The Bradley Manning Verdict Will Create Massive Chilling Effects For Whistleblowers And Journalists
from the shameful dept
Following the Bradley Manning verdict, a number of individuals and organizations have weighed in to highlight just how big the chilling effects of the guilty verdict will be. While being found not guilty of "aiding the enemy" meant that it wasn't the "worst case" scenario, it's still bad. Dan Gillmor does an excellent job laying out the simple facts about how the "unrelenting war" on leaks and whistleblowing will have damaging impact on the press, and by extension, the public.For those who want to tell the public what the government is doing with our money and in our name, there are new imperatives. Governmental secrecy, surveillance and the systematic silencing of whistleblowers require updated methods for journalists and journalism organizations of all kinds. Americans pursuing this craft have to understand the risks and find countermeasures.Gillmor also quotes another journalist, Jeremy Scahill, who points out that: "We're in a moment when journalism is being criminalized."
That is not enough. The public needs to awaken to the threat to its own freedoms from the Obama crackdown on leaks and, by extension, journalism and free speech itself. We are, more and more, a society where unaccountable people can commit unspeakable acts with impunity. They are creating a surveillance state that makes not just dissent, but knowledge itself, more and more dangerous. What we know about this is entirely due to leakers and their outlets. Ignorance is only bliss for the unaccountable.
Many in the journalism world are realizing this. Reporters Without Borders put out a statement about how damaging this is for investigative reporters and their sources:
The verdict is warning to all whistleblowers, against whom the Obama administration has been waging an unprecedented offensive that has ignored the public interest in their revelations. It also threatens the future of investigative journalism, which risks finding its sources drying up.Similarly, the Freedom of the Press Foundation is worried about the consequences, specifically over the conviction over the CFAA and how this will impact future cases:
“The information that Manning allegedly passed to WikiLeaks -- used by newspapers such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and Le Monde in coordination with Julian Assange’s website -- included revelations of grave abuses in the ‘war on terror’ launched by the Bush administration,” Reporters Without Borders said.
Michael Calderone, over at the Huffington Post noted that future whistleblowers of government fraud and abuse are likely to think twice now -- which some might argue was the entire point of the overzealous prosecution.Manning is now the most high profile conviction under President Obama’s crackdown on leakers. As has been well documented, his administration has prosecuted more leakers under the Espionage Act that all other administration’s combined, and has cast a distinct chill over investigative journalism.
The Espionage Act, a draconian statute written in 1917 as a way to punish non-violent opponents of World War I, has unfortunately been used in recent years to equate leakers and whistleblowers with spies and traitors. Facilitating that warped view in Manning's trial, the judge ruled early on that the defense was not allowed to put forth evidence of Manning’s sole intent to inform the American public, or evidence showing that none of the information materially harmed national security.
Today's ruling also opens up a new avenue for charging leakers and whistleblowers—section (a)(1) of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which until now, has never led to a conviction. It’s was crafted in the 1990s by using some of the worst parts of the Espionage Act and adding the phrase “with a computer.”
If basic whistleblowers are frightened, it's going to make the press's job harder, and it's going to make the government's ability to commit fraud and abuse that much easier.That Manning was convicted of six counts of espionage, out of 19 counts total, highlights the Obama administration's unprecedented use of the Espionage Act to prosecute individuals for leaking information not to foreign governments, but to the media. The Obama administration has invoked the Espionage Act seven times, with the most recent example being in the case of Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor who shed light on the extent of the U.S. surveillance state with leaks to The Guardian and the Post.
Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said it's a "very scary precedent" that "despite the lack of any evidence that he intended any harm to the United States, Manning faces decades in prison."
Meanwhile, the EFF has pointed out the ridiculousness of the CFAA conviction as a part of the ruling against Manning:
You can argue that Manning didn't follow the chain of command to blow the whistle (even though he tried) and that he released documents that he shouldn't have (even if there's no evidence that they did any real harm), but the impact of this ruling, and the eventual sentencing is going to have far-reaching implications, beyond just Manning. The government's overzealous prosecution is going to have serious chilling effects, and has opened up some highly questionable legal theories just because this leak happened "with a computer."the decision today continues a trend of government prosecutions that use familiarity with digital tools and knowledge of computers as a scare tactic and a basis for obtaining grossly disproportionate and unfair punishments, strategies enabled by broad, vague laws like the CFAA and the Espionage Act. Let's call this the “hacker madness” strategy. Using it, the prosecution portrays actions taken by someone using a computer as more dangerous or scary than they actually are by highlighting the digital tools used to a nontechnical or even technophobic judge.
In the Manning case, the prosecution used Manning’s use of a standard, over 15-year-old Unix program called Wget to collect information, as if it were a dark and nefarious technique. Of course, anyone who has ever called up this utility on a Unix machine, which at this point is likely millions of ordinary Americans, knows that this program is no more scary or spectacular (and far less powerful) than a simple Google search. Yet the court apparently didn’t know this and seemed swayed by it.
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Filed Under: bradley manning, chilling effects, investigative journalism, journalism, whistleblowers
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Massive Chilling Effects For Whistleblowers And Journalists?
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Let's review the rules
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Re: Let's review the rules
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With the latest revelations over XKeystore it's now clear that staying truly anonymous on the Internet when up against the resources of the NSA et al is damn difficult.
It really comes down to how hard they want to look for you. Start divulging their nasty little secrets and they'll try hard.
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- CD ROM or datastick and mail the files from someplace far from home.
- Cheap throw away tablet or laptop bought for cash, new email account, and an open Wi-Fi to do your emailing.
- Torrent file and mail or email to notify people where it is. Adding the info as a zip to a big name movie torrent would keep the info alive for a long time. This way you could dump it months in advance. Leaving the trail cold.
- A wikileaks type site, a throw away laptop, and open wifi.
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If you were a whistleblower would you want to trust the rest of your life to KillDisk given the resources the NSA can bring to bear?
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whistleblowing or data dump?
Basically, he wasn't whistleblowing a specific operation, he was exposing everything that the US was doing worldwide.
Whistleblowing is specific, data dumping is just tossing everything out and hoping someone else sees something interesting. Whistleblowing is motivated by the desire to make things better or stop a specific wrong, and the other is basically to f--k things up.
(PS: it's been over a month of Techdirt censorship of my posts... everything goes to moderation. Free speech, just watch what you say!).
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Re: whistleblowing or data dump?
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You claim you don't post spam.
Everyone else say you do.
Boy, that's a tricky one, wonder which is correct?
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If we want this to end there will have to be bloodshed. Even if somehow NSA and co were deafeated in court how do we know they'll actually follow the rules they harshly enforce against us?
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who is "Us"?
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Re: who is "Us"?
What are you, an NSA shill. I get suspicious of people tossing the word anarchy around who have no idea what the word means. The government needs to follow rules before simply spying on everyone, we can not have a government of anarchy where the government can do whatever it wants as it pleases, like putting whistle blowers in jail for no good reason.
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Blowback
Manning's document release was an opportunity to teach us all how difficult diplomacy is. What we get to take away instead is that there is a small class of folks that would rather hang the messenger than explain the message. Making the world safe for mercenary contractors is a poor choice. Doubling down instead of responding and reforming seems to be a recipe for Yet More Trouble, making the American Voter the enemy.
If I recall correctly, the US military spent some time in the 1990s detailing how assigning civil and humanitarian issues to the war makers led to a couple of troubling things: compromised war making, and increasing the likelyhood of military intervention in US civil affairs, of things like coups. Manning's great mistake was not his Thoreau moment of disobedience, it was being in the military while wanting to aid civil society - that has cost him his freedom for life.
The April 20, 2008 New York Times article, "Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand" is a good read on the precedent 'chilling effects' of compromised reporting. That Manning's trial has been essentially ignored in this country (USA), and that the best national scale reporting comes from foreign papers follows naturally from those compromises. I'd feel a lot worse about the chilling effects if they were new. That Manning or Snowden, or any other person trying to improve civli society by admitting our shortcomings as preamble to doing better, gets ignored by the US media makes their concerns of chilling effects pretty meaningless.
I'd argue that the modern whistleblower's use of new media outlets is the leading edge of a future full of blowback. I expect to see more critical facts emerge if, rather than addressing the root of the problems, all that happens is killing the messenger.
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I am convinced. We live in a society that shames all others that have come before us and are in existence today, we should be ashamed of what our society represents, and we should all simply leave for parts unknown to escape this cesspool. Now that I think about it, this might serve as a grand bargain for immigration reform...you know, the act where people risk all to come here so that they too can share in our cesspool.
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That's because you don't. While the US has grown intolerably despicable, there are much more despicable and corrupt countries. They just have less power.
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Nothing to see here, no need to cover it up ... oh wait a sec
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being attacked?
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You lose
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Re: being attacked?
So we have to sacrifice our freedoms to protect them?
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Libertarian
I really don't consider Manning a whistleblower. He didn't just blow the whistle on a program or two or government indiscretion... he release TONS of related and un-related info and some that put Americans in harms way.
He could just as easily gotten information about a couple of programs and released that. Instead, he is really no better than the NSA casting it's wide dragnet and hoping to come up with something.
Speaking of which, Snowden IS a whistleblower. He had specific information about programs which ARE illegal, despite what the government might claim - because the Constitution trumps FISA and the Patriot act, since neither are amendments. These are illegal programs which needed to be brought to light and which, revealed, won't overtly put our people in harm's way.
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Re: Libertarian
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The Real Whistleblowers
Sounds nice, doesn't it? Too bad it probably won't happen. No one has the guts any more.
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Re: The Real Whistleblowers
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Who has the right to government's data
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Re: Who has the right to government's data
Perhaps one could provide supporting evidence, facts, or something - otherwise this claim is empty propaganda.
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No...it won't.
Snowden is a whistle blower and has not committed any treasons to this nation by calling out the NSA to be accountable for its actions. He cherry picked the information he carefully gathered evidence to constitute blowing the whistle.
Manning leaked roughly 750,000 documents without question straight to Wikileaks and a few other sources. He didn't pick and choose information. All he basically said was "They are misbehaving" and handed over 750,000 documents and briefs...most of which were deemed classified.
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Re: No...it won't.
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This is contrary to what Manning has claimed and no one has presented any evidence to support this.
Similarly, you don't know how many documents Snowden leaked either. Just as with Manning's leaks, the original documents are being dribbled out slowly after the press has had a chance to go through them. How can you say one is different than the other?
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Black Panthers said . . .
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Oh the irony...
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Don't like a group, present your reasons, back them up with evidence, and that'll get you a lot farther than just calling names and hurling insults.
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Black Panthers said . . .
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