Valuable public service, Leakers, Whistleblowers, Secrets

In Defense of Leakers: Snowden and Manning : The New Yorker: "We still don’t know for sure what will happen to Snowden or Manning: the former appears destined to a life of exile, for now, at least, in a repressive country; the latter, for many more years in a military jail. (He’s already been in custody for almost three years, including in solitary confinement for eleven months—a treatment that a senior United Nations official charged with investigating allegations of torture described as cruel and inhuman.) We do know that, at great cost to themselves and their families, Snowden and Manning have illuminated much that the authorities would have preferred to keep hidden, and that they have sparked a long overdue public debate about what the Times, in its editorial about the Manning verdict, justly described as “a national security apparatus that has metastasized into a vast and largely unchecked exercise of government secrecy and the overzealous prosecution of those who breach it.” In short, the two leakers have performed a valuable public service."

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