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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

"Although The government protects whistleblowers, the government does not really protect whistleblowers that whistleblow government shit."

Sort of true, but not exactly true. Thomas Drake was a whistleblower. Snowden might have started out as a whistleblower (without going through the proper process), but has released a lot of detailed information beyond what is necessary to be a whistleblower, which could even possiblt cause net harm.

Edit: why disagree?

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If he hadn't released all the information proving that what he was saying was true, we'd be hearing about how he was just a disgruntled employee with personal issues who was making stuff up for the publicity so he could sell books, etc.

That's a possible theory. But then why wasn't that the case for Drake? And wouldn't it have been possible to do that with limited data release rather than as much as he did? For example, how is releasing lists of foreign cyber targets, or foreign embassy surveillance useful to he topic of domestic surveillance? It seems they released several thousand documents to prove his point, and yet it's believed that there are over 1M more that he exfiltrated. It seems like that's overkill for just proving you're telling the truth about domestic surveillance. This might have been a case where less is more - if he had taken/released just enough and limited the scope, then there would be more support for him.

I was a major skeptic of Snowden for the whole first year of Glenn Greenwald's releases. The Snowden leak was too convenient for folks like me that suspected it was going on for years, ever since the 1980's encryption scandal involving RSA and also PGP. They were clearly up to no good, but without evidence it was easy to dismiss.

Then almost a year to the date of the first publishing of the Snowden docs, along came heartbleed, which clearly showed the Snowden documents were legitimate. As more technical leaning documents came out, they also proved it. Without those documents though, we'd be told it was all a fairy tale.

I don't disagree. Not sure who is voting you down.

People who care about the rule of law and not having the most powerful bureaucracy in the history of the universe point their targets at our fellow citizens for basically no reason.

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