Caveat: I think Manning deserves a good while in prison, life or how long, meh, I'm not a judge. The primary reason I think this is because he didn't release specific information because he felt that it was incriminating. He mass dumped a bunch of stuff he hadn't read which to me screams: I'm pissed, so I'll dump this shit to be important, consequences and significance be damned. Snowden, a little more conflicted on, definitely more sympathetic.
As a former DoD employee, the hacker paranoia definitely scares me. I used scripts and wrote command line tools for analysis since the tools given were insufficient or just plain sucked. The arguments listed by jrochkind1 could have been applied to me. I certainly have never leaked any information but from the comments below it seems that programming and command line tools themselves are now considered crimes because they can be more powerful although the bulk of normal people are uninterested in using them. Should he be tried and convicted for what he did? Yes (IMO). Should he be tried and convicted because he was what most would consider a power user? No. That's like tacking on charges for a murderer for being too accurate. It deflates the validity of the governments claims, exposes the legal argument to some risk, and creates ridiculous precedent.
There is a scary amount of anti-tech stuff going on now, though I guess that should be expected. Thinking of pg's What People Can't Say essay here, since the computer illiterate are still in charge of most things, while simultaneously the computer literate are now ascendant. I expect it will get worse before it gets better.
As a former DoD employee, the hacker paranoia definitely scares me. I used scripts and wrote command line tools for analysis since the tools given were insufficient or just plain sucked. The arguments listed by jrochkind1 could have been applied to me. I certainly have never leaked any information but from the comments below it seems that programming and command line tools themselves are now considered crimes because they can be more powerful although the bulk of normal people are uninterested in using them. Should he be tried and convicted for what he did? Yes (IMO). Should he be tried and convicted because he was what most would consider a power user? No. That's like tacking on charges for a murderer for being too accurate. It deflates the validity of the governments claims, exposes the legal argument to some risk, and creates ridiculous precedent.
There is a scary amount of anti-tech stuff going on now, though I guess that should be expected. Thinking of pg's What People Can't Say essay here, since the computer illiterate are still in charge of most things, while simultaneously the computer literate are now ascendant. I expect it will get worse before it gets better.