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A heavily redacted Department of Defense report concludes that documents leaked to WikiLeaks had no "significant strategic impact" on the war in Afghanistan and "[had] no direct personal impact on current and former senior US leadership in Iraq":
The publication of hundreds of thousands of secret US documents leaked by the Army soldier Chelsea Manning in 2010 had no strategic impact on the American war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, a newly released Pentagon analysis concluded.
The main finding of the Department of Defense report, written a year after the breach, was that Manning's uploading of more than 700,000 secret files to the open information organization WikiLeaks had no significant strategic effect on the US war efforts.
The belated publication of the analysis gives the lie to the official line maintained over several years that the leak had caused serious harm to US national security.
[...] The conclusions are contained in the final report of the information review task force that the DoD set up in the wake of the Manning leaks to look into their impact in the hope of mitigating any damage. The report was obtained by BuzzFeed's investigative reporter Jason Leopold under freedom of information laws.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @12:44PM (8 children)
Blowing the whistle on the government's unconstitutional, illegal, and/or unethical activities is justifiable, even if it causes damage, and should never result in punishment. We need to encourage whistleblowers, not discourage them. But there is no evidence that Snowden caused actual damage anyway.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday June 22 2017, @02:40PM
But there is no evidence that Snowden caused actual damage anyway.
Yeah, I think that was the OP's point. Notice his use of the qualifying word "actual" before "damage".
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fishybell on Thursday June 22 2017, @03:38PM (6 children)
My problem with the Chelsea Manning leaks vs. the Snowden leaks is that it appears she wasn't actively grabbing only documents that showed constitutional issues, but rather just grabbing documents in bulk.
There is very much a reason to keep the documents secret, even if national security wouldn't be actively threatened by their release, and it's an unfortunate one: security through obscurity. If everything is secret, the things that actually need to be secret are harder to find.
This all brings me to another gripe. Snowden very much had a moral obligation to report on the US spying on its own citizens, but also had a moral obligation to not report on how, where, or when the US spyed on foreign entities. Snowden did active harm to US foreign relations and US intelligence capabilities by reporting on things like the US tapping of Angela Merkel's phone. Completely unnecessary for the overall narrative of "the NSA is doing very bad things that people should know about." This kind of thing moved him from patriot to attention hog in my mind. If he did it in the context of "the NSA is doing very bad things to everyone in the world," well, no duh. The NSA is a spy agency tasked with spying on foreign entities.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @04:12PM (5 children)
No. Since the US government is using these spying powers on everyone, then their methods need to be revealed so people can at least attempt to defend themselves. The solution? Don't conduct mass surveillance, period.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday June 22 2017, @06:19PM (3 children)
But that's a policy decision. Snowden's job was working for guys whose official duty is to spy on other countries.
It's like complaining about Microsoft releasing Windows in the first place instead of being anticompetitive. They're a for-profit company; they just need to abide by the rules.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23 2017, @01:26PM (2 children)
That's an ethical decision. The People need to know when the government is acting unethically, and how to fight back.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday June 23 2017, @03:38PM (1 child)
Pragmatism vs. idealism. Would you also argue we should disband the armed forces because war is unethical?
And before you say that analogy is hyperbolic, no, if you assume most other countries are spying as well, it's well-comparable.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23 2017, @07:05PM
There are ethical wars. Armed forces are useful for defensive wars and other stuff (defense vs real pirates).
As for offensive wars, if leaders propose a war, a referendum should be required and held then if not enough people voted for war, the leaders who proposed war get put on death row. Later separate referendums get held to redeem each of them at convenient times. Those who do not get enough votes get executed. If in hindsight it turns out war would have been a good idea, they get a posthumous award and people can cry or pretend to cry at the ceremony. See: https://soylentnews.org/~TheLink/journal/1632 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday June 22 2017, @11:54PM
The documents Bradley Manning leaked had nothing to do with surveillance, they were just embarrassing war videos of hillbilly cowboys gunning down innocents from a helicopter and diplomatic bullshit from the ambassador of Niggerstan calling the ambassador from Durkadurkastan an asshole.
I didn't believe it at first, but after some thought and some analysis I have come to believe that, above all, Manning was your classic disgruntled employee. Small dude, aloof and maybe a bit unstable, picked on and fucked-with nonstop by his peers with no way out (the military is not a job you can just "quit," or even "call in sick" to, without lasting consequences). With a Top Secret clearance, he was truly fucked. They were never going to let him go (without something to deserve a courts-martial) and he had no choice but to be bullied and fucked with all day every day.
That's not to say that he didn't benefit the public, but there was motivation other than altruism whether or not he consciously realized it.
Now, Adrian Lamo, the guy who ratted him out, has that smug shit-eating face you just wanna punch on sight. I hope the feds find him no longer useful and throw him under the bus, where he gets raped by packs of ferocious niggers with dicks the size of tallboys.