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Comment by comrh | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this isn't a bad point. Anyone have a response because the whistlerblower tag gets used a lot but he did release a lot that seemed to be normal spying.

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His argument was that it should be not his decision whether releasing a document is in the public interest, but rather something journalists should take care of (although he did select those journalists himself, so it's not fair to say it's a completely independent process).

Still better than a full dump à la WkiLeaks, but the big question is whether the journalists have the OpSec skills to avoid leaking the documents to other governments.

That is an awful defense. You can't just dump all the documents on a journalist and then blame the journalist for what is being released.

It doesn't matter if it was directly or through an intermediary, everything that Snowden gave to journalists, Snowden leaked to the public.

I'm not saying that he shouldn't be held responsible if all of those documents were to leak. He did, however, specifically select journalists who already experienced heavy surveillance from state actors and had at least some knowledge of proper OpSec and encryption to mitigate this risk to some degree. He acknowledged that it could leak, but still thought it's a risk worth taking (I can't remember his exact words, I think it was brought up in an interview.)

Why should he be the one to decide if the leaking of over a million highly classified documents is a "risk worth taking" to inform Americans of the phone metadata program? Doesn't that seem just odd to you? If I wanted to blow the whistle on a program I thought was illegal, I'd gather supporting documents and evidence of that one program (to include supposed emails I had sent in an attempt to follow the proper "channels" for reporting illegal activity - which in Snowden's case are conspicuously absent from the data he stole) so as to not discredit my work/sacrifice by leaking magnitudes more than I needed to.

Why not just leak documents related to that one issue? If he had, I would not hesitate in the least to call him a whistle blower, and in fact I think he'd be living as a free man right now if that were the case.

First, the reason is because this whistle blowing was /necessary/ due to a /lack of oversight/ and to a lack of eventual release for that oversight to the public.

Second, we don't know the number of potential documents, nor how they may have been divided among those to whom they were disseminated.

Addressing the first point, it should take work and review, on an ongoing basis, to re-affirm the classification of that material. By default there should be a /reasonable/ and /short/ expiration time. If it costs too much to keep those secrets than that in and of it's self is a reason for not HAVING so many secrets to keep!

The cost, otherwise, is to our freedoms; to the very liberty for which our government is supposed to be protecting.

Greenwald couldn't figure out how to use PGP on his own and then frequently communicated via CryptoCat. His OpSec skills at the time of the leak were questionable at best.

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