Manning and Assange are both free today. Isn't that proof that whether it was reasonable to believe Snowden was correct at the time, history has proved him wrong?

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marcus_holmes 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Assange is only free because he was not extradited to the USA, and effectively served ~10 years imprisonment anyway. Manning got a presidential pardon. I wouldn't hold either of these up as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists.

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dhx 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

In the case of Assange, Australian politicians did a lot of work to get him released in the end[1], including:

* Sending a delegation representing all major political parties to the US to argue for the release of Assange. Imagine picking the Republican and Democrat politician LEAST likely to want to cooperate on anything, and those two would have been Australia's equivalent representatives in this delegation. Reports afterwards of the meeting at DOJ HQ indicated it wasn't the type of meeting where the Australians would have brought Tim Tams to share around the room.[2]

* The Australian parliament voted publicly 2:1 on a motion for Assange's release.

* Repeated petitioning through ambassadors in the UK and US, official visits of Australian politicians, etc. Not in private either, as is typically the case for diplomatic affairs.

* Australian politicians attending UK extradition hearings.

* After getting agreement to a plea deal, flying Australian ambassadors for the UK and US to the court of a one-pub-town in the middle of the Pacific Ocean no one has heard of (Northern Mariana Islands) in support of Assange, then all of them flying back to the Australian prime minister's aircraft terminal for a welcome home bevvy.

This was all at a time too where "Free Assange" posters and graffiti was _widely_ distributed across Australian cities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange#Plea_bargain_an...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-27/inside-the-us-austral...

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CalRobert 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Reality Winner got five years for showing Russian interference in elections, which seems like doing the right thing

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slg 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No one was holding them up "as a shining example of how the USA treats whistleblowers and journalists." I was holding them up as history. History will judge Snowden differently because he chose exile and didn't give himself the opportunity for pardons or plea deals like Manning and Assange.

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marcus_holmes 3 hours ago | parent [-]

My point was that "both of these people are currently free" isn't the flex it appears to be.

And again, why are we so focused on judging Snowden and not focused on judging the crimes he exposed? I would think that history will judge him very favourably considering that he was completely correct to expose those crimes.

	▲	slg 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Once again, there was no flex. We aren't judging the morality or ethics of the situation in any direction. We are simply looking back on historical events with hindsight. We also don't have to flatten these historical events into one good side and one bad side. Reality tends to be more complicated than that. It's ok to recognize that Snowden maybe made some mistakes. That is neither an endorsement of the US government's spying or an accusation of ill intent against Snowden.

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Arodex an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is Snowden... free, in Russia? Is he, really? Between his constant KGB handlers and the Ukrainian bombings?

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lern_too_spel 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Just like Snowden, Manning would have been treated as a whistleblower if he had only leaked illegal or possibly illegal things the government did. Instead, he dumped a full archive of secret diplomatic cables. That's not as bad as Snowden, who deliberately leaked Chinese targets to China in hopes of getting asylum in Hong Kong.

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marcus_holmes 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Why is the focus always on what these people did, and not on the crimes that they exposed?

Why are you saying "if they had done it differently they would be treated better" instead of "I am ashamed of the evil and illegal acts that my country has done and want to change the system to make this impossible"?

Why do you care what either of them did more than you care about what the government did?

	▲	varjag an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Which crimes had Manning exposed? There has to be a list somewhere.

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impossiblefork 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No.

Assange didn't commit a crime, and was still forced by the Brits to confess in order to be released. Snowdens situation is completely different.

His only hope was a much wider view of the legality of the acts he'd taken to be considered, taking into account the legality and constitutionality of what he released information about, and there was and is no chance of that.

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slg 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>Assange didn't commit a crime

Assange literally pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act.

And if we're going to pretend that plea deals are coercion than we better rethink how the whole criminal justice system works.

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impossiblefork 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, that he was forced to do so by the Brits in order to be release is what I referred to, so of course it is coercion.

He is of not American and has no duty to be loyal to the US or to refrain from committing espionage against it.

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slg 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Your objection isn't to just Assange's case. It's with over 90% of criminal cases in the US. I was talking about a particular situation, so I'm not going to have the debate you seemingly want to have.

	▲	impossiblefork 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My objection is absolutely with Assange's case. I don't particularly approve of the idea of these sorts of plea deals, but they are not the core problem. The core problem is that Britain pressured Assange to enter into a US plea deal over something which it was entirely legal for him to do, seeing as he was in Iceland when the acts were committed. Seeing as part of the information obtained related to black sites at which there is reason to believe that people were killed (we know that that a person released from the Polish black site were almost killed, so we can be fairly sure that a bunch of people died there), and Iceland has a law making it legally mandatory to help people who are in danger; and I think there's good reason to believe that he had reason to believe that the information would reveal such things, so that it wasn't just him doing good, but him doing his legal duty, once he had reason to believe that people were in danger. So my concern has very little to do with plea agreements. They have to do with Britain.

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blitzar an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Assange didn't commit a crime

Smearing your own faeces on the wall isnt a crime - but breach of bail is

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masfuerte 33 minutes ago | parent [-]

He'd served his time for that.

	▲	blitzar 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		didn't commit a crime - or - committed a crime and served his time one is true and one is false

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youngtaff an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

We don’t know whether Assange committed a crime because he refused to go to Sweden to face the rape charges

He did of course commit several crimes under UK law by absconding to the Ecuadorian Embassy

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unsungNovelty 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not sure. You are talking about a Snowden in 2013 who looks around and see Chelsea and Assange NOT free. He made the decision based on that and what has happened before. I also think what Snowden exposed is far far far bigger.

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6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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