Assange, Manning, Snowden: Heroes or Villains?

[Deleted]

Below are quotes from 2 articles:

1 - Assange: More leaks to come

http://www.smh.com.au/national/assan...01-1mxmqz.html

WikiLeaks is planning new releases of secret documents on controversial negotiations and intelligence agency operations, according to the anti-secrecy organisation's Australian founder, Julian Assange.

"There'll be more publications – about large international so-called free trade deals, and about an intelligence agency," Mr Assange said.

In March, a US court confirmed that WikiLeaks and Mr Assange are still being targeted in a long-running investigation by the US Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation.

He has lived at Ecuador's London embassy since June 2012 when the South American country granted him political asylum on the grounds that he is at risk of extradition to the United States to face espionage and conspiracy charges arising from the leaking of thousands of secret documents by US Army private Chelsea Manning.

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Meanwhile, in Germany:

2 - Snowden, Assange and Manning statues unveiled in Berlin

http://www.euronews.com/2015/05/01/s...led-in-berlin/



Taking a stand in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz are whistleblowers Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

Activists and members of Germany’s Green party unveiled the life-size bronze statues on Friday.

All are considered heroes on the political left for leaking US intelligence documents.

US soldier Chelsea Manning (born Bradley Manning) was convicted in 2013 on charges relating to the Espionage Act for leaking US intelligence and military documents to Wikileaks. She is currently serving a 35 year prison sentence.

Edward Snowden is currently evading extradition to the US by taking asylum in Russia. He released classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) to journalists revealing the scale of the US government’s global surveillance capabilities.

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My question from all this is simple:

Whistleblowers like Assange, Manning and Snowden:
- who put transparency and truth above the safety of people and soldiers,
- who risk their own lives to expose things that perhaps the public is not ready for,
- who make their own decisions as to what is right and wrong and betray their governments to do so,
are they heroes -- or villains?

[starlord]

Whistleblowers like Assange, Manning and Snowden, who put transparency and truth above the safety of people and soldiers, who risk their own lives to expose things that perhaps the public is not ready for, who make their own decisions as to what is right and wrong and betray their governments to do so: are they heroes -- or villains?

this seems like a loaded question.

lets not pretend like theres no profit in secret information.

[Bags-]

america is founded on distrust of government

blind trust of authority is bad

[Doctor Amadeus]

Neither. Snowden is a weasel and traitor and Assange is a narsasistic ego maniac.

I don't trust either of their motives Snowdens story is inconsistant with everything he has done. Same with Assange.

[Skroe]

You know, you could make - and I strongly disagree with it but I certainly understand the perspective - argument for Edward Snowden being a "whistle-blower" and a hero. It requires ignoring the fact that actual US spying on US Citizens constitutes the tinniest minority of his leak and that most of the leak is related to Western (not even just American) security and spying on Russia, China and Terrorists. It requires ignoring a tremendous amount of Edward Snowden's backstory and him and his co-conspirator's political motivations. It requires forgetting that things like US contingency prepositioning locations and how the US electronically spies on China was leaked. If despite all of this you ignore and you only care about the NSA spying on Americans, you could make an argument (again one I disagree with) that Edward Snowden is a heroic whistleblower.

But Bradley Fucking Manning?

And worse than that, Julian Assange. The Julian Assange. Perhaps the internet's greatest bullshit artist and egotist of the last half decade whose chief cause in the world is the promotion of the Julian Assange brand, which he furthers by leaking documents of questionable value all while claiming (fraudulently) existence of proof of war crimes or other malfeasance. The last big thing Julian Assange did, for example, was leak State Department Cables... but all that did was make the State Department look tremendously professional and competent in a world overflowing with corruption. There was next to nothing shady in them at all, despite what Assange the self-promoter imagined.

I personally, look forward to the day all three share a cell block, Bradley Manning already rotting there for the next 30 years. But calling all three a hero requires really creative rewriting of history.

[Independent voter]

I think Manning might've got caught up in the spy game. The CIA found out he was leaking documents so they made sure he got only the documents they wanted him to have. That's my guess.

Snowden, I wish he would've done things differently, not sure we should trust him or not.

Both people probably did more good than bad and I say this in that they started a national conversation among voters. People talked about the leaked information and in the end decided to let government handle things. Maybe some are a little more cautious about government now then they were 10 years ago.

And visa versa, the government now knows it can trust voters a little more and not worry about public opinion as much.

Is the statue a "Bradley" or "Chelsea" version of Manning?

[Acidbaron]

I rather have them in our world today, despite their character flaws as i care little of how kind or good their personalities are. Instead of having all good people that are too afraid to speak out or report or distribute information of what our governments are actually up to.

We as citizens need to hold them accountable and we can only do that sadly with information disclosed from third party sources as everything is labelled as sensitive information that the public can't handle.

[tumppu]

Heroes to some, villains to others. Same could be said about anyone, really.

[Soulwind]

They're just as good and evil as the people they fought against or the people they helped. The world is not black and white.

As an european, I think they've done more good than harm, but I'd imagine americans feel betrayed and damaged by their actions.

america is founded on distrust of government

blind trust of authority is bad

That I can get behind. Fanatism is always bad.

[Deleted]

Whatever good he might have done beforehand Snowden betrayed himself and the cause of the privacy movement by becoming Putin's bitch. Next time the US government wants to bring in some new "anti-terrorism" law and online privacy advocates complain, they'll just get their media friends to show that footage again, instantly eliminating the credibility of any dissent.

Manning and Assange did a lot of good work, but there sloppiness in failing to redact vulnerable sources in the documents they exposed has also caused the movement problems. The laziness is inexcusable when you are putting ordinary people's lives in danger. This is ameliorated to some extent by the obvious suffering, particulary in Manning's case, that they endure currently.

[Deleted]

I can`t believe I`m saying this but I agree with Putin here - with which side of his asshole was Snowden thinking, if he was at all?

As you are reading this post, seconds are ticking away and the value of the information that he has is declining.
I bet his leaks achieved only one thing - it forced NSA back in to shadows and if anything, it made it leaner and meaner.

Besides his story is full of holes and it reeks of dirty scheming. As if he couldnt get a flight to Mexico and from there to Venezuela.
I hope he rots away in Russia and is never given the honour of being buried back in USA.

[Doctor Amadeus]

Whatever good he might have done beforehand Snowden betrayed himself and the cause of the privacy movement by becoming Putin's bitch. Next time the US government wants to bring in some new "anti-terrorism" law and online privacy advocates complain, they'll just get their media friends to show that footage again, instantly eliminating the credibility of any dissent.

Manning and Assange did a lot of good work, but there sloppiness in failing to redact vulnerable sources in the documents they exposed has also caused the movement problems. The laziness is inexcusable when you are putting ordinary people's lives in danger. This is ameliorated to some extent by the obvious suffering, particulary in Manning's case, that they endure currently.

None if them DID anything.

Snowden basically stole files while working for the NSA which why someone if his intellect would be at all oblivious to what they do, I'll never get. But this man basically stole files from the NSA and confidential information he swore not to.

He then thought to well ahead of this and worried how dangerous the government was. Snowden then decided to betray his country to others countries with essentially less freedoms and more corrupt. While leaving his friends and family open to the evil scary government.

Snowden is out if his fucking mind. And he did all this for what? What greater good or cause?


Not that there aren't times one must be a traitor to do what's right, I get that it's not something one sets out to do. But with this guy I'm not to sure. The last thing I would do is trust a guy like that who wants to tell me some shit he swore someone else he wouldn't.

Like I said I would vilify the guy but he is no Hero and like him or not he is a traitor.

Bottom line Snowden same could be said of the other 2 what was the gain?

To me it wasn't anything.

[Skroe]

None if them DID anything.

Snowden basically stole files while working for the NSA which why someone if his intellect would be at all oblivious to what they do, I'll never get. But this man basically stole files from the NSA and confidential information he swore not to.

He then thought to well ahead of this and worried how dangerous the government was. Snowden then decided to betray his country to others countries with essentially less freedoms and more corrupt. While leaving his friends and family open to the evil scary government.

Snowden is out if his fucking mind. And he did all this for what? What greater good or cause?

It's actually even stupider than that.

You know how like, you read on the internet, a few times a year, some suburban Muslim moron got hooked onto reading the wrong sites on the internet, and then gets a visit by the FBI for offering to help ISIS or Al Qaeda blow up Times Square or something? Snowden is the White Angle Saxon Protestant version of that.

Eddie Snowden has self taught smarts, but a life of pretty low achievement. He got his GED. He dropped out of college. His contractor job at the NSA was not a high level one. But what he did do a lot of was hang out on the internet exactly like the poser terrorist above. He hung out on the internet and read lots of websites and hung out a lot on forums, specifically the Ars Technica forums.

How many posts did he write? Something on the order of 40 a day, mostly on political issues. He lived there, for years.

What I'm describing is a person who got radicalized on the internet, on a forum not terribly different than this one. He saw Julian Assange's leaks, and became political sympathetic to a kind of anarcho-libertarian worldview that was in typical wannabe Al Qaeda suburban terrorist style, naively critical and hostile to American foreign actions. You can even look at how he responds when confronted by people like John Oliver. Edward Snowden is not a man, paradoxically, who likes to question what he assumes to be right.

Now I don't mean to equate Edward Snowden with ISIS or anything dumb like that. But he is an example of another type of internet radicalization. The guy who goes and tries to get to Syria via Turkey have hanging out on an ISIS forum is just the Islamic extremist expression of a larger phenomenon of disenfranchised young people who get stuck in echo chambers and come to believe, somewhat unquestioningly rather extremist things. And to be clear, what Edward Snowden is on record of believing, politically (putting aside the leaks), is very, very far outside the political mainstream in the US or Europe. It is the politics of someone who reads a small group of websites and considers that life experience or all there is that he needs to know.

If you can say one thing about Edward Snowden, it's that he is a essentially a forum political crusader who took his agenda out of the Ars Technica bulletin board and into the real world, which is a lot more than almost any other forum political crusader has ever done. But his entire political philosophy and the justification for his actions is as easily challenged as the wannabe-ISIS footsoldier's justifications for their rage against the West because they both come from the same type of source: websites that tell disenfranchised young people that the world is upside down and wrong for a set of easily comprehensible reasons, and that one type of radical action is the way to make it right.

In the end, like the wannabe ISIS footsoldier, Snowden threw his life away for nothing.

[Strangebrew]

Heroes, anyone who exposes the dirty laundry is a hero. Any government where they actively invade the citizens privacy deserves it.

[mmokri]

Where is poll? They are heroes. They do it for me, not some taxed money stolen from me.

[KrazyK923]

Like almost everything in life, it is far more complicated than them just being bad or good.

[Deleted]

Well this question comes down to "Do you agree with the US shamlessly spying on everyone?"

In which case, yes, they are heroes and the EU should grant them and other future whistleblowers, asylum.

Ofcoarse, the matter is much more complex then that and you can find good arguments for either side of the story. I'm not sure what benefit we have of all the intelligence gathering and spying, but I am pretty sure that its fairly bad manners to spy on your closest allies leaders because "the others do it aswel" without giving any evidence of that being the case.

[Kalis]

I think their motivation is the closest you'll get to whether or not they are heroes or villains.

Snowden: Believes what he did was in the interests of the public and, however naive he may have been, it's a fairly noble cause. Therefore I'd edge him toward the hero camp, but not into it.

Manning: Seems to have done it partly out of spite due to his/her perceived treatment by the military and partly out of what they thought was the public interest. Neither a hero nor a villain, s/he sits in the corner with the dunce cap on.

Assange: He comes across as the sort of person that would refer to himself in the third person. His motivation appears to be Assange, with any benefit to the public a side effect that he doesn't really care about. Definitely not a hero, but not a villain, except perhaps in some Hollywood teen movie, where he'd play the bitchy cheerleader whose only interest is to become head cheerleader and schemes to achieve that goal.

[Deleted]

Assange: He comes across as the sort of person that would refer to himself in the third person. His motivation appears to be Assange, with any benefit to the public a side effect that he doesn't really care about. Definitely not a hero, but not a villain, except perhaps in some Hollywood teen movie, where he'd play the bitchy cheerleader whose only interest is to become head cheerleader and schemes to achieve that goal.

I don't know, perhaps being stuck in that embassy for quite some years has made him lose sense of reality. I'd definitly say his intentions where noble.

[Kaykay]

Snowden is a hero in my book. I don't envy him sitting in Russia, but if the people don't call out the government on their shady/illegal business's, who is going to?

While it's not a civil war inducing secret that was spilled, it was still important enough that any respectable american choose wether they support total surveilance or wether they dont. Now they have the choice, before the government just choose what helped them best. And the next time the NSA lie to congress, hopefully consequences will follow.