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Comment by mbreese | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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