[djcapelis]

> By volunteering to join the military and obtain security clearance, Manning waived his First Amendment right to disclose anything he saw fit.

Yes. And how soon is it that our government locks everyone into a similar deal? Over 3 million people have security clearances. (And many more who don't have active ones, but are still bound by many of the rules around clearances.) How soon until you need clearance to do serious work in any number of areas?

How soon until giving up those rights is part of doing business? And is standard practice?

It already is in some areas of my field. I know of other subfields where the same is true.

Maybe it is time that we start protecting the rights of all and not pretending like those who have security clearances are an extremely rare exception whose rights can be waived without issue.

I'm not saying the rules should be that anyone can disclose whatever classified information they like, because obviously that doesn't work. But I don't think because someone made a choice at some point in their lives to get a clearance means we shouldn't discuss what circumstances and latitude they should get to speak their minds.

[tptacek]

We share a field. In what ways does that field demand that you surrender your rights?

I don't have much of a problem with the idea that contributing infosec work to the government requires you to become a part of something that is bigger than you or your individual rights, and have resolved that conflict by simply not working for the government; that also eliminates some other moral hazards of working for/with the military/industrial complex.

[djcapelis]

It doesn't demand you surrender your rights yet. It is just becoming more and more encouraging that you do so and I know many young researchers who are opting to make that choice a lot more often than I used to see.

The governmental sector in our field is the main area I was thinking of. And it is one that is only growing with time. A lot of avenues and research sub-fields require clearances if you don't want to be on the outside looking in. In particular, our ability to get realistic threat information on large scale actors is vastly limited and my research suffers from that lack of context.

This is worse in some specific subfields than it is in others, crypto comes to mind. Though that is one area where academia seems to have actually maybe made that less true than it used to be.

There are people in bio and other areas who are experiencing similar pressures. The scope of the work done by people with clearances is trending upwards and the subfields in which someone's ability to participate in them is more limited without a clearance seems to be expanding.

[tptacek]

You should encourage your peers not to go work for the government. There's a misconception on HN (I don't think you hold it) that GSA work is a major feeder for infosec, for vulnerability research, and for defensive security work. It isn't. Most of the researchers anyone here has "heard of" don't do any work for the government at all.

I talk every once in awhile about how Matasano chooses not to do government work, which makes it sound like we're taking a difficult principled stand. In reality, it's a very easy principled stand; our calendar is uniformly packed, we have no sales team, and I don't even remember the last time we needed to think about the the USG.

I personally have no problem with offensive security people working for the USG. It's not a choice I would make, but I see how other people might decide differently. But if you decide to do that, to make your work part of the national defense, it makes sense to me that you're going to lose some control over that work and over some of what you learn as you do that work.

Let's be honest: people doing "cyber" work for the government aren't poor kids from the suburbs trying to pay for college by doing a tour of duty. Relative to the market as a whole, they're immensely well compensated.

[dfc]

Its funny that you say "people doing "cyber" work for the government aren't poor kids from the suburbs trying to pay for college by doing a tour of duty." This is essentially what the CyberCorps Scholarship for Service is sans combat. The program has been going on for a long time now, Mudge played a part in the creation of the program.

https://www​.sfs.opm.gov/

[ballard]

Qui tacet consentire videtur

And more selfishly, .gov/.mil rarely pays on time.

[rayiner]

> I'm not saying the rules should be that anyone can disclose whatever classified information they like

But that's exactly what Manning did. If he were being prosecuted for discretely releasing specific information about specific crimes, we'd be talking about a different case.

[djcapelis]

> we'd be talking about a different case.

Yet people say the same thing about Snowden, who seems to have "discretely released specific information about specific crimes" to a larger extent than Manning did.

And while we're talking about it. It wasn't like the Pentagon Papers were all that specific. Ellsberg leaked the 47 volumes wholesale.

[saraid216]

I'm too unfamiliar with the specifics to respond with precision, but I will point out that "47 volumes" is not necessarily unspecific. Nor does it necessitate quantity of specific crimes.

All it really says is that it was useful, for some reason or another, to divide the information into 47 parts.

[ororlrlrlylyly]

At what point do you just say, you know what? US imperialism is just so fucking out of control, that we need to do whatever it takes to resist it, not get caught up in anal retentive legalism, or analyzing what the implications of various legal reforms would be, and just do whatever needs doing to support those who have taken courageous steps toward undermining the regime?

Do you really not believe that a revolution is called for?

[bwaldrep]

Sure, you are free to discuss what circumstances and latitude people bound by the UCMJ should have to speak their mind. You might be able to argue that the portions of Manning's leak that show evidence of wrongdoing were justified. That does not change the fact that he recklessly leaked hundreds of thousands of other classified documents, and is therefore guilty of espionage.

My point about Manning waiving his rights was primarily in response to this quote from the parent post:

> Government employees who blow the whistle on war crimes, other abuses and government incompetence should be protected under the First Amendment.

Waving the First Amendment around is meaningless when the affected parties have agreed to not reveal classified information and waive their rights as citizens. Arguing that the First Amendment broadly trumps the UCMJ and classification leads to nonsense. As you said, doing so obviously doesn't work. You can make a case that leaks are justified under some circumstances. That case does not involve appealing to the First Amendment.

[djcapelis]

> That case does not involve appealing to the First Amendment.

I think it must. You can make a case that UCMJ and waiving of rights are limited exceptions that must be allowed under the first amendment for the government to do its work, but as these rights are fundamental, I think it is the government that must justify restrictions on any citizen's right to free speech. And it is our system which requires that those restrictions be as limited as possible.

IMO, the First Amendment is in play because any restrictions on speech must be justified and limited.

[saraid216]

So I decided I ought to actually look it up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_expression which cites http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/19...

The most useful section appears to be "freedom of the press", in which military personnel published information against the wishes of security review.

"On appeal, the USCMA concluded that a regulation requiring security review was valid and, therefore, did not violate the military member's first amendment rights, noting that the right to free speech is not an indiscriminate right and is qualified by the requirements of reasonableness in relation to time, place, and circumstances."

My short interpretation is that: (1) the vast majority of people waving around the First Amendment flag have no idea what they're talking about, but (2) I have been incorrect in the blanket claim that there is no First Amendment protection for soldiers.

[djcapelis]

I think I can say we agree on both those points. And those are both really relevant citations, thanks for looking them up!

[anigbrowl]

The Constitution also gives Congress the power to 'make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces'. You seem to think the Bill of Rights trumps the rest of the constitution. It doesn't, but rather stands on the same plane as it, and where there are conflicts between different parts of the Constitution the matter typically ends up in the Supreme Court sooner or later.

There's a lot more to the Constitution than just the Bill of Rights, but most people only seem to remember the latter.

[djcapelis]

Yes. There's a bunch of clauses that allow a bunch of things. None of them involve tossing the first amendment out the window and all of them involve an analysis where the fundamental right to free speech is in play, but also often balanced by other legitimate governmental concerns.

Which is pretty much exactly what I said in my post.

[anigbrowl]

That's not what you said at all. Your stated position is that rights are fundamental and government has to justify any imposition on those, yes? So you're saying that the bill of Rights > the Rest of the Constitution.

Go read the Federalist Papers, there is no way the founders intended it to work that way and courts have never interpreted it that way either. James Madison explains it beter than I can:

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

[djcapelis]

Fundamental rights is a legally defined term, you should look it up sometime.

(Also the federalist papers pre-date and argued against the Bill of Rights. Which means they're a strange authority to reference in this context.)