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Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

I can't deny that he violated the trust placed in him by the military. That's a scary game, and one that I can't honestly take a position in, as I've never served.

However, I feel that service is more than to your branch, commander, or unit. What is a soldier? Someone willing to sacrifice themselves for a greater, to defend those who can't defend themselves, to bring honor to their service. A US soldier serves the people first, the government second. Manning realized the risk he was placing his life in, and like a true soldier, he didn't let that knowledge deter him. In taking responsibility, he's holding his head high, not cowering behind attorneys and HTTP proxies.

I can't say if he's right or wrong, but I can say that he showed courage befitting his title.

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If a soldier thinks something is wrong, he might talk to a reporter and even provide classified examples if necessary to prove his point.

That is not what Bradley Manning did. He did a full dump of information regardless of whether or not the information was related to his cause. That's not a courageous protest: that is playing God with other's lives on the line. In his delusion of Godhood, he literally committed treason.

Sorry for the harshness of this, but it genuinely outrages me that people see heroism in this guy. His behavior is outside even the most liberal interpretations of the concept of non-violent protest or civil disobedience.

> If a soldier thinks something is wrong, he might talk to a reporter and even provide classified examples if necessary to prove his point.

> That is not what Bradley Manning did.

Did you even read the article linked?

" Manning said he first tried to take his information to the Washington Post, the New York Times and Politico, before contacting WikiLeaks."

"Manning said he tried to talk to an unnamed Washington Post reporter to interest her in the Iraq and Afghanistan documents, but “I did not believe she took me seriously.” He left voicemails with the public editor and the news-tips lines for the New York Times and heard nothing. A blizzard, he said, kept him from driving to Politico’s office to discuss the documents. According to Manning’s account, only after his attempts to give the documents to mainstream media organizations fail did he consider giving them to WikiLeaks."

"Tried". "A blizzard kept him from ... discussing".

Half-heared efforts to contact three media outlets are not cause for dumping intelligence unrelated to this issue you are trying to bring to light.

Why did Manning need to speak to anyone? Why couldn't he just send data discs to all the papers mentioned with the classified data? If his true motivation was whistle blowing you'd expect him to leak the data to as many media outlets as possible.

Instead he sent them to Wikileaks?

If someone applied for a job with the attitude Manning showed for publishing this information, would you even bother giving him an interview?

I've heard this claim before (he put other's lives in danger), but I haven't seen it backed. As far as I know, even the military operations documents leaked were old (relatively). I haven't come across any sort of news relating to people dying because of these leaks. Or any sort of military or government personnel being put in danger.

I'm genuinely curious about this as well. I do recall seeing reference to wikileaks documents (in general) potentially endangering US allies / sources / informants / partners. However, I can't recall specifically whether or not the information was sourced from the documents Manning leaked.

"that is playing God with other's lives on the line."

That's the same pseudo-argument that keeps coming up again and again. Whose lives did he play with? Please don't answer with some hypothetical "aiding the enemy" crap.

Wasn't it the U.S. military that originally played with lives aka "collateral damage"?

Manning had Gigabytes of secret documents and cables. He didn't know what was in them. Even if no one died, he sure as heck didn't know that when he gambled on releasing them. Therefore he was playing God.

Second, if you search through this entire comment thread you will find links to NYTimes articles about them actual damage caused.

Nope you won't, but you will find a quote from the Pentagon saying no damage was caused.

He did a full dump of information regardless of whether or not the information was related to his cause.

...to a journalist, to vet and release as appropriate. It's not like he just uploaded it to The Pirate Bay or something.

Getting disgruntled and indiscriminately dumping whatever you find on sensitive internal networks, in violation of the military law you agreed to be governed by when you VOLUNTEERED for the US military, is not an honorable self-sacrifice.

If we believe that, then we should believe that any employee of any startup has an honorable sacrificial duty to leak that startup's code along with a dump of its databases.

So if a volunteer army is committing mass atrocities in the name of protecting state secrets, nobody should blow the whistle because they volunteered for the position before they knew what they were going to be doing?

I'm just wondering where the line is drawn here.

Someone mistaking video journalists when they are peaking around a corner with a video camera as enemy combatants that recently shot at a convoy, is not "mass atrocities". Lets draw that line.

I am making no implications or analogies; I am simply asking a hypothetical question in response to the parent post. Why does volunteering to follow some code make it morally wrong to blow the whistle?

If that was an employee of Enron circa 2000, yes I think she or he should be celebrated. It's not like Manning "indiscriminately dump[ed]" documents from an organization that was clearly honorable and honest -- quite on the contrary, it seems.

Sacrifice by definition must be voluntary, otherwise it's just servitude, so saying he volunteered is not a good argument against calling his service sacrifice.

Likewise breaking the law is not necessarily wrong, and what's legal and what's moral don't always overlap. Consider slavery.

As for the last part, it could be a duty to leak code if your startup is doing something highly immoral. No one's arguing for what you said; it seems like trolling.

If that startup is killing civillians, absolutely.

Not really a fair comparison. Unless the start-up was tax payer funded, and was doing objectionable things like selling customers credit card/personal information to third parties, and you knew about it, maybe then you would be lauded for exposing it. However no one would label you a hero for releasing a companies IP for the sake of it.

MAYBE if it was some company making bucket loads of money off of GPL code they were deliberately and knowingly abusing the license!

Homeland, the TV series, is based on a similar premise and, whether you like the show or not, it works.

In taking responsibility, he's holding his head high, not cowering behind attorneys and HTTP proxies.

You might be reading too much into this (or not). In the context of a plea bargain in the United States, "accepting responsibility" is a keyword. It triggers a significant reduction in your sentence.

Well said.

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