Leakers, motivations and consequences

We may have discussed this in class but I wanted to point out something about the differences in US government leaks. There are three major leaks that we can look at: Snowden's NSA documents, Julian Assange's wikileaks and the military documents leaked by Bradley/Chelsea Manning. (Future notice, I'm just going to refer to Bradley/Chelsea as Manning for convenience)

The idea of this blog post is to try to figure out the motives, goals and ideas that these leakers want to accomplish. In my mind Snowden and Manning are very similar in their intent. They are on the inside of their program and see what harm or injustices they are committing. Snowden was a system administrator, which means that he had a much larger amount of access than a typical NSA agent. After watching the documentary "Citizen Four" that had the initial interviews with Snowden when he was running from the United States, I believe I have a better idea of what his motivations were. His access allowed him to see all of the massive programs that the NSA was using to gather mass surveillance. In my mind, his motives were along the lines of, 'The people have the right to know what this government agency is doing and what they are collecting.' Different than most leaks, Snowden went directly through a specific set of journalists. Other leaks post everything at once, while his is pieced together and given context by a journalist.

Manning is similar to Snowden on the motivation part without a doubt. After leaking her documents, called the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs she writes, "This is one of the most significant documents of our time removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of 21st century asymmetric warfare." Manning leaked a couple of videos of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan firing on targets without proper identification that they were targets. These leaks were carefully selected and trimmed of identifying information. She saw the injustices that the US military was committing and like Snowden, felt that the public should hear what is happening. Unlike Snowden, Manning leaked her information through Wikileaks.

Finally there is Assange, who had created and set up wikileaks. He is completely different than the previous two characters. His role is the stateless anarchist born in the internet age. Any leak he receives, he will post. When the documents detailing how the US government talks, deals with, and feels about certain other countries was leaked I think it showed his truer motives. He was just being an anarchist and hurting these countries how ever he could. It didnt matter to him about the actual content but how much this would sour relations or hurt a country.

And for a final point I think that it is important to note what happened to every single leaker. Regardless if they leaked because of moral conviction, these leakers were all discredited, attacked on personal basis, or made more important than their documents. Examples of this are Bradley/Chelsea Manning's gender identity issues, Julian Assange being charged and extradited for rape and Snowden being labelled as a traitor or a Russian spy.

This may be a simplistic view, but it seems that regardless of your motive or how you leak information about how the US government runs, every single possible card will be used against you. And the more painful thing is that the public will care more about the story of the leak over the actual leaked data. These should all be lessons to those who make the choice to leak any information from now on.