[ck2]

So by your standard, Martin Luther King Jr. should be getting out of prison just about now?

Manning was a whistlerblower, just like Snowden, with less power and ability for flight to defend themselves.

There was no personal gain ever intended or achieved, yet great personal loss even in the best outcome. They saw something very wrong happening and had little to no way to say "hey there are some incredibly powerful forces in this country doing some very evil things".

The problem is we only treat whistleblowers like traitors legally and Manning's "trial" was a complete scam, zero media coverage allowed on purpose by the government so they could be railroaded.

[bostonpete]

I don't purport to be an expert on either of these cases, but my impression as a casual observer was that Mannings leak was just a massive dump of classified documents without any attempt to be selective about which information needed to come to light.

Any sizable dump of classified documents is likely to have some damning pieces in there but that doesn't necessarily justify blindly leaking massive amounts of documents. I think Manning would have gotten a more favorable response by more people if he had been just a bit selective in what he leaked.

Again, I don't have deep knowledge on either of these cases compared to some around here so I'll concede that maybe I'm wrong on some of my facts...?

[duaneb]

It's not even clear Manning is a whistleblower—what the hell did he blow a whistle on? It's not like any widespread scandal, corruption, or conspiracy was revealed.

[joshfraser]

I believe this was where it started http://www.collateralmurder.com

[BlackDeath3]

Yeah, I was under the impression that he leaked information on the slaughter of civilians in the Middle East by soldiers/mercenaries. My familiarity is clearly cursory.

[mbreese]

Along with a ton of other stuff that wasn't germane to that incident. Manning's big issue was that they released a bunch of classified material without much regard for what it said. It was very broad in scope. Had it been a narrow subset of the data, Manning would have had a better chance of being considered a whistleblower.

[BlackDeath3]

OK, that is what I had heard.

[dinkumthinkum]

Let's not compare Martin Luther King Jr. to Snowden and Manning.