Hacker News Reader

Comment by agorabinary | Hacker News Reader

And who is to decide whether the leaked documents demonstrate government wrongdoing or not? If not for whistleblowers, we wouldn't even know that these wrongdoings exist, which would preclude our ability to judge them as such. This is the fallacy behind government secrecy.

Information must always be free --- non-disclosure contracts never take precedence over the First Amendment. Imagine if the Nazis were somehow able to cover up the Holocaust, would a non-disclosure contract prevent a German citizen from leaking the existence of the genocide? But you say, genocide is clearly wrong. But without the leaked information, how would we even know a genocide happened?

View on HN

That's the risk for whistleblowers. You have to be careful what you leak, and make sure that it is relevant. That's one reason why this case and the Snowden case are very different. Manning leaked a ton of stuff, a lot of which wasn't applicable. Snowden leaked very specific things, so he has a better shot at being considered a legit whistleblower.

Also - Godwin. Don't use Nazis as examples, it just diminishes your argument.

Reductio ad absurdum, a perfectly legitimate form of proof, begs to differ with Mr. Godwin.

Anyone can leak anything, as anyone can say anything. This is the law as per the First Amendment. You could lose your job contract for leaking information, but you could also lose your job for no reason at all. Those that would argue that only criminality should be leaked --- who is to determine that criminality if no one knows about it in the first place? Evidence of the act before judgment of the act. And to those who say leaking information can lead to soldier casualties --- so can lying to a public about the motivations for countless aggressive wars, and then assuming the public "can't handle the truth". Jessup went to prison for that, thanks to a few good men. Unfortunately, Americans don't listen to their movies, only watch them.

The constitution has provisions for government secrets, you should read it in it's entirety.

I won't link to a single section, but rather the entire document, because everyone should read the whole thing on a regular basis.

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_trans...

Reductio ad absurdum, a perfectly legitimate form of proof, begs to differ with Mr. Godwin

Godwin's law isn't about legitimate forms of proof, it's about the level and quality of discourse. It's not saying you're wrong it's saying that your point would be stronger without Nazi references.

Look at it as help, not refutation :)

Your meandering Chewbacca defense kind of falls flat at the beginning, when you claim that the First Amendment allows one to say anything they wish.

Try using that argument to leak persons' sensitive personally-identifiable information someday and see how well it works for you.

You can't just say anything. The First Amendment is not absolute - there have always been limits on it. Saying "fire" in a crowded theater is the canonical example.

Do you know who is responsible for determining what is criminal and what isn't? A judge and/or jury. That's the way our system works. That's the risk for whistleblowers. They have to be prepared to go to trial to determine if they get protected.

Seriously - in "A Few Good Men" Jessup went to jail for ordering the beating of a soldier. That has absolutely no bearing on this.

Godwin's law came about for a reason - using Nazis as an example is overdone. Its like comparing software to cars - it's an overused analogy. Because of this, you lose most of the power your argument may have had. Pick something else if you want to point out how ridiculous something is.

Walter Block disagrees: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPeqXcJqkeg . His hypothetical situations at the end may seems unrealistic to you, but consider them as illustrative of the dangers of blanket prosecution over much more favorable voluntary solutions.

Collecting and understanding the evidence of a situation may be up to a a judge/jury, but natural law is not. A judge cannot lawfully reject the First Amendment, which universally defends whistleblowers. "That's the way our system works" is not an argument.

The issue at the heart of A Few Good Men was the notion that an enlightened minority can lie to a majority for the good of that majority. Jessup beats soldiers, our government drone-bombs children. And they both think they can withhold these acts from public view, because it's in the "public's interest not to know". Whistleblowers rightfully reject this view, as did the jury in A Few Good Men.

Okay, I'll use Stalin and his genocides. Does it make a difference?

I'm assuming the video is equivalent to the text here: http://mises.org/books/defending.pdf

In which case even Block, an academic anarcist prepared to go to the extremes of defending one's right to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre is pretty unequivocal about the enforceability of voluntarily-agreed contracts against such speech. Such as by those who contracted to work for the military, for example?

Love or loathe what Manning did (and it's possible to do both: to believe he is both a whistleblower and someone who disclosed a lot of other information with no justification), the First Amendment was never intended to protect his course of action. Which leaves us with whether his course of action was ethical, and ethics and the military have never been easy bedfellows.

Natural law doesn't come into it, and is usually the refuge of people who don't have an argument. A judge can't just reject the First Amendment, but there are well-established limits on it, and your claim that it 'universally defends whistleblowers' is strictly imaginary. It doesn't say anything about protecting people who reveal government misdeeds.

This is something I think people really don't appreciate about the Snowden case: He's been extremely shrewd about the tiny amounts he's leaked. It's all gold and no dross, so is pretty damn credible, and very possibly legal. He may be a free and clear, able to come home, free man, by his 40th birthday.

> Information must always be free --- non-disclosure contracts never take precedence over the First Amendment.

This belief is very naive and unrealistic. There are some kinds of information that should obviously not be free. Credit card numbers, PINs, SSNs, identities of confidential informants, etc. In order for society to function there will be secrets. What we need is a healthy debate over what secrets should be allowed, how they should be kept, and how responsible oversight should be administered without publicly divulging everything. Statements like "information must always be free" provide nothing but straw men for those in favor of minimal oversight to knock down. Making such assertions is counterproductive.

Even if that information could get soldiers killed if released to the public? You waive certain rights when you join the U.S. military.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com