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The Year's Dumbest Moments in Tech
harrymcc writes "Over at TIME.com, I rounded up the year's dumbest moments in technology. Yes, the launch of Healthcare.gov is included, as are Edward Snowden's revelations. But so are a bunch of people embarrassing themselves on Twitter, both BlackBerry and Lenovo hiring celebrities to (supposedly) design products, the release of glitchy products ranging from OS X 10.9 Mavericks to the new Yahoo Mail, and much more." I can't think of anything dumber than the NSA's claims that metadata isn't data.
Agreed that his infodump was for the good. But he still acted as a traitor by running to China and Russia. If he had "big balls," he would have stayed here and faced the music. I would be standing outside the prison where they held him screaming for his release. Now, there's no telling what he gave up to some real enemies of freedom.
You really think they would have thrown him in Gitmo if he had released the docs and invited reporters to park outside his house and come in to hang out and play x-box or something? What he did was to intentionally NOT face the consequences. Instead, he took an archive of sensitive data and took it straight to our two biggest international rivals. If you don't think he's dancing on Putin's strings saying exactly what Putin wants him to say, you are naive.
Do not compare Manning to Snowden. Manning was a fool and most likely a traitor. He threw out the baby with the bathwater. Just because some of what he leaked turned out to have been leak-worthy does not justify leaking everything he could get his hands on. If you save a dozen people from a burning building but in the process doom a hundred to die, you are still culpable for the deaths of the hundred. He is correctly incarcerated and his rights justifiably curtailed.
Snowden has been careful to leak only what he thinks was unconstitutional. I disagree with some of this definitions of what's unconstitutional, but I respect that he's trying to leak only the materials which are leak-worthy.