew it was a risk but they still had to actively oppress him for the consequences to materialize. If he became some kind of martyr, it's because they oppressed him for doing what everyone else knew was just.
I don't think Snowden leaked those things because he wanted to protest the Espionage Act of 1917. I think he wanted Americans to see the content of what he leaked.
It’s always funny to see HN’s thoughts on that sort of cutthroat pragmatism when it’s them doing it, but how hard they demonize it when someone else does it.
I believe Snowden is still a US citizen; he never renounced it, nor was it stripped from him. He has dual citizenship, once he was granted Russian citizenship.
Citizenship of the country in which he resides provides some (admittedly shaky) greater claim to status, services, and opportunity, as well as, possibly, a passport and travel opportunities should he seek them for other domains. That last has been explicitly denied him by the country of his birth.
"at a time when his acquittal was anything but a foregone conclusion."
This is a laughable statement given the treatment of several other recent whistleblowers. The power of the security state is orders of magnitude greater now.
Snowden sacrificed a comfortable life to expose a criminal enterprise in Washington that deprived Americans of their constitutional rights.
Why should he accept to be judged by the criminals he exposed?
He initially wanted to go to a different state, for your information, because he knew there would be people who would use his refuge in Russia to question his loyalty.
The good news is that Americans on the street are overwhelmingly on his side and against the corrupt and unaccountable cabal running the country.
While I don't even agree that Snowden behaved cowardly - which is what you appear to be suggesting - it's really quite appalling to see that used as a way to undercut the status of "whistleblower". Surely, you take greater issue with our modern surveillance state than ones decorum based on how they perceive their likely ill treatment from the said state?
Tbh it's the rhetorical equivalent of the game of "two for flinching", and just as juvenile.
So the greater moral courage would have been for Snowden to keep his mouth shut and remain a U.S.citizen? Where do you put the average person, who would simply prefer to keep their head down and enjoy their life, in your moral rankings scale?
You seem to think that turning himself in was somehow a good thing. Why? Either his action in blowing the whistle is moral, in which case facing life imprisonment is obviously wrong, or his whistleblowing is wrong, in which case you wouldn't be praising his "moral courage". One he leaked the information, becoming a punching bag for the state doesn't do the world any good.
By that logic, no one would ever immigrate to the United States. Stand and fight for your beliefs, instead of fleeing your country with an oppressive regime. Clearly this is not the case and voting with your feet is a last resort when a system is so corrupted that it cannot be changed anymore.
That's because Russia doesn't extradite its citizens. While Russia doesn't have an extradition treaty with the USA - it has extradition treaties with some other US allied countries. So he'll be safe from extradition even after Putin is gone.
I see that New York Times is careful not to mention Manning, or Snowden, or Assange, or indeed draw any of the lines to the present day situation - lines that Ellsberg himself tried so desperately to draw in the last months of his life.
In the book of Genesis, there is a part where Abraham haggles with God(!) trying to save the city of Sodom. If there's 50 honest people, will you spare it? How about 45? 40? He gets all the way to 10. Famously, that wasn't low enough.
I feel like Sodom lost one of the honest men covering for it today.
> I see that New York Times is careful not to mention Manning, or Snowden, or Assange, or indeed draw any of the lines to the present day situation - lines that Ellsberg himself tried so desperately to draw in the last months of his life.
“By two years in Vietnam, I was reporting very strongly that there was no prospect of progress of any kind so the war should not be continued. And that came to be the majority view of the American people before the Pentagon Papers came out."
And yet Nixon handily won in 1968 (even with Wallace kneecapping him in 5 states) and 1972.
While not well covered, Ellsberg would mention in person that his early issues weren't that it was a bad or immoral war but that the US wasn't committing the forces/effort required to win it. That's one of the reasons he waffled for so long.
Johnson had escalated the war, created it really, from the Gulf of Tonkin 'crisis'. By 1968, the war had failed and at some level everyone knew that. Johnson was not running for re-election and Nixon had a 'secret plan' to end the war. Nixon ran on that and that's why he won handily. He even conspired with Anna Chennault to sabotage the peace talks and get the South Vietnamese to believe they'd get a better deal from Nixon.
After winning, Nixon continued the war even after Congress reversed the Gulf of Tonkin war powers resolution. He even signed that reversal but then cynically claimed the power to defend the troops and remained.
> I see that New York Times is careful not to mention Manning, [...]
I'm curious how common it is for that kind of connection to be made in an obituary. Not that I have a strong opinion one way or the other here, but in my understanding, obits typically cover the life of the individual and the direct impact of their work -- notably, not the impact of others inspired by their work?
Assange, Manning and Snowden was a huge focus of Ellsberg's work for the past 15 years or so. Basically every time he appeared in the paper he was opining on that subject and for many of us it's how we first heard of him. You would expect it to be there if you thought him a hero who had somehow fallen in saying these things. You would expect it to be there if you thought it was his heroism continued. You would expect it to be there if you had no opinion about it just because of how much media coverage it gathered.
Leaving such a significant part of his recent life out of the obituary seems utterly bizarre, deeply not normal and it's hard to imagine how it's not deliberate.
“Have you ever heard the story of the 36 tzaddikim? They say that the world rests on the backs of 36 living saints—36 unselfish men and women. Because of them the world continues to exist.
They are the secret kings and queens of this world.”
— Death, The Sandman, issue 31, Three Septembers and a January (1991)
You're misremembering somewhat. God agrees not to destroy the city if Abraham can find 10 honest men. In the end it turns out there's only 1 (named Lot) and this isn't enough, so God has his angels escort Lot and his family out of the city before smiting it. Oddly, this determination of honesty is based on Lot extending hospitality to two angelic visitors sent to test him and defending his guests from the rapacious townspeople; Lot offers to let the crowd ravage his daughters instead but the townspeople decline his offer. No word on how the daughters felt about this.
I used to think that Lot knew the townspeople well, knew what would happen, and successfully proved the point: "You see? They don't care, they need you."
One of my Christian friends offered a different perspective: the city was so vile that even a man of slightly dubious moral character like Lot was a man of virtue, compared to the crowd outside his house.
In any case, that was not enough to save the city.
The thing that always struck me most about that passage is the determination to fulfill the lust even after being struck blind and being undeterred and persisting in groping for doorknobs and looking for a way in to Lot's home. If that's an accurate representation I can't imagine how anything other than getting my eyesight back or figuring out what happened to it would not be one's top priority in that moment. It may be a figurative use of the word blind though, like a mirage, or some other confusion ploy, or a mental fog to obscure the entrance somehow.
The throwing the daughters under the bus could have been a declaration of his knowledge of the state of their souls and whatever corruption overtook it by that point. Or it could have been a risky gambit to buy time--when the mob comes I'm sure it's a terrifying experience.
>The thing that always struck me most about that passage is the determination to fulfill the lust even after being struck blind and being undeterred and persisting in groping for doorknobs and looking for a way in to Lot's home. If that's an accurate representation I can't imagine how anything other than getting my eyesight back or figuring out what happened to it would not be one's top priority in that moment. It may be a figurative use of the word blind though, like a mirage, or some other confusion ploy, or a mental fog to obscure the entrance somehow.
Maybe you could look at it under the optics that modern people think their freedom to say "merry christmas" is under attack. Why not think that even if it's totally absurd, people would be morally outraged and believe that people would ignore their blindess overtaken by lust and the wish to rape.
Abraham drew near and said, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? 24 Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city. Will you then sweep away the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it? 25 Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” 26 And the Lord said, “If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”
27 Abraham answered and said, “Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes. 28 Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking. Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?” And he said, “I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.” 29 Again he spoke to him and said, “Suppose forty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of forty I will not do it.” 30 Then he said, “Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak. Suppose thirty are found there.” He answered, “I will not do it, if I find thirty there.” 31 He said, “Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord. Suppose twenty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of twenty I will not destroy it.” 32 Then he said, “Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak again but this once. Suppose ten are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it.” 33 And the Lord went his way, when he had finished speaking to Abraham, and Abraham returned to his place.
is that right, are you saying the onus was on Abraham to do the legwork and locating of good men rather than God omnisciently evaluating the state of all the souls in the town and determining which side of the balance they landed on at that particular moment?
I don't think that's accurate, I just double checked and it's God who's doing the evaluating, there's lots of hits for "If I find...".
Yeah, I should have said 'if God can find 10 honest men.' I'm not sure how omniscience or omnipotence really manifests in the Bible since God habitually delegates tasks to angels instead of just teleporting people into or out of harm's way, but then again abstractions don't make for gripping stories.
The question was about the minimum number of "righteous" people required for the city to be saved. Abraham started at 50, then 45, then 40, 30, 20, and finally 10 -- at each point, God said "OK, if there are that many righteous people in the city, I'll spare it."
It boggles my mind that, given stories in the Bible like this, anyone would think worshiping such a cruel and vengeful god is a moral thing to do.
Granted, the New Testament tries to paint a much more compassionate picture. Just goes to show you that the church will do its best to change its marketing when the need arises.
> It boggles my mind that, given stories in the Bible like this, anyone would think worshiping such a cruel and vengeful god is a moral thing to do.
We're getting far afield from Ellsberg here, but let me just point out the logic of this statement:
1. There is a universal standard of morality -- a standard so universal that it would apply to God himself
2. "kelnos" knows what this universal standard says, at least well enough to judge the actions of "God" in this story as violating it.
Now, for the most part I agree with you (except the conclusion); and in fact, that truth -- that the immorality of killing innocent people applies to God himself, and that mere mortals like Abraham (and kelnos) can be said to know what it is -- is implied by the story itself. But those are pretty big philosophical propositions, and I don't think most people are aware they're making them when they make statements like this.
You could start by asking why God mentioned his intentions to Abraham at all. What the text says about that:
> Then the Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him. For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just, so that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.”
That is, Abraham's idea of justice, and how authorities act, will have a big impact on a fairly big chunk of humanity.
Abraham obviously knows that Sodom isn't a great place. But just how bad is it? Obviously part of Abraham thinks even 10 people should be enough to spare the city; but some other part of Abraham may be more "realpolitik". Abraham thinks this Elohim person is more than just some local tyrant god; but is he really? Abraham thinks that even God should be open to having his decisions measured by justice and morality -- but that's not exactly a common attitude for gods of that time.
God affirms all of Abraham's intuitions. Yes Abraham, you're right: killing the innocent with the righteous is not OK. Yes Abraham, you're right: even my actions are guided by morality. Yes Abraham, you're right: The "judge of all the earth" won't be offended if you check him.
This experience changed Abraham as a person, and affected not only how he ran his own show, but what he passes on to his kids and their kids.
Abraham basically bargained God down to save the city if it had ten honest men, but there were not even ten. So even ten wasn’t low enough of a standard for Sodom to be able to pass.
It's less 'save' and 'not destroy' although that's maybe a fine distinction.
In Genesis God is drawn to do something about Sodom as the din of shrieks from that city has spurred him to action, shrieks either from people of the city oppressed in it or visitors to the city oppressed by it. Considering the Lot story later and God's intention to destroy Sodom presumably shrieks by visitors. Anyhow. Yes, Abraham haggles. Just prior to this we hear God's internal monologue where he decides, for the first time, to include a human -- post Adam, depending on how you read the naming of things -- in the decision making process that governs the world. Abraham is presumably horrified -- the narrator of Genesis does not say -- and haggles God down from destroying the city outright, to 50 etc etc daring to go as low as 10, a number that, just so happens, to be a later minimum administrative unit size in Jewish society. In the narrative structure of Genesis we have already seen an attempt to eradicate evil through destruction -- the Flood -- and that does not work, to the point where God promises not to do outright, global destruction like that again. So it's clear in the narrative -- though perhaps not to Abraham who may or may not have known about the post-Flood promise -- that God has a maximum upper bound on the amount of people that can be destroyed in response to evil: all. Abraham brings this maximum upper bound down to 50 as an opening gambit, then etc etc. It is worth noting that Abraham, at this point in the story, is elderly and rich, so he's presumably used to negotiation as a way of life.
Why would Sodom not be destroyed if there were less honest people? God's intention before consulting Abraham is to destroy the whole city but it is Abraham that bargains the number down to a minimum. If ten can be found, the threshold for destruction isn't reached. An entirely reasonable read here is that Abraham couldn't bear to see an entire city's worth of people destroyed and God was willing to be convinced otherwise. In itself that's a remarkable thing for a Near Eastern deity and is one sign that Genesis as a piece of literature is in conversation with and opposed to other contemporary Near Eastern literature.
Anyway, that's not the only read here -- there are millennia of commentary on this very text -- but it is worth pointing out that the Genesis text comes from the Mesopotamian culture, one that is both distinct from our Greek-derived way of thinking/being and has also gone extinct outside of literature, so norms that may have appeared self-evident to the original audience might not come through to modern readers so easily, or at all.
I think they're saying that an honest man doesn't cover for anything, so there were no honest people left in Sodom. They couldn't even find 10 honest people.
Similarly, an honest journalist doesn't cover for their newspaper, so there are no honest journalists left in the NYT.
It's a flawed premise when you look back on the past 100 years where the concept of 'honesty' really meant 'loyalty to your government'. Hitler, Stalin, McCarthy, Nixon...
If we feel that analogy was necessary here... So it seem that present time seems to reward citizens of Sodom. Maybe God is different than the one from Genesis.
Why mention Manning, or Snowden, or Assange and not the former POTUS? Doesn't he also stand accused of violating the Espionage Act, in a way that's regarded by many as politically-slanted persecution?
It’s a ridiculous law, originally used as a cudgel against anti WW1 protesters and socialists. A real horseshoe that it’s looped around to Trump, but let’s look at this critically.
Was Trump exposing the classified information he took to the broader populace? No. Was there a public good to be had if he did? Probably not. Taking the nuclear secrets and making those public? Not good.
There is no intent in the espionage law, so from a legal standpoint that doesn’t matter, but I don’t think Trump belongs with the whistleblowers. Sounds like he wanted to keep this information secret, for himself. He’s on tape, saying as much.
I saw Daniel Ellsberg speak at a Rotary event and got to talk to him later. Very humble and intelligent person. He said all he had done paled to what needed to be done about climate change.
This is such sad news. Daniel Ellsberg showd extraordinary courage to do what he did. Few in his position would have exposed themselves for what they believed right.
What we need to take from his legacy is that if our democracies were in good health and functioning as they should then the Daniel Ellsbergs of this world would not have to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the common good.
as a society we have moved on from whistleblowers - now we lock them up or call them conspiracy theorists - all enabled by the corporate media who does nothing but the bidding of the three letter agencies who tells them what to say, when to say it, and how to say it.
The absolutely psychotic nature of what the American government was up to in the 1950s and 1960s was only touched on in the Pentagon Papers. Daniel Ellsberg certainly deserves a historical memorial for what he exposed to the public about the idiocies of the Vietnam War, but it was just the tip of the iceberg. For example, experimental biological warfare was a feature of the US attack on North Korea, and that program was originated in 1942 (*Merck Report) and expanded via information from Shiro Ishii (captured war criminal who turned over records of Unit 731, the Japanese biological warfare unit active in China, to US spies and hence to Fort Detrick.) The US biological warfare program was actively connected to the CIA's MK-ULTRA brainwashing/torture program which operated domestically during the 1960s, involving use of LSD and similar drugs to manipulate people (likely involved in the Charles Manson debacle). Biological warfare and chemical warfare testing exploded during the 1960s under JFK and Johnson, and was only (publicly) shut down by Nixon after the disastrous 5,000 sheep kill outside Dugway Utah via a VX gas oopsie.
They were all insane back then, and they still are trying to hide a lot of what they got up to back then from public scrutiny. Of course it didn't end there, the 9/18 and 10/8 anthrax attacks walked out of US government programs aimed at replicating the Soviet biowarfare programs of the 1970s/1980s, and out of those attacks came Project Bioshield... I think that gave Anthony Fauci's career a boost, and led to financing of gain of function research in North Carolina and Wuhan, China, and of course chimeric virus recombination was a long-standing dream of the biological warfare establishment, though the methods they were trying to use to accomplish that in the 1980s were pretty sloppy compared to today's CRISPR approaches.
Everything is connected, at some level. Keep leaking their dirty secrets, I'm going to go toast Ellsberg now.
I'm not familiar with that many details of USA political history, I didn't really know who Daniel Ellsberg is (the name sounds somewhat familiar, but I might be getting them confused with someone else?), and I didn't know what the Pentagon Papers are.
But "the Pentagon Papers" sound important (kind of like the Panama Papers or the Paradise Papers, and may even be the trope namer?) and "who leaked the Pentagon Papers" sounds like an interesting story that I might want to learn more about.
"Someone who is famous in some way but you've never heard of has died" is a much weaker pull. Yeah, there might be something interesting there, and if it's someone whose death has hit the top of the HN front page then the odds of me finding it worth reading are somewhat higher than if it was a headline almost anywhere else (hence why I'm here). But there are a bunch of other headlines on HN, and I could have easily skipped past it. "who leaked the pentagon papers" would have been a much stronger signal that this was someone I wanted to read more about.
The content and context matters. The response would have been different if he had leaked random material rather than the Pentagon Papers, which showed heinous behavior by our government.
Trump isn't being charged for having classified documents in an insecured manner. He's being charged for refusing to give them back after being asked, lying about having them, and obstructing officials trying to get them back from him.
There’s definitely a difference between leaking secret information to the public, and keeping it yourself to use for your own purposes. Without getting into which one is worse, surely you can see they’re not really comparable.
If Donald Trump had declassified the docs and shared them publicly, we would be having a totally different conversation, and he wouldn’t be under federal indictment.
Hello? The purpose of the classification is to keep the information secret. Do you seriously believe that printing the info on the front page is somehow not as indictment-worthy as keeping the documents stashed away?
The reality is that what Trump did by hiding the papers was much more consistent with the spirit of classification than what the NYT did with the Pentagon papers.
Responsible actors will try to balance security with transparency. It is not surprising that a newspaper would have a different view on where the right balance lies than the government. You might disagree with the NYT editors’ judgment, but they decided it was worth harming national security to expose government lies about the Vietnam War.
Trump’s hoarding of classified documents and refusal to give them back did nothing to increase transparency, because Trump did not make any information public. So it’s not surprising that the NYT views Trump’s actions differently than Ellsberg’s.
The last 4 years has been an absolute bloodbath for the US comic industry with regards to comic books, comic strips, and comic magazines. A ton of all time greats have died, most recently John Romita Sr. These are all folks who would have mostly gotten their start around the 50s and 60s in the Silver Age of American comics.
Here's a philosophical (?) topic I would love to hear opinions on the occasion of remembering Ellsberg's contributions.
Some would say that the transparency of revealing the Pentagon papers caused us as a people for the first time (debatable of course) to not fundamentally trust that the government usually does the right thing.
(In the general public perception sense. There were and always would be groups discontent or not trusting the state was acting in their interests on specific issues. But this was a large scale violation of people's beliefs, some might say.)
But for the first time (again, debatable), the government was shown to be covering up the national disgrace of the very important and big topic of Vietnam for face saving, and sacrificing lives in the process. And that this was just people at the top muddling through really important topics.
And this was important for a people to know, and understand that they could check government like this.
So... however --
I wonder, is there something such as too much transparency for a country's people, in the face of the reality of who your international competitors are, in a modern information age?
When governments can control information, they are much more able to sweep certain things under the rug, unify a people with partial information, and embark on war, other issues that dismiss or hide the many layers of truth or actions. And every issue is always complicated by who it helps and hurts. In a huge democracy, there will always be someone hurt by some decision.
When you have competitor countries who are not committed to such whistleblowing, sharing of information, freedom of press, and their people are able to be unified towards some goals while smaller issues are swept under the rug. Is our country by comparison paralyzed from doing great things, because any great thing will have endless "complainers" once all the details are known because of our freedom of information and above mistrust of government?
Basically, is there conceivably a bad or unintended consequence of so much freedom of the press to check government? Has too much democracy been a hinderance (or will it be when some important issue presents itself) to the progress of a democracy?
In a democratic system, the point of whistleblowing and journalism is not to expose secrets that could put lives at risk, but to hold powerful people accountable for their actions.
The latter people spend a lot of resources conflating the two. They manufacture the illusion that they are necessarily operating for the public interest, and therefore the only reason why their secret operations are secret is to keep people safe. By extension, guys like Assange are clearly criminals for violating that secrecy.
In reality, in the cases of Ellsberg, Manning, Snowden (et al.), we learned that our governments were not operating in the public interest. The Vietnam and Iraq invasions were insane and wasteful, enriching the pockets and hegemonic fantasies of a tiny elite at the cost of real American lives (and countless other lives).
