Anyway, what I find disgusting about the whole 'Manning' case is that vetting procedures should have never ever allowed this man to get even close to sensitive material, let alone top-secret. Burning him at the stake is just a way to assign blame when in reality every person that ever evaluated Mannings psychological profile had been asleep at the switch. The guy needs help, not punishment. The fact that we as a society depend on the Bradley Mannings of this world to keep us on the straight and narrow is what is really frightening.
It was the lowest clearance, btw.
No, I don't claim that.
> Or how come, you dismiss him as a fragile person?
Because, unlike you, I know his biography by heart.
> it was the lowest clearance by the way:
"Receiving a TS/SCI security clearance (Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information)."
see:
That's a ridiculous mockery of anything they think should be a "secret" from US citizens.
First and foremost, they're just a background check. There are lots of janitors and painters that have Secret or Top Secret clearances so they can work in buildings that contain that kind of information. There are large swaths of people that work in factories with clearances that really couldn't tell you anything of value - but they have to pass a background check to get the job.
Then once you narrow it down to the people that have actual classified knowledge, they generally only know a sliver of a small area and that's it. "Need to know" matters a whole lot.
The people with wide ranging access to lots of different databases is very small. I would bet Bradley Manning is one of less than 50,000 or so people with that kind of access.
You'd lose that bet pretty quickly. He was one of those.
Classified material is kept from US citizens as a side-effect of it not being public. Believe it or not there are certain limited exceptions in practice to those classification requirements, since the exceptions don't translate to full public disclosure. E.g. a military spouse knowing the week to expect their spouse's return home, something which is normally classified from public disclosure until after it's already occurred.
> The fact that we as a society depend on the Bradley
> Mannings of this world to keep us on the straight and
> narrow is what is really frightening.
Based on the contents of what Manning's leaks, shouldn't we be a lot more worried about depending on a military and state department rife with corruption and immorality? If members of military and diplomatic corps took their oaths to the country and constitution seriously, there should be many more whistleblowers than Manning, given the apparent levels of routine misconduct in those organizations.
Absolutely, but that's not really the subject of the thread. I strongly believe that we could move forward quite a bit by taking corporate interests & cronyism out of the political equation.
> If members of military and diplomatic corps took their oaths to the country and constitution seriously, there should be many more whistleblowers than Manning, given the apparent levels of routine misconduct in those organizations.
Again, no disagreement there. Which is exactly the reason they're coming down like a ton of bricks on Manning, we really don't want to give any other whistleblowers the idea that they can get away with it.
The part where they are not paying attention is that by treating Manning in this way they've caused his case to become an example of how bad things really are, on top of that they're giving the signal that if you pass out secret documents in bulk the only thing you probably should do different compared to Manning is that you should not tell others.