[msg]

Martin Luther King didn't live in a world where we imprison innocent men in legal limbo without trial or habeas corpus, or where we officially sanctioned torture and the oubliette. He could trust that he would be vindicated by the justice system.

The whole point of the Snowden story is that the government is not trustworthy in this era. I would not trust the US government to give him justice any more than they did Aaron Swartz.

I think Snowden knew exactly what to expect if he "faced the music" and exactly how much attention he could keep on his story in exile.

[SqMafia]

"Martin Luther King didn't live in a world where we imprison innocent men in legal limbo without trial or habeas corpus, or where we officially sanctioned torture and the oubliette. He could trust that he would be vindicated by the justice system."

You're kidding me right?!? You honestly think the era he lived in was fair and just to people like him? Do you know how many lynchings there were in Florida alone? Does the name Emmett Till ring a bell? What did you think MLK fought for?

[msg]

http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/resources/article/an...

Do any of you believe that there would have been a new Letter from Birmingham Jail if Snowden were imprisoned? Keep in mind the US authorities are calling this civil rights whistleblowing "treason". Aiding the terrorists and enemy combatant status cannot be far behind.

Like it or not, the rule of law has been badly damaged by the endless emergency.

These days you do your nonviolent resistance from behind the safety of a diplomatic minefield.

[krapp]

What Snowden did is, arguably, treason. Whatever you believe about the righteousness of his cause, or the evil of the programs he exposed, or the corruption of the government pursuing him, that he's being pursued is in fact a case of the system working as intended.

[alexqgb]

"What Snowden did is, arguably, treason."

Not by anyone who understands the legal definition of treason. Among other things, treason presupposes formally declared hostilities. Even Cold War turncoats convicted of espionage for aiding the Soviet Union couldn't be charged with treason, since technically, we were never at war with the USSR.

[krapp]

Fair enough, I'll concede the point.

But of course, they would just as well argue we're in the War on Terror. It would be an obvious flimsy justification but, there you are.

[alexqgb]

You really don't understand what a formal declaration of war is, do you?

[akiselev]

I believe you have that backwards. The first statement is not arguable while the second one is, because of the nature of the first.

[rst]

King lived in a world where extra-judicial killings were frequent in the South, and the perpetrators (many with connections to local law enforcement) had effective impunity.

As to Federal law enforcement, the FBI tried to blackmail him personally with recordings implicating him in extramarital affairs; see http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/king-like-all-frauds-yo...

Also, the 1950s Red Scare was a fairly recent memory; that resulted in ruining the livelihoods of numerous Americans, including at least one prominent and politically active African-American, Paul Robeson.

[rayiner]

Its this sort of uneducated, a-historical crap that makes it impossible to read HN lately. If you think the government was less scary back then, in the grip of anti-communist paranoia, you're insane, deluded, or just plain uneducated. Saying that MLK could count on a fair shake from a justice system that didn't give any minority a fair shake back then, much less political radicals, is the height of ridiculousness.

[pg]

You don't need to resort to insults.

[tptacek]

HN has been especially frustrating for the last 2 weeks.

Maybe, instead of hoping that people will maintain perfect civility throughout a nonstop stream of political discussions, something could instead be done to ratchet back the politics on HN?

[jessaustin]

Perhaps reality has been especially frustrating?

Although yeah, implying that blacks in the American South in the mid-20th C could rely on the justice system is ridiculous enough to force me to agree with rayiner for once.

[anigbrowl]

Frankly, I think the offending comment is insulting to the intelligence, as well as to the (collective) experience of people who were the target of racial discrimination laws. I don't want to be political about it, but HN as a community is sometimes subject to an alarming degree of demographic myopia.

[rayiner]

Sorry, I got emotional and attacked him instead of his comment. For that I apologize. But he essentially implied that a black guy fighting segregation during the height of communist paranoia and racial tension in the 1960's could count on a fairer shake from the justice system than a wealthy white kid in 2013 with the support of a rich and influential segment of society. That's the kind of statement that tends to engender emotional, rather than cool and collected responses.

[clicks]

    But he essentially implied that a black guy fighting 
    segregation during the height of communist paranoia and 
    racial tension in the 1960's could count on a fairer 
    shake from the justice system than a wealthy white kid in 
    2013 with the support of a rich and influential segment 
    of society.

I get what you're trying to say... but I'm not sure if the latter point of that statement is so spot on. Manning was a wealthy white kid with the support of a rich and influential segment of society... as was Aaron Swartz, and yet they were both met with the heavy side of law.

[rayiner]

Manning was a soldier and faced the military justice system, which is necessarily harsh. With Schwartz, we'll never know what kind of shake he would have gotten--a judge never even got to hear his plea.

[jacquesm]

Saying that Snowden will receive a fair shake today is also pretty ridiculous.

[anigbrowl]

I don't think so. right now Major Nidal Hasan (the army psychiatrist who, by his own admission, perpetrated a small massacre at Fort Hood, Texas in 2009) is having a trial right now and acting as his own defense counsel. Predictably, he's making a hash of it and is likely to receive the death penalty because his only offered defense, which has been rejected as a matter of law, is that he was acting to protect the lives of Taliban leaders; but he's most certainly getting a fair trial - a fact which is irritating a great many people on the right.

[jessaustin]

I'm pretty sure TPTB exactly predicted the events of Hassan's trial. It has gone forward in this manner because this is the manner they desire. It's not like Hassan was held for months in solitary without the luxury of clothing.

[alexqgb]

The point isn't that the government has suddenly gone bad, but that the specific nature of the badness has changed very substantially and fairly recently. Snowden's choices may be unprecedented, but so is the situation that the rest of us are facing. His greatest fear (which he was very explicit about) is that this new and very unsettling state of affairs would go unrecognized, even after he made his revelations.

[agwa]

It was scary back then for sure. MLK and his supporters suffered beatings, faced extrajudicial lynchings, etc. I'm not disputing any of that. Yet, we don't have to speculate whether MLK could count on a fair shake from the justice system, because history tells us. MLK was arrested 30 times[1], yet he spent relatively little time incarcerated. The longest sentence he ever received was 4 months (compare that to Aaron Swartz' 6 months plea offer), but he served less than that. His famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail was written when he was in jail for only 11 days[2]. As screwed up as things were then, the justice system was not so draconian that it prevented him from leading an effective campaign of civil disobedience.

I don't think it's unreasonable to speculate that Edward Snowden, if arrested in the US, would be denied bail. He would be facing decades in prison. It's quite likely he'd be held in solitary confinement and he could even be subjected to "Special Administrative Measures" (a recent invention) that would severely restrict his freedom to communicate with the outside world[3]. There would be no Letter from a Federal Detention Center from Edward Snowden. These draconian sentences and measures make it completely impossible to conduct a meaningful campaign of civil disobedience, as they can be wielded to completely neutralize a movement's leaders and serve as a warning to anyone else who is thinking of doing the same thing.

What's truly ahistoric is comparing Snowden to MLK to suggest he needs to come back to the US and face the consequences. Snowden may not be facing beatings and lynch mobs, but he would be facing a justice system that would treat him far more harshly than it ever treated MLK. We've thankfully lost many of the great evils of the past, but there are new evils. Civil disobedience is even more difficult today, and what's especially insidious is that instead of it being discouraged by lynch mobs and corrupt southern sheriffs, it's discouraged by the justice system itself.

(We should be thinking about the consequences Snowden would face because the essential civil disobedience of the future may very well be about information, but if you'd rather look at "conventional" protesters more akin to MLK, consider Al Sharpton being jailed for 90 days in 2001 for trespassing during a protest against a naval base in San Juan[4], or the case of the anti-nuke protesters that was on HN a few days ago[5]. Not quite as draconian as the situation Snowden could be facing, but the sentences are still unfair, longer than what MLK faced, and make carrying out effective civil disobedience extremely difficult.)

[1] http://www.thekingcenter.org/faqs

[2] http://www.lib.lsu.edu/hum/mlk/srs216.html

[3] They're mostly used for "dangerous" prisoners, like suspected or convicted terrorists, but they're also used for those accused or convicted of espionage charges: http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2009/June/09-ag-564.html

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/24/nyregion/sharpton-and-3-fr...

[5] https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/15-7

[dylangs1030]

Hey rayiner, if it helps at all, I frequently follow your comments on Hacker News, and I've been able to grasp all your (very cogent) examples of how the government was worse in the 20th century. So it's not falling on deaf ears.

Just wanted to give some encouragement since you seem really discouraged by HN this week. It's been straining on the whole community, I think.

[apu]

Strong agree (for both rayiner and tptacek). It's amazing how much abuse has been heaped on them for simply putting things into perspective, for questioning stories, for thinking carefully about what's actually being stated and claimed by various parties.

[krapp]

He could trust that he would be vindicated by the justice system.

His belief that justice would someday inevitably prevail belied the injustice of his system. To the degree that any of what you suggest was true in the day, it wasn't true at all for blacks, less so for those who didn't 'keep their place'.

In this modern case, Edward Snowden is the beneficiary of far, far more privilege and opportunity for fairness from his own government than Martin Luther King could ever have hoped for. Just imagine what the discourse would be if Edward Snowden turned out to be Arabic, or Muslim, or went by a Muslim sounding name. If he fled to the wrong country they might already be picking smoking chunks of him off a cafe wall. There would be no debate in the media as to whether he was a 'hero' or 'traitor'.

[rdouble]

Right, MLK lived in a world where innocent men got strung up in trees.

[anigbrowl]

You need to read more history. Without commenting on Snowden, I think the US is a substantially freer nation then it was in the time of MLK.

[akiselev]

I wouldn't say that the US is substantially more free today than it was then.

[anigbrowl]

Obviously it's a matter of opinion, but the comment I replied to offered a naively rosy picture of how justice was administered in MLK's day. It's a common error in political debates to invoke an earlier time as if it were a golden age of some sort.

As a parallel example, I'm not too enthused about our use of drones in military conflicts these days, but a lot of people who object to the use of drones overlook the fact that 20 years ago we did the same thing with cruise missiles, and 20 years before that we engaged in carpet bombing, with a much higher loss of life in the aggregate as you go farther back in history. So it's reasonable to argue that drones are bad, but naive to omit the fact that they're substantially less bad than how we used to wage war.

[akiselev]

Sorry I think I got distracted, accidentally pressed enter while tabbing through pages, and never finished my thought. I totally agree with your point about nostalgia.

I was going to say that we need to adopt a new understanding of what it means to be free.

Maybe most people care more about security than freedom from surveillance or government corruption. If this is what they want, then this is what they'll get and if we're going to talk about being free we need to redefine freedom so that it reflects the unrestricted flow of information instead of arbitrary "endowed" rights, which aren't rights at all if we don't want them.

The Civil Rights movement was a struggle of a minority against a majority for rights that were rightfully theirs. Today, the majority is handing its rights over on a silver platter to the security/intelligence agency. I think we are less free.

[lazyjones]

> I wouldn't say that the US is substantially more free today than it was then.

It's not something that needs a lot of thought if you consider that the current president allegedly personally authorises deadly drone strikes even on american citizens (on "Terror Tuesdays"), while Nixon had to resign over Watergate.

[akiselev]

I don't think American should get any preference here. Nothing gives the US to force its might onto other countries, but while we're at it regardless of my non-voting voice, drone strikes are better than the carpet bombings of civilians that Nixon/Kissinger ordered in Laos and Cambodia [1] during the Vietnam War, not to mention the other things American troops did to flush out guerrilla fighters (killing entire villages). The violence is at least starting to have less unintended casualties (I don't think the drone program has many casualties that were not known before the order). In the big picture, I'm more worried about how to control the state in a world whose infrastructure enables mass surveillance.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu