General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Manning’s Biggest Revelation of All [View all]JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)How utterly lacking in compassion when you think this was a white collar crime.
Unlike Bush and Obama, Manning has never ordered the killing of anyone.
We need more honest soldiers like Manning. They might make a more honest country of us.
Our government uses our secrecy laws to hide its corruption.
To expose the corruption in our government, we have to have whistleblowers who ignore the secrecy laws. That's how exposing corruption works.
Sorry. Can you tell me how corruption that reaches into the very agencies and legislatures and courts that are supposed to seek it out and destroy it (as does ours) can be revealed unless someone breaks the secrecy laws that permit the agencies and legislatures and courts to hide their corruption?
There is no way but to speak out in spite of the secrecy laws.
Ironically, the government uses international communication means, presumably the same cables that the UK and our government connects to in the surveillance program to transmit its messages to people like Bradley Manning in Iraq.
If, when we use our internet provider to transmit our communications, the government claims that we are making them public and no longer own them. But when the government uses the same cables to transmit its messages as we do (I assume they do at certain points during transmission), those messages remain private. I don't see the logic in that.
If our messages are public when we get on the phone line and call our aunts in D.C., then why are the government's messages private when they get on a phone line and call someone (same phone lines we use) in D.C. Do they have a completely separate, private system? I don't think so. They have secure lines within their facilities, but at some point they use the same lines we do. How does that work. They encrypt their information. So what. We can too, but they still want to take it.
This is about a government giving itself more rights in terms of freedom speech and press and association than it gives the people. That is not democracy. That is a dictatorship. Our government is supposed to answer to us, not the other way around. We are supposed to have privacy. Our government is not supposed to claim privacy rights.