The Banality of Systemic Evil

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality-of-systemic-evil/

by Maakuth • 13 years ago

366 166 13 years ago

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

twoodfin5• 13 years ago

Notably missing from this piece: An argument that valid responses to perceived abuses include massive, indiscriminate data dumps, repeatedly bypassing MIT's network access controls and/or taking laptops full of classified information to Moscow.

gizmo• 13 years ago

This is essentially trolling: you can't start a meaningful discussion with an opening comment like yours.

twoodfin5• 13 years ago

This article is pure hn catnip and I doubt much meaningful discussion will emerge here at all.

That being said: The author is setting up a straw man (with an opening analogy to the Nazis to boot!). Nobody thinks Chelsea Manning would have been wrong to continue to fight against or expose a variety of military abuses. Or for Snowden to write his Congressman about NSA abuses. Or for Swartz to campaign for changes to government funded research publication.

People like David Brooks are not succumbing to the banality of evil when calling out Snowden or Manning for behaving recklessly. They're arguing that the flaws in our system are not so pernicious as to justify, say, Manning's indiscriminate data dump or Snowden's theft.

Ygg2• 13 years ago

Oh no, the powerpoint presentation that tells which companies are in bed with NSA will doom us all.

Moscow probably knows most of it, this isn't information/news for them.

I'd like to see all the men that were killed hurt by WikiLeaks data dumps. I mean cables were fucking benign, nothing people already didn't know or heavily suspected.

SideburnsOfDoom• 13 years ago

Also notably missing from current discourse: A valid argument that valid responses to perceived abuses include using the traditional whistle-blower channels.

People go to Moscow because there seems to be no other way to blow the whistle any more, not without ending up like Pfc Manning. Snowden said that right from the start; missing that part is either ignorance or disinformation.

andyjohnson0• 13 years ago

You're misunderstanding the purpose of the article. The author is examining the general tendency for hierarchical organisations to require require moral submission on the part of people who work within them.

Snowden at al are given as recent, specific examples of people who claim that their "moral compass" requires them to take action. It is entirely possible to disagree with them (and you clearly do) but its much more difficult to argue that dissent based on moral conviction should never be permitted under any circumstances.

Then again, maybe you're just trolling and I've wasted my time.

raverbashing2• 13 years ago

"or taking laptops full of classified information to Moscow."

Well, tough crap. If the gov had not threatened him, he would have returned to american soil or gone to a friendlier nation.

Now thanks to this complete and utter SNAFU it's as good as the government handling all the information to Russia.

shamshiel2• 13 years ago

When exactly did the government threaten Snowden? What did they threaten him with?

Assuming that they threatened him with prison time (I believe he was already out of the country), is the government not allowed to try and convict people based on the established law of the land if those people are following their personal moral compass? Is "I felt it was the right thing to do" an absolute defense against prosecution?

I am also curious as to how the government is responsible for Snowden fleeing to Moscow. Is Snowden responsible for his own actions or not?

ck2• 13 years ago

I was reading up on Jeremy Hammond as I knew less about him and this caught my eye:

The judge's husband has an email address released in the Stratfor disclosure and works with Stratfor clients, but the judge refuses to recuse herself (while threatening Hammond that he faces a life sentence).

Unmitigated gall.

timje1• 13 years ago

This strikes me as unusual - the judge is clearly going to be biased by her husband's involvement, how is it that she gets to judge whether to recuse herself? Hopefully this means any the eventual verdict can be overturned by a future appeal, if necessary.

mcherm2• 13 years ago

If you ask lawyers (and I have done so) then they say that the reason judges rule on their own recusal is because otherwise every trial would get interrupted for a trip to appeals court to decide on whether a recusal is appropriate. The existing system allows an appeals court to decide AFTERWARD whether the recusal decision was appropriate (although the judge is given a great deal of latitude and only egregious cases would be overruled). They can then order a new trial.

I am not sure I agree with this: it seems to me that a quick ruling could be made on recusal and that it would arise quite rarely. But I'm not familiar with the system, and the lawyers I have heard from are. I suppose if judges are nearly always making good choices about when to recuse themselves the system should work fairly well.

DanielRibeiro• 13 years ago

Jeremy Hammond has been around for a while: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Hammond

He created a whole site like Stripe's Capture the Flag back in 2003: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HackThisSite

This part of his history is also sad:

Hammond attended the University of Illinois at Chicago on a full scholarship. In the spring of 2004, during his freshman year, he pointed out a security flaw on the computer science department’s website to department administrators, offering to fix it. For pointing out the flaw, Hammond was called before the department chair and ultimately banned from returning for his sophomore year.

ihsw• 13 years ago

Yet another example of when full, public, and anonymous disclosure should be employed.

bqe• 13 years ago

I met Jeremy at HOPE Number Six.

He was absolutely convinced that hacking was going to be the way that we protest in the future. He likened it to doing a sit-in of a restaurant, protesting outside of a business, or chaining yourself to a tree.

Everything he did was focused on this goal. Helping people learn to hack was going to be a required part of a functioning society. He led by example and some people followed.

I can't help but wonder if he is the first of his kind: a political prisoner of the Internet age.

tokenizer6• 13 years ago

How about we try to get to the core issues of this systemic risk of authoritarianism and repression, and look at:

Ageism: Why can't younger people vote? Because they don't have valid opinions? Some adults don't have valid opinions. This seems to affect our dramatically in our modern era, as many of our older folks are still around and skewing the generational differences towards conservatism.

Classism: Why do we feel it necessary to have a political class at all? Bush Sr., Mr. Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, (Ms. Clinton?). To me, it feels weird even asking these people to have differing views. They're all apart of the council on foreign relations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_Council_on_Fore...). Control+F either Clinton or Bush. This in my opinion, is why we won't change any neo-con/neo-lib policies anytime soon. Expect less worker rights, more outsourcing, more free trade, more deficits, and more protection of institutions deemed too big to fail (impossible in classical capitalism but not the crony kind).

Apathy: The US has killed many people in Iraq since 2003. If you crunch one version of account, it works out to 16 people every day, for 20 years. Yet most Americans are more concerned with their own internal matters. This seems like it could be extended to anything being committed outside of the US to other humans, including torture, enslavement, anything. The American people have already shown that if their bellies are full, then it doesn't matter how many people their government kills. How can anyone fix this?

Anyway, this to me seems like the major hurdles we all need to get over...

rwmj4• 13 years ago

Why can't younger people vote? I think this breaks into two separate questions: Why don't younger people vote very much and what can we do to encourage that. And, why do we stop 16 year olds from voting? Here is one Labour policy I'm very much in favour of: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-party-a...

Why do we feel it necessary to have a political class at all? More generally, why do we have representative democracy at all? We have the internet. It's now technically possible for everyone to vote on every issue, or even to have everyone collaborate on drafting new laws.

guerrilla• 13 years ago

We have the internet

About that... say some of us did set up a usable and scalable direct democracy mechanism on the Internet. Say we get the massive user-base this deserves for some currently existing nation. Imagine for some random piece of psuedolegislation, we got some law passed in said system such that it succeeds with an unprecedented turnout and majority lead. At what point does that stop being just a petition but the actual law. A near impossible feat, but when military turnout reaches a certain percentage, I think at some point we have something going.

More realistically, why not create the software and infrastructure and start pitching this to some cities, counties, maybe even states/provinces to start doing this? It could at least be informative and entertaining.

More practicalaly, the biggest issue I see is in the security of it. How could identity be handled? Integrity? etc, etc. #trust

I say, let's get started anyway. We'll probably want to have some failure under our belt anyway by the time there's a real demand (assuming I'm psychic ;)

I think my point is, it's up to us. We are the people.

mseebach4• 13 years ago

And, why do we stop 16 year olds from voting? Here is one Labour policy I'm very much in favour of:

Meh. That's as naked politicking as if the Tories suggested double votes for land owners or higher rate tax payers.

sigzero• 13 years ago

Today's 16 year olds are by far not mature in thought enough to vote. Sorry no.

snowwrestler3• 13 years ago

Representative democracy is not a technical solution. It was not a hack to overcome the lack of real-time communications.

It was chosen in full knowledge of the downside of direct democracy, which is mob rule.

I don't understand how someone can watch the online witch hunts on, say, Reddit, and think "I wish that had the force of law."

hammerzeit• 13 years ago

On the ageism question, 18 is the general age where we welcome people into American society as adults -- not just voting but also army service and criminal liability. I'm not opposed to moving the voting age earlier but it should be in conjunction with those other responsibilities.

You're kind of begging the question on the other two -- you've assumed your hypotheses, making it hard to disentangle. For example, you're assuming Americans haven't confronted the fact that war kills lots of people -- I don't know that's clearly the case. You're right on the cliff of using the word "sheeple."

One thing I will question -- are populist governments (which you seem to desire) really a solution to the issues of authoritarianism and repression? A movement that seems to have contempt for as many people as the populist movement does seems like it could easily degenerate into its own tyranny and purging.

_delirium• 13 years ago

The alignment of the two ages is actually pretty recent, at least in the US. Traditionally, military conscription age was 18, while voting was 21. It was moved (in 1971) due to agitation from people who argued that it was unethical to conscript people to die for their country, but not trust the same people to vote for their leaders. But that's merely an argument for why voting age should be <= conscription age, not necessarily an argument that it should be ==.

mseebach4• 13 years ago

Why can't younger people vote? Because they don't have valid opinions?

Because society has a long-standing agreement that a phase of life called "childhood" exists, during which an individual is not fully developed and can't be trusted to make decisions about his or her future. It may be somewhat arbitrarily defined at 18, but I don't see why people who need to be protected against entering into contracts as well as receiving a slew of rights and protections can be expected to have meaningful input into the management of their country. Someone who can't even join the military could vote to send their older fellow countrymen into war. I find the idea that the voting age can be lower than the age of majority very strange, and I have strong doubts that the age of majority should be lowered to 16 - on account of protecting childhood.

This seems to affect our dramatically in our modern era, as many of our older folks are still around and skewing the generational differences towards conservatism.

Wait, what. You meant to come out against ageism, then you criticize old people for voting "wrong"?

All in all, if you take a step back from you criticisms, there's a common point: Legitimacy. Submitting a ballot every few years is a very weak foundation for a government as sprawling and powerful as most modern and western ones. Fiddling the knobs of who can vote does little more than shift the balance of power inside the political class.

tokenizer6• 13 years ago

Wait, what. You meant to come out against ageism, then you criticize old people for voting "wrong"?

No, I'm simply pointing out that in this day and age, we have more older people voicing their opinion. This leads to policies that favor this group and disadvantages other groups (youth).

I think Thomas Jefferson had much to say on the tyranny of one generation to the next.

All in all, if you take a step back from you criticisms, there's a common point: Legitimacy. Submitting a ballot every few years is a very weak foundation for a government as sprawling and powerful as most modern and western ones. Fiddling the knobs of who can vote does little more than shift the balance of power inside the political class.

Agreed. However youth suffrage is an important topic. You say that society needs to protect childhood, but to me, it seems like they're protecting them from their own opinions and values... Like the article mentions.

sophacles• 13 years ago

Even if we grant the notion of childhood as valid (one which I agree with, but am open to other models - the idea that one turns 18 and is suddenly a different person has weird impacts), we are seeing a systemic erosion of the notion. One which makes the GP's question valid.

I mean that the very idea of 18 == adulthood is going away. For instance, more and more people over the age of 13 but under the age of 18 are being prosecuted as adults in criminal cases. Zero tolerance policies for kids of all ages are assuming that they are capable of making choices with life altering consequences, but only in negative ways. So for some actions - adult understanding of the world is assumed much younger than the age of 18. On the other hand, we are seeing the infantilization of people older than 18 - drinking age is 21, car rental 25, college policies are becoming more and more like those of high-school, college campus law enforcement is becoming less and less tolerant of "young people behavior" (e.g. parties and festivals). It is a weird set of standards that sends a strange message. Those that conform well are placed in a class that can fully enjoy the rewards of membership eventually, and those that don't or make mistakes are placed in a different class, one with many restrictions.

Basically I'm saying that while the notions of adulthood and childhood aren't bad, the implementation brings them into question.

yummyfajitas• 13 years ago

Someone who can't even join the military could vote to send their older fellow countrymen into war.

On the other hand, when someone who can't even join the military (e.g. folks over 30) could vote to send their younger fellow countrymen into war, no one thinks twice.

(I think 30 is the age at which you are too old to join the military, but someone correct me if I'm wrong.)

bcoates• 13 years ago

The problem with that is that there's also this thing called "adolescence" where children have to actually learn how to be adults, and like almost everything else in life, the way you become good at being an adult is to be bad at being an adult and not letting that stop you.

Don't worry too much about kids taking over the country -- voter participation by people younger than 40 is so low that you could drop the voting age to zero and it wouldn't affect the results that much.

onebaddude• 13 years ago

They're all apart of the council on foreign relations... This in my opinion, is why we won't change...

So was Carl Sagan, Angelina Jolie, Paul Krugman, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Brokaw, Aaron Ross Sorkin, etc etc.

The CFR is a collection of influential Americans who meet to discuss and influence policy on the gamut of topics. It isn't a place where the Illuminati lizard-people meet to perform occult rituals and determine how to enslave the population of the earth, despite how the interwebs tries to paint that picture.

It's hard to say they have any specific agenda when you actually read some of the (vast amounts) of work they produce. You are welcome to disagree with their policies, but don't act like they're some powerful entity that's ruining the world. It's incredibly naive.

Expect less worker rights, more outsourcing, more free trade, more deficits

So, on the one hand you criticize others for apathy, but on the other you criticize outsourcing, which moves jobs into the capable hands of the denizens of other, poorer countries, rather than hording them in your own country; free trade, which is hugely beneficial to everyone involved, always, provided everyone actually practices it; and (I assume governmental) deficits. Why are there high deficits, currently? Oh yeah, social safety net. Should we get rid of that?

My point is, these subjects (even TBTF) aren't black and white.

tokenizer6• 13 years ago

Why are there high deficits, currently? Oh yeah, social safety net.

Yes, because it's definitely not military and espionage expenditure or subsidies for corporations.

My point is, these subjects (even TBTF) aren't black and white.

While I agree with you B&W point, I feel like too big to fail is a failure in management of the economy. To let companies become so big as to effect the entire economy so negatively if they fail is disastrous. The government is propping up/keeping afloat monopolies.

In my opinion, The US is at 0% interest rates, is still in a recession, and can't possibly do anything else in regards to inflationary measures (printing money) without the negative affect on it's position as the world reserve currency.

http://youtu.be/PHe0bXAIuk0?t=13m36s <- Notice how the US is on target for a depression according to many economists.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMHmTyJXcy0&feature=c4-overvi... <- Here's a great talk regarding quantum easing and how unless the government can start more drastic measures, the economy will tank.

I'd like to heard your defense for the status quo, and also how you believe that social safety nets created in the 40's has anything to do with our crises of 2008.

eli_gottlieb12• 13 years ago

The CFR is a collection of influential Americans who meet to discuss and influence policy on the gamut of topics. It isn't a place where the Illuminati lizard-people meet to perform occult rituals and determine how to enslave the population of the earth, despite how the interwebs tries to paint that picture.

It's hard to say they have any specific agenda when you actually read some of the (vast amounts) of work they produce.

It's not that hard at all. They are very clearly economic neoliberals, moral/social moderates, and foreign-policy hawks. These positions are coherently expressed in all their literature, even if their membership varies in just how ardent/extreme or quiet/moderate they want to be about expressing and imposing their ideology.

nl• 13 years ago

I think this is a very powerful & well reasoned piece.

I have a feeling that many of those who should read it will be unduly distracted by the gender issues around Manning.

emhart• 13 years ago

I was hoping to send this piece to my Mother, as we've had long, frustrating conversations about each of the people mentioned in the article, but hesitated for that very reason. Then, just now reading your comment, realized that my hesitation is actually a desire on my part not to fight a battle on two fronts.

But. It's worth the fight. Sending her the article and I might even stop in for dinner and start the conversation fresh tonight.

DanielBMarkham2• 13 years ago

You have to be very careful here about the argument that you're making.

If you're effectively saying that any individual has free reign to do whatever they desire with trade secrets, sensitive diplomatic information, and whatnot because of a moral injury they may feel the system is giving them, then you've effectively destroyed any form of organized human activity that involves trust or secrets.

Here's why: people get morally offended at all kinds of bullshit. It's totally dependent on the individual as to what pushes their buttons.

So yes, good people in bad systems do really bad things. Lots of Nazis were working boring jobs as part of the system that exterminated millions of people. But as a society we generally do not hold these people accountable for such actions. After WWII most of those folks kept right on working boring jobs, this time rebuilding the country instead of operating concentration camps.

Whether or not those people are supposed to feel guilt or revulsion at their own actions is a moral question -- a question between each of them and their own standard of what the universe expects of them. Confusing personal decisions with public ones is a good way to muddle your thinking.

mattmanser• 13 years ago

He's not even making the argument you're suggesting, he's simply trying to explain why the media has such a hard time explaining the motivation behind the whistleblowers and why they end up circumventing chain of command.

twoodfin5• 13 years ago

No, he doesn't explain that. There's just some hand waving about "the bureaucracy" and "the system". I think it does a disservice to the many real whistleblowers who believe (often correctly) that by working within the system, or at least by working outside it without breaking the law, they can effect meaningful change.

He makes no attempt to explain just what "evil" Manning was fighting by passing along essentially random classified diplomatic traffic, or why Snowden might have felt morally justified in leaking secrets about U.S. spying on strategic competitors. This was not the Pentagon Papers.

DanielBMarkham2• 13 years ago

"You have to be very careful..."

Not the author of the piece. People in general, i.e. the HN community

Nursie• 13 years ago

> Lots of Nazis were working boring jobs as part of the system that exterminated millions of people. But as a society we generally do not hold these people accountable for such actions.

So what? Perhaps if they had held themselves more accountable when they were enabling the regime then some of the horrific acts committed by the Nazis could have been stopped! Sure, as a society we don't hold them criminally responsible, but we hold them morally responsible to some extent. And we absolutely should. Just being one cog in a giant evil machine is not a good thing, the existence of millions of such cogs enables incredible evils to occur.

There is no absolute here. You can't say as an absolute "if it offends your morality then whistleblow" and neither can you say "always trust the chain of command". Neither leads to a good outcome. But people damn well need to take a look at all the small things they do and evaluate if they contribute to something they cannot morally defend. And where it's massive abuses of the people by the government, hell yes, blow that whistle hard.

kijin11• 13 years ago

If you're effectively saying that any individual has free reign to do whatever they desire with trade secrets, sensitive diplomatic information, and whatnot because of a moral injury they may feel the system is giving them, then you've effectively destroyed any form of organized human activity that involves trust or secrets.

That's a straw man argument.

There are lots of innocuous things that could destroy our civilization if everyone chose to do it all the time. If everyone had their A/C turned up to MAX on a hot summer day, the entire continent will suffer a blackout and all industry will grind to a halt. If everyone exercised their right to travel on public roads at the same time, there will be a massive traffic jam everywhere. What saves the day is the mundane fact that not everyone exercises all of their rights all the time. Just like the bandwidth of your internet connection, rights are routinely oversold with the expectation that not everyone will use them at the same time. Otherwise everyone will have ridiculously low bandwidth caps.

Most people who support Snowden believe that some people sometimes have a right, or even a duty, to divulge secrets. Organized human activity as we know it will, of course, grind to a halt if everyone in fact divulged everyone else's secrets all the time. But the mundane fact of the matter is that most people will keep secrets. Common sense, not strict laws against divulging secrets, keeps human civilization alive.

jbooth4• 13 years ago

As a society we very specifically said in Nuremberg that "just following orders" is not an excuse.

Zigurd• 13 years ago

You are assuming that, in a post Cold War world, there is a large and useful set of such "organized activity" that depends on secrecy, without giving one concrete example.

Instead what we have is a proliferation of secrecy that leads to systemic and individual corruption.

Let's go probe the boundaries of transparency. What, exactly, will stop working well? If anything, it is likely to be a tiny and perhaps negligible fraction of what is now secret. That is, we may find the cost of radical transparency, especially in government, is much lower than the cost of a metastatic security state.

jchrisa• 13 years ago

Assange's manifesto specifically endorses revealing all secrets. I owe this deeper thought before endorsing it myself, but I have to admit the idea is appealing.

kijin11• 13 years ago

David Brooks made a case for why he thought Snowden was wrong to leak information about the Prism surveillance program ... “For society to function well,” he wrote, “there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things.” The complaint is eerily parallel to one from a case discussed in “Moral Mazes,” where ... the complaint against the accountant by the other managers of his company was that “by insisting on his own moral purity … he eroded the fundamental trust and understanding that makes cooperative managerial work possible.”

Welcome to the hyper-individualistic, hyper-critical, post-communitarian world, where neither tradition nor any existing social institution is taken for granted. Everything is now open to critical scrutiny, and nothing that fails such scrutiny will receive anyone's respect. Gone are the days when "institutions", "common procedures" and "cooperative managerial work", for example, were universally agreed to be valuable things in themselves. Now they need to prove their own worth, or else. Because if they have no intrinsic moral worth, you can't blame others for eroding them.

I don't know whether there really is such a thing as Generation W, but if Snowden and Swartz are its holotypes, then I have rather high hopes for it. Not because I expect a whole lot of whistleblowing in the foreseeable future, nor because I think they're particularly interested in politics (they probably aren't), but because they're probably the first generation to ascribe absolutely no intrinsic moral worth to the "System" in "Systemic Evil".

The System, whether it's a corrupt industry, a corrupt three-letter agency, or your country, has finally lost the romantic halo ascribed to it by traditional assumptions. It has revealed itself to be just another social convention with some (in fact, lots of) instrumental value but zero intrinsic value. The baby boomers, of course, also had their moment of subversiveness in the form of the civil rights movement. But the U.S. in the 60s and 70s was affluent and egalitarian enough to leave them with lifetime jobs, nice suburban homes, and enough money to watch Fox News on their four-foot TVs for the remainder of their retirement. Those perks are now gone, and with it the last traces of the System's romantic halo. All that is left is a rotting social infrastructure with questionable instrumental value at best.

So perhaps for the first time in human history, a large number of people are now mentally prepared to judge the "System" solely on its instrumental value. Instead of asking whether or not their actions will help preserve the System, people can now honestly ask whether certain portions of the System are worth preserving in the first place. Gen W is like the theoretical physicist in that famous story who, when asked how his research contributes to national defense, replies that his research makes the nation worth defending. Only sometimes, it might not be worth defending. Or perhaps even worth destroying.

It is no surprise that the Obama administration has a reputation for prosecuting more whistleblowers than (nearly?) every other administration before it. Previous administrations had no need for massive prosecutions, the population behaved itself. But the population won't behave anymore. The only psychological bias that kept them at bay has dissolved away, and I suspect that it's gone for good.

And like a lot of people who have warm fuzzy feelings about Snowden, I think that this quiet but irreversible change in humanity's sociopolitical lookout will turn out to be a Very Good Thing (tm) in the long term. Another superstition trampled under the relentless feet of reason.

devx• 13 years ago

“there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things.”

It's funny that he can't see he's arguing against himself. Snownden would've never done this if it wasn't the NSA that was breaching everyone's trust. Manning also wouldn't have leaked those documents, if he didn't think war crimes were being committed.

Why should we be the ones to trust the government, when the government has zero trust in us, and therefore wants to spy on everyone, when it really should be the other way around. Privacy for citizens, total transparency for the government.

berntb• 13 years ago

>when the government has zero trust in us

Oh, please.

You know, I know and the governments know that somewhere between 0.1% and 1% of the population is a danger to the rest because of our fanatically held opinions.

(Considering my jokes regarding nuclear weapons etc, I'm probably in a few registers myself and continuously checked. I just hope I won't be sued for mental damage caused by being so boring. :-) )

The main problem is not that there is a lot of spying, the problem is that there is no one verifying and controlling the watchers.

It seems to be the only solution to have watchers and someone verifying what the watchers do. To e.g. avoid blackmail of politicians etc. (This has happened before in USA.)

Edit: True, drenei/conanite. You'd want the creativity used in complaining instead used in finding ways to make good controls of the watchers. How to select them democratically while still making certain they are silent/competent.

Edit 2: This seems to jump up/down with votes. :-) My point is not that internal spying is good, just that it is needed. The only solution is to make it work without risking a 1984 situation, since the internal spying is potentially as dangerous as terrorists.

7952• 13 years ago

The internet has spawned lots of little communities that can be highly valued by their users. To general outside scrutiny they seem extremely odd. Perhaps our allegiance is moving away from country and nation to small sub-cultures. The problem is that the gap in understanding between these groups can be huge. People can't tell the difference between a mosque or church, reddit, 4chan, and Wikileaks. In fact they are all just groups of people who could be dangerous, or could be a friend. You can't assume anything based merely on nationality or other traditional cultural determinants. But as groups they do have power.

nodata• 13 years ago

Wow. Do you have a book?

kijin11• 13 years ago

No, just a programmer with a philosophy degree who occasionally tries to convince himself that the degree was worth it ;)

Peter Ludlow, who wrote the NYT piece, is a real Professor of Philosophy. If you're interested in philosophical treatments of cyber rights, hacktivism, and online communities, read his books!

zanny• 13 years ago

I like to have romanticized views about the potential for a critical intellectuals review of our social strata and peaceful transition into whatever we deem more effective, but then I step outside my home and talk to anyone in my age group (I'm 22, so 18 - 26) and I am not conversing with enlightened anti-establishment intellectuals, I am conversing with zombies glued to smartphones chugging Starbucks.

We criticize the baby boomers for being distracted by TV, but I think gen Y is going to prove themselves even more easily distracted, especially considering how shitty their outlook is if they have a whole-scope outlook on the world they live in. It sucks, it has very limited avenues for improvement, and all angles point towards further problems. Why worry when you can distract yourself with trite banality?

rayiner5• 13 years ago

I step outside my home and talk to anyone in my age group (I'm 22, so 18 - 26) and I am not conversing with enlightened anti-establishment intellectuals, I am conversing with zombies glued to smartphones chugging Starbucks.

I'm sure you're wonderful to be around at parties!

kijin11• 13 years ago

Intellectual ability and political interest probably follow a normal distribution, so it's not surprising that the majority of any age group prefers distraction to active political engagement. Intellectuals complain about "sheeple" in every time and place, after all. For every Snowden, a million young people happily divulge their entire lives on Facebook and don't care whether NSA is reading it. Doesn't matter, because we don't need a million Snowdens. The only thing that matters is a statistical anomaly that distinguishes the next generation from the last on election day.

Every kid who tweets about her 9th-grade teacher's inappropriate joke is a whistleblower in the making. 0.001% of them might go on to work for a three-letter agency, and 0.001% of those who do might eventually leak something incriminating. Then some men in black will go through her school records and find that she's had a long-standing "problem with authority". Who knows? Even Snowden, until 2009, believed that whistleblowers should be shot in the balls [1].

Subtle, deeply ingrained assumptions like "the Government says so, so it must be true" or "white men are more trustworthy than blacks" only show up in large-scale aggregate data. It might be so un-obvious that a whole generation of sociologists could make a living studying the tip of the mysterious iceberg. But that's how societies change all the time, it will have tangible political consequences in the long term, and that's all I'm hoping for.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/exclusive-in-2009...

atlanticus2• 13 years ago

Sadly, if you believe in evolution and market forces we are on the optimal path.

rayiner5• 13 years ago

There is nothing new under the sun. Your grand kids will be writing similar screeds in whatever forum is popular with them about more or less the same subject, just as the hippie generation did in the 1960's.

Society vacillates between rejecting institutions and embracing them, for a basic reason: you really don't want to go too far in any direction.

On one hand, you obviously don't want to become slaves to the status quo. Injustice exists, and it must be fought. On one hand, there is intrinsic value in having issues be settled. At a point, a final disposition is better than the "right" disposition. It is difficult for society to function productively without broadly shared values, purposes, and coordinating institutions.

The idea of a "hyper-individualistic" "post-communitarian" world is absolutely at odds with the direction of social change to date. Our societies become ever more interdependent, a phenomenon that has accelerated greatly since the industrial revolution and the resulting trend towards specialization and division of labor. Which is really the more "hyper-individualistic" world? The world circa 1750 where everyone was a farmer and grew their own food and sewed their own clothes and generally did 95% of the activities necessary to sustain their lives, or the world circa 2013 where everyone does a hyper-specialized job and depends on the labor of thousands of other people doing hyper-specialized jobs to maintain their lifestyle? Shared values, shared purpose, and common institutions are far more important today than they were a couple of hundred years ago.

jbooth4• 13 years ago

Actually, two things are new:

1) The ability to store/process data on the scale to monitor an entire population.

2) The US government's assertion that it has the right to do this. It's not new under the sun, but it's new in the US.

rubinelli• 13 years ago

Yea, we are smaller parts of a larger whole, but the nature of our interaction is completely different. We have replaced relationships with contracts, traditions with EULAs. And while individuals used to be relatively self-reliant in normal conditions, they had the backing of the community. There's no modern equivalent of barn-raising. This is the real problem: modern institutions don't give individuals any stability, but still demand compliance, if not loyalty.

wissler• 13 years ago

Nothing new? What about the Internet, which enables radical new ways of communicating?

Apocryphon2• 13 years ago

Watergate was probably the turning point though, that destroyed trust in the establishment. Or was it World War I?

eli_gottlieb12• 13 years ago

As a Gen Y kid, you nailed it.

We're not anarchists. Well, ok, most of us will claim to be anarchists of some sort. But what's really going on is that we almost all, to a man, feel hugely betrayed by society's institutions.

That doesn't mean we hate institutions and all want to move to the desert and become survivalist maniacs. It means we want institutions that actually do their job of making society run well.

paganel• 13 years ago

a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures.

Hope I'm not referencing Godwin's law so soon in the discussion, but this quote makes me think about the deference most of the German intellectuals had for "Der Staat", starting with Hegel. There are countless examples, but a quick search brought me to this (which is actually a book written from an "individualist" POV, as far as I can tell):

Oppenheimer's view of the state is profoundly opposed to the then dominant characterisation propounded by G. W. F. Hegel of the state as an admirable achievement of modern civilisation.[1] Proponents of this view tend to accept the social contract view that the State came about as every larger groups of people agreed to subordinate their private interests for the common good. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_State_%28book%29)

As an outsider, I always regarded the Anglo-Saxon system (meaning the United States and Britain) as an antidote to the views expressed by Continental Europe, seems things have changed.

rayiner5• 13 years ago

Hope I'm not referencing Godwin's law so soon in the discussion, but this quote makes me think about the deference most of the German intellectuals had for "Der Staat", starting with Hegel.

There is a lot more to take away from the history of Germany than "respect for the state allowed the Nazis to rise."

For hundreds of years, "Germany" was composed of bickering territories that were kept divided by the continual intervention of the major European powers. Unification and the rise of the German state brought tremendous prosperity and economic progress to Germans. Modern Germany still draws tremendous benefit from that unification.

kijin11• 13 years ago

The United States is a unique country in the sense that it was carefully designed from the ground up, in accordance with the latest scientific and philosophical theories of the time, in opposition to the political systems of the old world, and most importantly with a healthy dose of skepticism about all those romantic ideals of the state. See Thomas Paine's Common Sense [1] for a good example.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5964665

Sadly, much of it has been forgotten.

mcguire• 13 years ago

"As an outsider, I always regarded the Anglo-Saxon system (meaning the United States and Britain) as an antidote to the views expressed by Continental Europe, seems things have changed."

On one hand, I believe the British Empire was built on "a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures". That's just the way it's done, after all.

On the other, I suspect the United States is becoming a civilized country.

mzs• 13 years ago

"David Brooks..." That's why.

jbooth4• 13 years ago

Seriously. We've got a generation of journalists who grew up reading about Woodward and Bernstein, went to j-school full of idealism and wound up being a bunch of boot-licking cronies, trying to get their access.

return02• 13 years ago

The real crisis is the crisis of the State. Anti-Statism has found many supporters in the newer generations, and for good reason. The homogenization of western cultures has made all boundaries easily transgressible to the point where the sovereign state is seen as an archaic and irrelevant construction that is not so easy to trust as it used to be.

3am2• 13 years ago

Your writing style is kind of grandiose and off-putting, and detracts from the point you are trying to make. And your point is also a bit historically melodramatic. The French and American revolutions were both much more socially disruptive than current events, as were the 1930s and the 1960s/70s. This is not close to the "the first time in human history" that social change on the order your are predicting has occurred.

kijin11• 13 years ago

Sorry about the writing style. I've been reading a rather grandiose novel lately and it probably affected my writing. I learned English in 4 different countries, so I don't have a consistent style that I can call mine.

As for your second point, of course there have been much more disruptive changes in the past. But I wasn't talking about the scale of disruption, only about the cultural backgrounds that underlie social change. Nowadays, there are much fewer common backgrounds (religious, ideological or cultural) to bind people together than ever before. Most people who are affected by your political action will not share your faith, your ancestry, or even your language. They won't even identify you as a compatriot, and you don't care for their traditions and emotional attachments, either. How do you act under such circumstances? I find this question both thrilling and worrying.

powertower• 13 years ago

Idealism tends to blind those that follow it.

w_t_payne• 13 years ago

Quite. Political problems are really just engineering problems in disguise.

znowi• 13 years ago

Well put and a nice addition to the article. Please post more :)

jka• 13 years ago

What happens in such a hyper-individualistic, post-System world when organized criminals approach the employees of data repositories and use the typical approaches of {payments, blackmail, threats} to directly retrieve, or install back-doors into, troves of user information?

It is certainly not very nice to suspect that there may be great powers watching and manipulating the world, but real harm and manipulation also exist, and that's why we (historically) have security agencies.

Now if they are not doing their job, or if the capabilities and funding they have far outweigh their accomplishments, then yes, we should curtail them. Or if they have become completely internally corrupt, and are providing no safety at all, then yes, perhaps they should be disbanded.

But we would still need an alternative which we do trust (collectively, if not individually) to provide the same services, or people will just be exploited worse by malignant players who don't have even the pretence of moral behaviour.

My line of thinking here might seem to be a conservative one of "don't rock the boat" - but I'm not necessarily proposing inaction/the status-quo; open source does a pretty good job of promoting trust in software where previously there was a large information disparity between developer and customer, for example, and I think that concept could (potentially) apply here too.

thwarted• 13 years ago

David Brooks made a case for why he thought Snowden was wrong to leak information about the Prism surveillance program ... “For society to function well,” he wrote, “there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things.”

What gets me about this quote is complete lack of introspection as to who exactly lacks respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. Snowden revealed a lack of respect for institutions in those very institutions. The hypocrisy is thick.

But we all know this. And we all know that this is spin. And it's this lack of self-respect the institutions have for themselves and their own actions that fosters questioning the moral stance, value, and intrinsic worth of the "System" by those brought up on messages of double-standards, question authority, and buck the status quo. The emperor has no clothes, and comes right out and says it.

nyan_sandwich2• 13 years ago

I agree that "the system" has no intrinsic value, and is purely an engineering problem. This is obvious. But this sentiment is often erroneously taken as an argument for naively re-architecting the current system.

Us engineer/programmer types know that the last thing you want to do is a total rewrite of a working system, because its precise setup often contains domain knowledge that we don't have. "I don't know what this piece does, but it's ugly and seems problematic" does not necessarily imply "this piece should be removed or changed using my current level of expertise".

The analogy is not perfect, because civilizations are not really intelligently designed, so they can often contain crud that's just crud, but the same goes for you own body. Do you have the domain knowledge to determine that the appendix does nothing, the little finger is noncritical, and the liver is critical? Do Snowden or Swartz have the domain knowledge of the workings of civilization to make a decision like that for everybody?

It's that kind of naive wholesale re-architecting that dropped the ball on the Congo, Zimbabwe, etc, and caused a hundred million to die by communism.

As much as I think Swartz was right to challenge the rent seekers in science publication, and Snowden was right to undermine the NSA, I think there's really something to be said for being careful with this stuff.

Sure there's a lot of apparent problems in our current civilization, but please consider that we might occupy a relatively optimized position in a sea of dysfunctional possible societies, and that the exact mechanics of that may be nontrivial and beyond the understanding of you or me or any of these other "Generation W" troublemakers (of which I am one). The stakes are high enough that we really ought to be careful.

Another superstition trampled under the relentless feet of reason.

This doesn't seem like rational thought, it seems like endorsement of destructive mob behavior backed by quasi-religious ideals.

Would you recognize naive problematic restructuring when you saw it, or are you just using this sentiment as another soldier in the war against some fixed enemy?

crazygringo• 13 years ago

This is a good description of the conservative vs liberal mindset, at least one way of looking at it (there are many others, of course).

Conservatives tend to err on the side of caution, aware that many things work well for reasons we're not aware of, so you should respect institutions because they've got experience and longetivity on their side, and the consequences of changing/dismantling them may be far worse than you'd imagine. Humility is good, and don't mess with what works.

Liberals tend to err on the side of improvement, with a belief that we can understand things, and then intelligently change them to make the world a better place. Obviously, this can produce much more positive change, and make the world a far better place... but can also lead to the kind of societal breakdown that conservatives fear.

But don't try mapping this to political parties... they're organizations with agendas, not so philosophical.

kijin11• 13 years ago

Do Snowden or Swartz have the domain knowledge of the workings of civilization to make a decision like that for everybody?

They didn't make a decision "for everybody", they just made a decision that happened to affect a lot of people. It is part of the romanticism that surrounds the modern state to assume that every action with implications for a Government must be a decision for everybody. No it isn't. The NSA isn't "everybody". The Obama administration isn't "everybody". The fate of human civilization does not depend, and has never depended, on the actions of one Swartz and one Snowden.

The good thing about changes that take place over generations, like what I was trying to describe above, is that they take a long time. We're talking about 30-50 years here, if not longer. The boomers won't be dead until the 2050s, and it will probably take just as long for someone who grew up worshiping Swartz and Snowden to occupy the White House. As Max Planck said, progress happens one funeral at a time. Guess what, modern medical technology has made funerals rarer than ever before.

One Swartz and one Snowden won't change the world. I'm not even sure whether the kind of behavior they exemplify should be encouraged at all. But the thing is, those leaks weren't one-man attempts to re-architect the USA. Rather, they are symptoms of a wider political and psychological change that has been going on for a couple of decades already, and will likely accelerate whether we like it or not. This is not about some violent revolution, it's about social progress, and progress takes a long time.

Patches are coming. The pull requests won't be as polite as they used to be. Not a single line of code will be taken for granted, not even those written by the BDFL himself. But none of this needs to involve a complete rewrite. Just a series of incremental improvements.

specialist• 13 years ago

... neither tradition nor any existing social institution is taken for granted.

I have a different view. Mostly unsubstantiated.

Every system becomes calcified. Every system will be exploited (broken) by insiders. That the rich get richer is math, not morality. Ditto power.

There is no perfect system, no ideal.

Periodically, mostly due to social upheaval, mostly due to technological change, the status quo is disrupted. I call this "shaking the ant farm".

Then there is a period of uncertainty. Until a new consensus is reached. New structures erected.

In USA's culture (and political history), the last major renegotiation was The New Deal. It's duration was extended by the Cold War and the US's massive investment in response to Sputnik.

We've been coasting on those investments ever since.

I don't know when the ant farm will be shook up again.

(My world views are heavily influenced by my understanding of Peter Drucker, Kevin Phillips, and Robert Wright.)

eli_gottlieb12• 13 years ago

There is no perfect system, no ideal.

This would imply that the world never actually gets better at all, which I think is clearly refuted by reality. Anyone given the choice to live in 1913 or 2013 would clearly choose the latter -- even if they might ask for 1968 over either!

Just because social perfection has yet to spring from the singular pen of one philosopher in a cafe somewhere doesn't mean that convergent improvements don't happen.

Enlightenment-driven social democracy works better than other systems we've tried. Maybe it's even a local optimum we can't improve on through mere hill-climbing. What I do know is, if we just sit there saying, "There's no ideal to reach towards, shit just happens, what the hell?", we'll never accomplish anything.

We know what we like, so that is an ideal: make a system we like better than the previous systems.

_bfhp• 13 years ago

Skimming the article I see no mention of COINTELPRO, of which these programs are no doubt a continuation of at least spiritually. This would make sense given that this is the NY Times, and bringing up COINTELPRO would perhaps force them to admit racial/xenophobic dimensions and roots to these recent revelations (e.g. the USG's history of targeting civil rights and anti-war activism), instead of white guys fighting for other white guys' iPad Privacy..

Swartz argued that it was sometimes necessary to break the rules that required obedience to the system in order to avoid systemic evil.

That paragraph would have been a perfect place in which to touch on the Church Committee and its origins. Does the author even know about it?

Honestly, most people with social power and influence don't seem to care about the revelations because they don't. They have nothing on the line -- their rights will never be threatened, nor will government programs like the endless War on Terror ever affect them (in ways that they will understand; "blowback" is evidently too intricate of a concept for most). Could that be because they're white men? Perish the thought

coldcode• 13 years ago

Plato said "The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."

gruseom2• 13 years ago

I doubt that Plato said that.

tptacek5• 13 years ago

Misquoted. According to Respectfully Quoted, this maxim is unverified. In fact, however, it is drawn from Plato's Republic. Paul Shorey offers a literal translation: "But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule" (Book 1, Section 347c). Since Plato specifically addresses those unwilling to govern (), rather than those who are simply indifferent, the accurate translation unfortunately does not apply as broadly to think-tank work as the misquotation does.

washedup• 13 years ago

"Systems are optimized for their own survival and preventing the system from doing evil may well require breaking with organizational niceties, protocols or laws. It requires stepping outside of one’s assigned organizational role. The chief executive is not in a better position to recognize systemic evil than is a middle level manager or, for that matter, an IT contractor. Recognizing systemic evil does not require rank or intelligence, just honesty of vision."

It is natural for ALL systems, whether a political organization, company, terrorist organization, and even biological entities, to fight change and keep the system in tact. We are now at a point where we can critically assess our social organizations from a humanistic perspective and ask if they are really adding value or not.

It is very, very exciting. Also scary.

anandabits• 13 years ago

It's nice to see discussion in mainstream media applying Arendt to the policies and practices of the United States. I've been talking about this for some time now.

Spreading awareness of how institutional behavior can lead to evil actions is extremely important. We have learned a lot about power, evil, oppression, etc since the structure of the modern democratic state was created. We can and need to do much better.

tptacek5• 13 years ago

Manipulative. For instance:

* The article's entire coverage of Manning revolves around a single incident involving the detention of 15 Iraqis. But that's not all Manning did, despite the wording of the article. Manning fell afoul of the law by haphazardly collecting and releasing to a stranger on the Internet far more documents than any person could possibly have reviewed, many of which had no public interest implications.

* The article cites the case of Jeremy Hammond, convicted for hacking and dumping Stratfor. Ludlow famously supports Hammond's actions. But Hammond didn't leak secrets he knew were in the public interest. He picked an organization whose politics he disagreed with, attacked them, and helped circulate the credit card numbers of its subscribers to the Internet. The clear message being sent by Hammond's inclusion in the article is that he is of a kind with Manning, Snowden, and Swartz. The only thing his case has in common with the others is that they they share some of the same political motivations.

* The article does the same thing with John Kiriakou, asserting as axiomatic the idea that Kiriakou was motivated by the public interest. But Kiriakou didn't become a "whistleblower" until that label became convenient to his defense, after it became apparent that his conversations with journalists, which related to a book he was selling, had outed an agent who had been in deep cover for over 20 years.

I'm left with a disquieting conclusions about the way proponents of Ludlow think: so long as the accused share your politics, it's more important for society to empathize with their motivations than with their decisions and actions. That's what people who blow up abortion clinics think.

I'm also a little worried about the phenomenon of generating public support for any mass leak by working with the media to promote those leaked documents that are most interesting/entertaining/important, while working to thwart any effort to evaluate the impact of the leak as a whole. Call it "Greenwaldism", which feeds a careful drip of calculated outrage and then harnesses it to attack anyone who points out any accompanying documents that might have caused harm by their disclosure.

jgroszko• 13 years ago

I'd be curious to hear why you make a distinction between leaking for the public interest and leaking because of a disagreement with an organization's politics? Presumably most people hold their political views because they believe they believe those views are in the best public interest?

tptacek5• 13 years ago

Hammond didn't leak information about Stratfor! He attacked them. His actions were straightforwardly criminal, in a way that few people on HN have any problem recognizing, and his case is only blurred by articles like this that attempt to conflate what he did with what he believed.

tedunangst• 13 years ago

"My political philosophy says this is good for the kind of society I want to live in" is a get out of jail free card? What about the people who don't want to live in your kind of society?

kijin11• 13 years ago

I agree that the inclusion of Hammond and Kiriakou does a disservice to the article. Even Swartz gets little more than a cursory mention. Ludlow would have done better to focus exclusively on Manning and Snowden. I suppose he couldn't help citing some of his favorite but lesser-known characters.

But I don't think the author is trying to "thwart any effort to evaluate the impact of the leak as a whole". Maybe you're more familiar with the author's hidden agenda than I am, but this particular article just looks like an attempt to glorify Manning and Snowden's motivations without saying anything, whether positive or negative, about the consequences of their actions. It just isn't within the scope of the paper.

I would love to read some well-reasoned and evidence-based analyses of the concrete consequences of Manning's and Snowden's leaks. But does every op-ed need to be so comprehensive and perfectly balanced? People who are concerned about the deadly consequences of recent leaks should write their own articles, I'd read them too. Even better if somebody posts a (nicely animated, responsive, HTML5, node.js-backed, CSS-only, etc.) infographic of excess deaths attributed to each leak. HN would love that! If the leakers are getting more public support than they deserve, it's only because their opponents have been unable (or unwilling) to publicize themselves effectively so far.

lucisferre• 13 years ago

That's what people who blow up abortion clinics think.

That seems a bit hyperbolic. Blowing up an abortion clinic is a clear, obvious, and directly destructive and violent act. Leaking information may not always be done altruistically, but political motivations or not it's definitely more complex than that.

And while I can see your point, I think you have focused on, relatively speaking, the mundane issues of leaking information rather than the quite significant revelations that have resulted. These things which point to very serious and concerning issues. Not that I want to say the ends always justify the means, but regardless of the means you're going to have to deal with and acknowledge the ends. I can think of nothing less productive in the wake of these revelations than to attempt redirect the focus conversation back to the morality of the leaking itself or the intentions of the leakers. The conversation about what to do about what we now know seems to be magnitudes more important.

tptacek5• 13 years ago

I don't know what to think about the Snowden case, which is why I didn't really engage with it my comments. It's clear that there are immediately practical revelations that have followed from the documents he's leaked. If it were just documents like the one that revealed Verizon had coughed up its whole call database to NSA under the "business records" provision of the PATRIOT act, I'd have no trouble calling him a hero.

It is harder for me to be sympathetic towards Manning. The best-known "revelations" (at least, about misconduct) from those dumps were already known in detail before the disclosure; Reuters published an article that did a scene by scene recap of the video now known as "Collateral Murder", for instance.

EGreg• 13 years ago

This is why we have checks and balances between three branches of government -- to make sure no one branch gets too much leeway to get disconnected from what everyone else thinks is ok.

Similarly, people set up governments for societies but they also have a culture, and an idea of what is "beyond the pale". An insular culture can slowly become disconnected from the rest of the people, even in government which gets feedback through voting and other limited means. Thus, individuals possessing a "moral sense" who are hired to work in the government may in fact engage in whistleblowing. Governments recognize this and many offer limited protections to this activity. Of course, if they are too far gone in how much they disconnect from the people's preferences, then they might seek to screen heavily when hiring new people, to make sure they don't have this "liability". And thus make themselves even more insular.

At the end of the day, SECRECY is the source of many of the problems. Secret laws and secret courts like FISA which sometimes complain that they are being lied to by the executive branch -- but only during fortuitous court case does it even come to light. Or this: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/the-secr... ... nothing changed in the last two years. I am a liberal and I really liked Obama, but I despise his administration's stance on secrecy, and foreign policy, because it sets a terrible precedent.

Compare: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOp...

mark212• 13 years ago

You'll forgive me if I don't put reading someone's email on the same moral plane as the premeditated murder of 12 million people during the Holocaust.

cappsjulian• 13 years ago

"a statement about what happens when people play their 'proper' roles within a system, following prescribed conduct with respect to that system, while remaining blind to the moral consequences of what the system was doing — or at least compartmentalizing and ignoring those consequences."

Like Todd in Breaking Bad, who is in fact a neo-nazi.

jonmrodriguez• 13 years ago

I think this otherwise-great article is weakened by its praise of Manning. Unlike the heroic Snowden, Manning leaked an enormous bulk of documents that she didn't actually review in detail, which showed little to no wrongdoing relative to the bulk of the texts leaked. This seems useless, reckless, and spiteful. http://www.quora.com/Chelsea-formerly-PFC-Bradley-Manning/Is...

The Banality of Systemic Evil

Related Stories