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What If Manning Had Leaked To the New York Times?
New submitter minstrelmike points outs a two-page editorial in the NYTimes "about what would have been different legally, morally, and security-wise," had the military information released through WikiLeaks been published by the Times instead.
"'If Manning had delivered his material to The Times, WikiLeaks would not have been able to post the unedited cables, as it ultimately did, heedless of the risk to human rights advocates, dissidents and informants named therein. In fact, you might not have heard of WikiLeaks. The group has had other middling scoops, but Manning put it on the map.' The writers also discusses what the Times would and would not have done, admitting they probably wouldn't have shared with other news outlets, but also admitting they would definitely have not shared everything."
He wanted it to get out.
Do you produce anything besides drivel?
Spin:
"heedless of the risk to human rights advocates, dissidents and informants named therein"
Reality:
http://www.collateralmurder.com/
"A full audio recording of the whistleblower is released today despite a court prohibition on such recordings"
Okay, I'll bite.
The end result of a journalist's work is a product (called a newspaper even if it's only rehashes of things we all know and it's posted digitally).
What's your job, and what's the end product?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
I thought Manning shopped it around to all the big existing media and they didn't want to know, it was only after Wikileaks picked it up that THEN they came back. And as to unedited, Wikileaks was working with the newspapers to get the redactions done until.. The Guardian in the UK started dropping unedited stuff? Don't know for sure, a lot of finger pointing, but 99% of it always appears to be at Wikileaks and from what appeared to be going on at the time, they were doing the best they could to release slowly and carefully to avoid putting people into danger (though as pointed out, anyone who wanted this data probably already had it).
Waiting for an amusing sig.
There is absolutely no way NYT would have touched Manning's cable archives. They would have feigned interest and then shopped him. Bill Keller knows this.
The OP is the biggest piece of self-serving balderdash I've read in weeks. It's nauseating, and teeming with distortions and outright lies about Manning and Wikileaks.
I wonder if they would have simply sat on them for a year, like they did with the NSA wiretapping matter just because the feds asked them to?
At this point, "Why didn't he leak to the Times?" is only slightly less risible than "Why didn't he just register his concerns with the chain of command?"
NYT to whistle blowers: "Give your leaks to us instead of lame ol' Wikileaks! *WE* will make money on.. err... I mean *WE* will keep your data safer!"
WikiLeaks would not have been able to post the unedited cables, as it ultimately did, heedless of the risk to human rights advocates
That's one whopper of a half truth.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
> WikiLeaks would not have been able to post the unedited cables, as it ultimately did, heedless of the risk to human rights advocates, dissidents and informants named therein
The unredacted cables were published by accident, with Wikileaks and The Guardian being about equally neglectful. The op-eds claim of "[publishing] heedless of the risk" here is a lie.
I know that it is an op-ed, and therefore not the New York Times' opinion, but the New York Times still have a responsibility to do a basic fact check before posting it.
What If The New York Times Still Mattered?
If he'd leaked to NYT then nobody would have read the cables at all because the site is paywalled.
somebody forgot to take their laxatives this morning...
OK, big shot. Why don't you go ahead and tell me what rampant crime is running through our neighborhoods that isn't being reported on. Because I can tell you, with an extremely high level of confidence, that every single act of violence or criminality is taken by the media to be sensationalized and spun as a talking point for whatever agenda they are being paid to promote this week. Unless of course those acts of violence or criminality are being perpetuated by the people paying them the money, in which case yes, you won't hear a thing about it.
But the kinds of crimes that those people are perpetuating aren't the kind that make you batten down the hatches and dive under your bed. As a matter of fact, as far as real, violent crime is concerned, it's at it's lowest level in decades. But turn on the local ActionNews, and you'd think we're living in some post-apocalyptic Mad Max world, where just going outside is going to get you robbed and killed.
Funny, really. Because when I go outside, I still see the birds and the bees and the trees and things seem to be just like they've always been. It's all a matter of perspective.
NYT journalist?
Here's some fucking news, you cannot tax an economy into prosperity, unemployment is increasing and the cost of fucking hamburgers is going up thanks to Obama and all the socialists elected and supported by the NYT. They do not report news, they spin and transcribe what the elitists in government tell them to say. That's all.
What I do is none of your fucking business.
Sure you can tax into prosperity... Tax pays for services needed for prosperity, like security (police, defense), libraries, transport and communication infrastructure, education, a legal system etc at a minimum. This obviously doesn't mean that "more tax is always better", but some level of tax is needed. Providing care for the elderly and children increases the workforce and thus prosperity, but also requires funding.
The society might also find that handling things like health together through the tax system has benefits - when looked at purely through the numbers, US clearly pays far more (as %GDP) than anyone else with not very good results.
What the fuck planet is this author from? The government would have gotten wind of it, after they likely reported it to the government, and they would have immediately handed it all over with a court gag order in place as well. Receiving stolen property is illegal. Receiving stolen government classified intel is probably more illegal. Publishing it online and in the paper is mega ultimate super-illegal so no, not a damn word of it would have gotten out. I can't believe Slashdot let this idiotic of a fantasy story through.
Unfortunately there's no, "you're an idiot" mod, so I'll leave you unmoderated and tell you directly. If Manning really did leak this information then yes, he's a hero. But he's not a traitor, and he deserves no punishment. He deserves what any hero does, but unfortunately he's getting what heroes too often get. Instead of praise and thanks for highlighting evil, and exposing dark secrets, he's getting punished for it. But that's to be expected, what evil organization actually likes being exposed as evil when they try and pretend otherwise?
People like to say, "oh, you broke the law, accept the consequences", but fuck that shit. If the law is wrong (and any law that forbids a person to revel wrong doing on the scale reveled by Manning, is wrong), then it is your duty to break it. And then to evade injustice. E.g. the mafia come and say, "we'll protect your shop from someone firebombing it", but if you reject their offer, you still have the right to defend your shop yourself from firebombing (which will come from the mafia). The mafia are the government, demanding you accept their laws or face the consequences they decided on.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
Be careful what you wish for.
We could always move the tax rates back to where they were when Reagan was in office.
It might actually pay for all of our military traipsing around the world.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
The law is not an absolute concept. It is a convention full of flaws. When someone breaks an unfair laws he does not "deserve" punishment, even if he does it knowing he will get it, and if in the end he does not get the punishment much for the better, although it seldom happens.
However, he's also a fucking traitor and deserves the punishment which is coming to him
- I suppose he is a 'traitor' in the same way that an SS soldier would have been in Nazi units designed to burn people alive in concentration camps, for releasing the real information about the atrocities for all the public to find out.
USA government kills civilian children on daily basis with bombs, that's part of the information released by Manning. I don't give a shit what the literal legality is of what he did, he is not a traitor, the US government is the traitor of the principles that the country was founded upon.
USA government, every single fucker in it that knew and authorised that knows and authorises murder of people on daily basis should be rotting in jail, Manning is a normal person that became part of a completely corrupt, oppressive, ridiculously blood thirsty system and he did not stand for it. By releasing this information he notifies the public what atrocities are done in their name under the pretence of 'protecting the Constitution', while in reality completely abandoning the Constitution and destroying every principle that the USA Republic was founded upon.
You can't handle the truth.
I feel the same way, except I believe the cables should have been edited for names of the innocent and so on.
They were. Wikileaks didn't release the unedited cables, and I doubt Manning would have been willing to leak them without assurance that they would redact dangerous information. The problem was that "respectable newspapers" (The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel) were involved in the redaction process, and The Guardian used the opportunity for a scoop. Maybe NYT is more trustworthy than The Guardian - I don't know - but it is deeply ironic that they are using this of all things as an example of being better "legally, morally, and security-wise" than Wikileaks when Wikileaks's only shortcoming was involving the likes of NYT in the first place.
Also wealth redistribution can be good for an economy. It is what made the USA the powerhouse it was. WW2 and the programs of the great depression moved lots of money into the hand of the new middle class, they spent that money thus driving the economy. A single rich person has only so many needs they will spend money on, taking that money and giving it to people who will spend it will improve the economy. Today we see the reverse with a shrinking middle class and a slowing economy as wealth accumulates in the hands of a small few.
These are just facts, they have nothing to do with the morality of such action.
But see, that changes as soon as you call that rich person a Job Creator. A Job Creator can spend infinite money creating jobs, whereas the middle class will waste in on pointless things like mortgages, new technology, and transportation.
We just think it's funny that you keep calling Obama a socialist. All it shows is that you have no clue what the word means. Obama is not a socialist. The American Socialist Party doesn't even think he's a socialist.
I don't like or support Obama, but not because of his economic stance. The fact is that he'd be able to get a lot more done to help the country on the economic front if the Republicans weren't bound and determined to block everything he attempts to do.
Technoli
He's not a hero. He violated his contract with the US government. All claims to moral superiority on his part are void since he had no authorization to handle the materials in the first place and the indiscriminate nature of what he collected.
That being said I'd like to know who in the chain of command is going to be held responsible for the utter lack of operational security that made it possible for Manning to copy the files in the first place. Obviously nobody will because the higher ups are all going to have their asses covered by the Manning / Assange shitstorm that's been concocted to distract everyone.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Comeback without the strawman and total misunderstanding of systemic poverty and we can talk. Until then, fuck off.
He's not a hero. He violated his contract with the US government.
Those two are not mutually exclusive; in fact, I'd consider them quite strongly linked. The global bully who goes around kicking sand in others' faces is the US and has been for at least 35 years, possibly longer.
you stupid elitist pricks all have a big laugh about the EVIL CONSERVATIVE and you pat each other on the back to cheer on yet more and more government, more regulations, more taxation, theft and erosion of the civil society.
You know, it takes a truly exception level of delusion to think that it's the elite in this country who want more taxes on themselves, and the average working people who want to cut all benefit programs and social safety nets for the average working people.
Yes, I'm sure all the billionaire power-brokers in this country are all Democrats who just hate it when Republicans pass tax breaks and pro-corporate laws that benefit themselves greatly. "Oh no, please make me pay more taxes and take away these laws that allow me to lord over the poor like a God!" I can hear Donald Trump and the Koch brothers saying.
Tell me, what color is the sky in your world?
Your political party doesn't care about your rights and only represents corporate interests.
Sure you can tax into prosperity... Tax pays for services needed for prosperity, like security (police, defense), libraries, transport and communication infrastructure,
education, a legal system etc at a minimum. This obviously doesn't mean that "more tax is always better", but some level of tax is needed. Providing care for the elderly and children increases the workforce and thus prosperity, but also requires funding.
One of the clearest indications that political thought is an oxymoron is the idea that everything must come in only 2 flavors and nothing between, and that all lines must be straight lines.
Reality isn't that tidy. There is a point where too little taxes fail society and a point where too much tax crushes. There's also a spot in between. Or actually, more of a blob, since there are a lot of variables in the equation. The blob can be larger or smaller or even inside-out depending on whether your demands exceed supply.
We are the most spoiled generation in all human history. We have all - even the eldest - spent all, or nearly all of our lives expecting things to become cheaper every day. Sure, we howl about inflation, but the truth is, anything electronic has been chasing Moore's law for decades, and almost everything we do any more ties into something electronic, even if it's just just sitting down at the PC and figuring out when to plant the South 40.
Matters only got worse when offshoring became economically viable. We've come to expect that Lower Prices Every Day is a right, and not simply being in the right place at the right time. No 16th-century farmer expected next year to require less effort or money to survive than last year.
So we do foolish things like lower taxes right before a recession is due when we should have been saving the money for when the rains came and lowering taxes afterwards. And compound it, by fighting to keep the taxes low even as we embark on expensive campaigns.
There's almost always something that isn't really necessary in any budget, whether it's personal, corporate, or government. And tough times help provide incentive for getting rid of it. Still, historically, we are used to being able to prosper while paying far more tax than we have for the last 10 years. And, frankly, the last 10 years have mostly been pretty miserable, so I don't buy the whole "lower taxes = more prosperity" line. If it can't work in a period that long, I'll likely die before it works at all - if it ever does. Ergo, it's useless for my purposes.
The one thing that more government money can do that no one else can, is spend money when no one else dares to. Governments don't have to show a profit (and shouldn't!), nor do they have to be concerned over-much about daily expenses. They can keep on cranking regardless, and if it isn't very efficient, nonetheless, it keeps money in circulation instead of being hoarded. Hoarded money doesn't really do anyone any good. Not even the hoarders. Until you spend it, money is just potential.
Because Troll and Flamebait are used since Slashdot has no "-1 conflicts with my ideology" moderation option.
I even address the fact that I was not supporting such a thing, but people still get upset if they see any remark that conflicts with their worldview.
He violated his contract with the US government.
- OMG and the US government has violated its contract with the entire USA, with all the people and all the States.
USA government was supposed to protect and defend the Constitution and the principles of individual rights, instead it's killing off individuals and is taking a long, stinking dump on the Constitution. It doesn't matter that somebody who signed up TO PROTECT THE CONSTITUTION is not following the orders of the system, that is clearly is violating its own oath to do the same.
He did not sign up to protect the government, he signed up to protect the Constitution.
Manning is doing his job, the rest of the government is not.
You can't handle the truth.
Without SS their will be old people begging in the streets. The simple fact is either through their own mistakes or by unfortunate circumstances many people will never have enough money to retire. When they can no longer work either we can help them or allow them to starve on the street. No amount of your ideology will change reality.
The free market does not raise all boats equally, that is a myth. Again, look at history not ideology.
Wikileaks was being actively supported by several media outlets at the time (which IIRC included the Associated Press). As such, they were acting agents of the press doing work that the papers themselves hadn't dared for decades.
However it was the Guardian's blunder that caused the real breech, IMO. There is no denying they bungled it.
A creationist can come onto here and "conflict with my ideology" and still sound like an idiot and get modded down appropriately. Some ideologies (namely those parroted by Fox "News" watchers) are stupid and deserve to be ridiculed.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Stop with the ideology.
If we stop SS payments right now, people will be forced onto the street. That is a fact, unless you have some alterative for paying their bills.
For the most of human existence retirement did not exist. People worked until they died. That was it. There is no need to save for retirement when you die in the fields at 50 or in the mine at 45.
There exists a huge class of workers who literally could save every dime they don't spend on necessities and still not have enough to retire ever.
Even if you think they should try harder, or pull on their boot straps more or whatever fantasy you have, the reality is some people will never be able to save that kind of money. They just do not have the income to do so.
I don't know what sort of Communist society you live in, but in America people create jobs for people because they profit from it, not for charity. Jobs will be created when there is demand for those jobs (or the products that those jobs create). If there is no demand (for example, if there is no middle class to buy the products) then the rich people will not the create jobs. And they shouldn't. But, if all the rich people decide to stop creating jobs ("going Galt"), then there will still be demand and middle class or poor people will create the jobs themselves (because there is potential to make money - this is how small businesses are created).
It boggles my mind that all these Republicans think they have to worship rich people as gods or they will take all the jobs away. I don't thank my boss for giving me a job. My boss thanks me for being hardworking and productive by giving me bonuses and raises. My boss (who is a conservative) made a joke right after the election that he is going to have to fire people because his taxes were going to go up. I told him (lightheartedly of course) that if I did not already make him more money than I cost, then he should go ahead and fire me because I don't work for charity. Guess what? I am still working (he did not fire me).
Free market capitalism is as removed from reality as ideal communism, and just as unworkable in practice with large groups of people. Social Security has zero contribution to our national debt -- if anything, Congress needs to stop looting it for purposes entirely unrelated to public welfare.
As for Bradley Manning, I wish we as a nation would grow a spine and stand up against the injustice against him, the injustice against other whistleblowers, and the injustices he helped expose. We need to drag the authoritarians kicking and screaming through an equitable process to make this happen, but it's something we would all be better off doing.
"These people must believe that the rich are no smarter than your average house cat"
I have come to the conclusion that the rich, indeed, are not smarter than the average house cat.
The economy lives and dies by people spending money.
People without jobs and people with lower paychecks just cant do that.
But still, the "Job Creators" keep sending jobs to other countries, bolstering their economies, bleeding ours....
emt 377 emt 4
I think you misread some sarcasm there. Poe's law. It's weird living in a country where there are 2 parties and one defines itself by being factually wrong as much as possible. It makes it impossible to satire.
Republicans are on the record as vowing to block anything the Obama attempts to do.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/26/democrats-gop-plot-obstruct-obama
And yes, Obamacare is so socialist that it is virtually identical to a health care plan the the Republicans came up with several years back.
Obama is not trying to take away your guns or your Second Amendment rights. If you had been paying attention, you would have realized that he's trying to take away your Fourth Amendment rights.
Technoli
This is what this is about. The Times really didn't like Jullian Assage.
I think its because they are titled, old newspaper snobs who think its not only their duty, but their right to decide what the people get and do not get to hear. They are pissed that things like wikileaks exist in the first place and the old order of newsmedia is being shaken up.
The NYT thinks the people OWE the Times news stories, and they should just for them over, as if they are a perennial authority figure on everything news related.
Again with the leaks, they think it was their sole right to censor the government cables of what and what should not be shown to the public.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/opinion/keller-wikileaks-a-postscript.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/28/julian-assange-press-wikileaks-documentary_n_1116599.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/26/new-york-times-assange-wikileaks_n_814434.html
So althought it was not wikileaks who outed Manning, but a hacker named Adrian Lamo, who Bradley Manning bragged to about leaking the docs.
So what got Bradley Manning caught was ultimately his own big mouth.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/03/adrian-lamo-bradley-manning-q-and-a
This article is nothing more than some weasel words to get potential informats to go back to the news media instead of new media, for all the wrong reasons. I wreaks of typical news trickery, and self-promotion.
Commenting on having no clue: Way to read too far into it.
My comment is saying that we spend waaaaay too much money being the world's police.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
The constitution is and always has been a flawed legal document. It was amended before it even took effect to fix some of the flaws; it has been repeatedly amended since. It has too much bolt-on shit that's ineffective and poorly works around the framework it provides, and needs to be torn down and rewritten.
Gun crimes are committed by both legal and illegal gun owners--legal gun owners with your psychological profile are the likely to commit gun crimes, while those with more reservation and less paranoia are less likely. Legal gun owners with your mentality also commit more "justifiable homicide" because of a pattern of zero tolerance--of immediately and fatally employing a firearm where it would be legally and even barely justifiable, more concerned with "he had it coming, I was protecting myself" than trying to stay human. The strict, mechanical decision process of "there is a threat, I must eliminate it by any force" is inhuman.
Socialism is a good thing... in moderation. Socialist programs support and balance an economy, whereas pure socialism and pure capitalism both concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a few.
Further, context is important: Extremely small economies--for example, colonies of less than 100 people--benefit from full scale socialism because any other economy is infeasible; but as the colony grows, these economies quickly fail. This is because a family unit is inherently socialistic, and a small community must be socially tight-knit to survive. Larger, socially disconnected communities (nations of hundreds, thousands, millions) quickly lose such motivation because they lose sight of the need, and then lose the need outright; thus capitalism comes into play. As nations get quite large, capitalism fails; thus regulations must come into play to retain the benefits offered by capitalism.
Political parties promise the world, while economic theorists are used to back up assertions about capitalism and socialism and how we'd be much better off in a feel-good socialist utopia or a freedom-driven capitalist free market. The truth is all systems can be exploited; on a small scale exploitation is impossible because the risk is unmanageable (exploit your power in a colony of 50 people barely trying to survive as is and you'll probably collapse the economy, then you die with everyone else--if they don't hang you first and get on with their lives), but on a large scale it's too easy.
Micro-managing an economy is simply impossible on a large scale: socialism works, but only when you absolutely understand the needs and constraints of the entire economic system on all levels; you can't, and so capitalism allows for these details to work themselves out (i.e. delegation).
Capitalism is ripe for exploit and stagnation, however, and so minor socialist practices--regulations, tax incentives, etc--are put in place to guide the system. Excessive or improper use of these practices is destructive to the economy, but so is not employing them at all.
There is a balance. Nobody seeks it. Those in power seek more power, or seek to push ideals they believe will universally solve all problems; they won't.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Some things are not worth dealing with.
For instance there is no point in arguing with someone who claims the earth is flat. Nor is there a need to go talk to the bum on the corner screaming about the aliens.
Not necessarily:
Side A: "The sky is blue."
Side B: "No, the sky is green."
Side A: "No, really, the sky is blue, look."
Side B: "I think the sky is really green, so it must be green."
Side A: "No it isn't. Use this camera, point it at the sky, and see what color the camera says the sky is."
Side B: "I still think it's green."
Side A: "See, as described by John Tyndall in 1859, the small particles in the air scatter the blue light more than the red light. This was later quantified by Lord Rayleigh when he determined exactly how large the effect is."
Side B: "Well, that's all well and good, but I still think it's green."
Now, is Side A being stupid because they stop taking Side B's arguments seriously at that point?
I am officially gone from
Do you have any sources on when and where socialism works and when it doesn't?
Technoli
Manual redistribution can in theory work, but only if the redistribution is done in a way that everyone understands the full implications and the way the money is applied is not sidetracked by political considerations and corruption. If you artificially buoy the standard of living in a country based on redistribution, eventually, everything will be redistributed and/or the rich will have departed for greener pastures. Then the standard of living will fail dramatically.
There is the strange idea that rich people's money sits in the Scrooge McDuck vault and they do nothing other than swim in it. I hear what people are saying about "trickle down" and supply side, but the investments of most rich people are either in their own companies, which a good number of them founded, or in stocks or other bank issues. All of that money has to be reinvested in something productive so that it keeps up with inflation.
Additionally, there is a benefit to giving resources to people who already have their basic needs met. If you only ensure enough money to provide basic needs, then no one will go beyond that. For much of his life, Mozart was sponsored by the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, someone who could afford to have an orchestra in his employ. Extravagant? Yes. Did it produce nothing? Certainly not. Many of the proponents of the Enlightenment were quite wealthy, and those who weren't had patrons.
I agree that we need to see what we can do to help meet people's needs. On the other hand, I don't consider the fact that there exist rich individuals to automatically signal that as the reason that other people have no jobs or a lower standard of living. The amount of money in people's hands is not the issue. Productivity is the issue. If you don't have productivity backing it, you can raise the minimum wage to a million dollars a year, and in the end, a loaf of bread will cost a few thousand dollars because handing people money doesn't make them better off unless they get more money than someone else does. Redistribution doesn't inherently increase productivity, it just shuffles around fiat currency.
Thank you. People need to quit bitching about Obama and go do something! Show us some of that good ole conservative self reliance. IME successful people are going to be successful regardless of whether it happens to be government or big business trying to claw at their money.
I could bring a few, mainly specific governments. I will list a few you can look up the details on wikipedia.
Socialist systems that didn't work (not always due to their socialist policies but nevertheless): USSR, North VIetnam, DDR, Greece
Governments with many socialist policies that seem to work well for them: Switzerland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, China.
Bear in mind this is a complex issue, the difference between the way things are done in these different countries is massive. It is not possible to compare for example the policies of China and Finland in any meaningful way as their situations are too different. The countries that have had failures with socialist systems usually had their problems as a result of things that had nothing to do with socialism, also the countries that had success with socialist policies often had other advantages from the start and can't point purely at socialism for their success. Cuba is a nice example of both. Socialism has given them a fairly good national system in terms of wealth equality, education, medicine. On the other hand they are still a very poor country, they have a lot of enemies (well at least one major one). One nice way to compare different systems is through statistics.
A nice tool for this is google public data explorer. Things like literacy. life expectancy, child mortality, teachers per capita, doctors per capita, poverty etc. can be compared across different systems and the results can be surprising. On the other hand it is difficult to deduce causation from those statistics.
One of the strongest arguments in favour of socialist policies I have ever heard was from a TED video which showed that statistically economic inequality (unfair distribution of wealth) is a very strong indicator for almost every form of social of social problem, to such a degree that if all the rich people in an inequal country were to give 90% of their wealth to a trust to support the poorest in society, even those rich people would be better off.