[agorabinary]

Reductio ad absurdum, a perfectly legitimate form of proof, begs to differ with Mr. Godwin.

Anyone can leak anything, as anyone can say anything. This is the law as per the First Amendment. You could lose your job contract for leaking information, but you could also lose your job for no reason at all. Those that would argue that only criminality should be leaked --- who is to determine that criminality if no one knows about it in the first place? Evidence of the act before judgment of the act. And to those who say leaking information can lead to soldier casualties --- so can lying to a public about the motivations for countless aggressive wars, and then assuming the public "can't handle the truth". Jessup went to prison for that, thanks to a few good men. Unfortunately, Americans don't listen to their movies, only watch them.

[phaus]

The constitution has provisions for government secrets, you should read it in it's entirety.

I won't link to a single section, but rather the entire document, because everyone should read the whole thing on a regular basis.

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_trans...

[MartinCron]

Reductio ad absurdum, a perfectly legitimate form of proof, begs to differ with Mr. Godwin

Godwin's law isn't about legitimate forms of proof, it's about the level and quality of discourse. It's not saying you're wrong it's saying that your point would be stronger without Nazi references.

Look at it as help, not refutation :)

[mpyne]

Your meandering Chewbacca defense kind of falls flat at the beginning, when you claim that the First Amendment allows one to say anything they wish.

Try using that argument to leak persons' sensitive personally-identifiable information someday and see how well it works for you.

[mbreese]

You can't just say anything. The First Amendment is not absolute - there have always been limits on it. Saying "fire" in a crowded theater is the canonical example.

Do you know who is responsible for determining what is criminal and what isn't? A judge and/or jury. That's the way our system works. That's the risk for whistleblowers. They have to be prepared to go to trial to determine if they get protected.

Seriously - in "A Few Good Men" Jessup went to jail for ordering the beating of a soldier. That has absolutely no bearing on this.

Godwin's law came about for a reason - using Nazis as an example is overdone. Its like comparing software to cars - it's an overused analogy. Because of this, you lose most of the power your argument may have had. Pick something else if you want to point out how ridiculous something is.

[agorabinary]

Walter Block disagrees: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPeqXcJqkeg . His hypothetical situations at the end may seems unrealistic to you, but consider them as illustrative of the dangers of blanket prosecution over much more favorable voluntary solutions.

Collecting and understanding the evidence of a situation may be up to a a judge/jury, but natural law is not. A judge cannot lawfully reject the First Amendment, which universally defends whistleblowers. "That's the way our system works" is not an argument.

The issue at the heart of A Few Good Men was the notion that an enlightened minority can lie to a majority for the good of that majority. Jessup beats soldiers, our government drone-bombs children. And they both think they can withhold these acts from public view, because it's in the "public's interest not to know". Whistleblowers rightfully reject this view, as did the jury in A Few Good Men.

Okay, I'll use Stalin and his genocides. Does it make a difference?

[notahacker]

I'm assuming the video is equivalent to the text here: http://mises.org/books/defending.pdf

In which case even Block, an academic anarcist prepared to go to the extremes of defending one's right to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre is pretty unequivocal about the enforceability of voluntarily-agreed contracts against such speech. Such as by those who contracted to work for the military, for example?

Love or loathe what Manning did (and it's possible to do both: to believe he is both a whistleblower and someone who disclosed a lot of other information with no justification), the First Amendment was never intended to protect his course of action. Which leaves us with whether his course of action was ethical, and ethics and the military have never been easy bedfellows.

[anigbrowl]

Collecting and understanding the evidence of a situation may be up to a a judge/jury, but natural law is not. A judge cannot lawfully reject the First Amendment, which universally defends whistleblowers.

Natural law doesn't come into it, and is usually the refuge of people who don't have an argument. A judge can't just reject the First Amendment, but there are well-established limits on it, and your claim that it 'universally defends whistleblowers' is strictly imaginary. It doesn't say anything about protecting people who reveal government misdeeds.