[slurgfest]

Getting disgruntled and indiscriminately dumping whatever you find on sensitive internal networks, in violation of the military law you agreed to be governed by when you VOLUNTEERED for the US military, is not an honorable self-sacrifice.

If we believe that, then we should believe that any employee of any startup has an honorable sacrificial duty to leak that startup's code along with a dump of its databases.

[nuclear_eclipse]

So if a volunteer army is committing mass atrocities in the name of protecting state secrets, nobody should blow the whistle because they volunteered for the position before they knew what they were going to be doing?

I'm just wondering where the line is drawn here.

[MysticFear]

Someone mistaking video journalists when they are peaking around a corner with a video camera as enemy combatants that recently shot at a convoy, is not "mass atrocities". Lets draw that line.

[nuclear_eclipse]

I am making no implications or analogies; I am simply asking a hypothetical question in response to the parent post. Why does volunteering to follow some code make it morally wrong to blow the whistle?

[malbs]

Not really a fair comparison. Unless the start-up was tax payer funded, and was doing objectionable things like selling customers credit card/personal information to third parties, and you knew about it, maybe then you would be lauded for exposing it. However no one would label you a hero for releasing a companies IP for the sake of it.

MAYBE if it was some company making bucket loads of money off of GPL code they were deliberately and knowingly abusing the license!

[superprime]

Sacrifice by definition must be voluntary, otherwise it's just servitude, so saying he volunteered is not a good argument against calling his service sacrifice.

Likewise breaking the law is not necessarily wrong, and what's legal and what's moral don't always overlap. Consider slavery.

As for the last part, it could be a duty to leak code if your startup is doing something highly immoral. No one's arguing for what you said; it seems like trolling.

[yesbabyyes]

If that was an employee of Enron circa 2000, yes I think she or he should be celebrated. It's not like Manning "indiscriminately dump[ed]" documents from an organization that was clearly honorable and honest -- quite on the contrary, it seems.

[icebraining]

If that startup is killing civillians, absolutely.

[opminion]

Homeland, the TV series, is based on a similar premise and, whether you like the show or not, it works.