"I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for the law."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
(P.S. Good luck, David. The international community stands with you.)
I don't know the particulars of this person, the case, etc to comment on them so I won't. However, I will say that 'classified' has often become a way to hide actions that governments and individuals don't want the public to see instead of hiding things in order to protect the public.
I think countries need laws on the duration of classification that get to the heart of national security vs public interest. I think a core issue is that classified information should come out within the lifetime of people involved with very few exceptions. Additionally, crimes found after declassification should have automatic statute of limitation renewals.
One system that may work could be automatic mandatory release unless renewed at a higher level of classification. Every time material is elevated it should require the highest level of administration to approve renewal. Additionally, when things are declassified they should be publicly advertised in some way so that records requests can find them.
There is a need for classified materials, but there should be a high bar to make them and a low bar to release them in order to avoid the government using them as a shield to hid activities they don't want the public to see.
I will say that 'classified' has often become a way to hide actions that governments and individuals don't want the public to see instead of hiding things in order to protect the public.
You can probably rationalize anything as "protecting the public" with the magic phrases "national security" (no exposing shady government operations), "ensuring order and stability" (no political protests) and "ensuring innovation and prosperity" (no resisting anything the private sector wants to do).
Yes, you can, but that doesn't mean there isn't a real need in some, if not many, cases. The big questions are how do we balance the real need to protect national security with the actual harm to public interest and how do we eventually address the actual harm to public interest that occurred when something was classified.
One possibility would be to criminalize over classification.
That would have its own unintended consequences
Don’t forget about the “safety of children”.
or justification with just "9-11" - is that still the ultimate rejoinder?
This is pretty much how they call these laws in China...
At least in the US government, whomever creates the document classifies the document. It basically requires an act of congress or the President to change it once done.
That being said, "I will say that 'classified' has often become a way to hide actions that governments and individuals don't want the public to see" is just as true there.
It basically requires an act of congress or the President to change it once done.
Isn't the mere passage of time also a remover of classification? Like isn't there a default time from the creation date?
Or it must be positively declassified by an action?
IIRC, after 50 years it can be reviewed for declassification. I don't think there is anything automated about it.
One system that may work could be automatic mandatory release unless renewed at a higher level of classification. Every time material is elevated it should require the highest level of administration to approve renewal. Additionally, when things are declassified they should be publicly advertised in some way so that records requests can find them.
Never worked with any TS/SCI huh?
I agree with your base idea, but the devil is in the details here. We do need better policy around classified material, given it's supposed to serve the population. But automatic outcome based on some unconnected rules or judgement, uh... doesn't have a great track record for success. We likely do need more accountability to make sure secrets from society serve that society. But I don't think an edict about expiration dates is that.
an edict about expiration dates
is exactly what Division 3 of the Archives Act 1983 (Australia) and section 3(4) of the Public Records Act 1958 (UK) provide for, so this is hardly as unworkable an idea as you make it out to be.
Have you read Division 3 of the Archives Act 1983? Something along these lines is fairly widespread, although of course the Sir Humphreys of the world have had some success in limiting the damage done to their interests.
I'm all for whistleblower protection and don't think he should be serving time, based on the 15 minutes I've been aware of this, (so don't take this "but" the wrong way)
but,
What exactly was he blowing the whistle about?
McBride had become dissatisfied with military leadership and increased scrutiny of soldiers.
McBride's lawyers told the court that he had leaked information in an attempt to bring awareness to excessive investigation of soldiers.
What? Is he a counter-whistle blower? What am I missing?
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_McBride_(whistleblower...]
Follow-up:
Ok this article makes it make a bit more sense: https://apnews.com/article/mcbride-whistleblower-court-priso...
McBride’s documents formed the basis of an Australian Broadcasting Corp. seven-part television series in 2017 that contained war crime allegations including Australian Special Air Service Regiment soldiers killing unarmed Afghan men and children in 2013.
McBride’s argument that his suspicions that the higher echelons of the Australian Defense Force were engaged in criminal activity obliged him to disclose classified papers “didn’t reflect reality,” Mossop said.
What exactly was he blowing the whistle about?
If you dig a bit deeper within your own Wikipedia link, you’ll see the actual list of issues [0].
The documents contained at least 10 accounts of possibly unlawful killings of unarmed men and children
of an incident in which an SAS soldier severed the hands of an Afghan insurgent for identification confirmation purposes
But he wasn't blowing the whistle on those.
He says, both in court and elsewhere, that his concern was that higher ups were undertaking investigations of soldiers he felt did nothing wrong, for PR reasons, and he believed that was illegal.
I was certainly confused before but I think it makes more sense now.
As a lawyer, his assignment was to prosecute a soldier whom he thought innocent - a scapegoat - when the top brass knew about actual war criminals (e.g. Ben Roberts-Smith).
So it seems to be a regular power struggle? All these guys did shady things and then some of the higher ups want to pick a few scapegoats to clear the record and save their asses? So one of the underlings just blow the whistles but clearly the higher ups still have things under control.
Just purely speculating btw...
What you've mentioned is underreported. He was whistleblowing because he was dissatisfied with military leadership and the *increased scrutiny* of soldiers.
Ironically, this led to further scrutiny and the identification of alleged war crimes.
This is the impression that I got from reading Wikipedia and quotes from his lawyer, so I wouldn't call it underreported.
Someone elsewhere in this thread linked me to a video where McBride explained that the top brass knew about actual war crimes (e.g. Ben Roberts-Smith,) and wanted to appear to be doing something, so they tasked McBride with prosecuting a scapegoat (whom McBride believed innocent) and that was what caused him to to start gathering and leaking documents.
My take is this is Abu Ghraib again.
David McBride is a military lawyer and is standing up for justice for the soldiers accused of war crimes because there is evidence they were acting under orders and did not simply lose discipline and go rogue. In other words this was coordinated terror campaign, not a few soldiers getting trigger happy.
They executed civilians.[1,2,3] You don't execute civilians. Any officer who gives you an order to execute civilians is giving you an unlawful order. This is so fundamental it is covered in basic training.
The reporting around this has indicated that basically there was a culture within the SAS that you needed to be "blooded" and serving SAS personnel were isolated, harassed or threatened by other personnel if they didn't participate by those who were in it.
The people being investigated may or may not have been acting under orders from higher officers...but the accusations are that they also directly threatened other soldiers if they objected to, or directly facilitated, those unlawful orders.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/may/...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-20/former-sas-soldier-ar...
Listen to his actual words, not the reporting from the media: https://youtu.be/sYt4CxFfQUU?si=MpgD5PcFlB4gLzHj
You'll see the reporting is totally skewed (huge surprise). He identified certain low ranking military members being effectively thrown under the bus for small things, or things it's dubious they even did. While the Australian gov continues to protect the real psychos: special forces and the top brass.
Successive federal governments wanted to keep up appearances with the US, & kept them on station for too long. Oversight & discipline became frayed. Certain US special forces wouldn't work with them because of it. The grunts were sacrificed to protect the top brass, but especially the politicians who looked the other way. Particularly embarrassing to do otherwise when one (Ben Roberts-Smith) has already been given a Victoria Cross.
https://michaelwest.com.au/david-mcbride-sentencing-reserved...
Odgers says the Army command was involved with “window dressing” which he suspected involved criminality; that is “command was undertaking improper investigations done for PR purposes, and he found that repellant and believed that he needed this to be properly investigated”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Files_(Australia)
The documents were leaked to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) by David McBride,[3] upon and seven stories were ultimately published as a result. The documents covered a wide range of topics, however most notably it detailed multiple cases of possible unlawful killings of unarmed men and children.
First Australian to go to jail over Afghanistan & Iraq is a whistle-blower. Truly a kangaroo legal system.
I find it hard to blame the judge here, it is their duty to discharge the law as written.
However Australia's laws are inherently anti-whistle-blower and IMO therefore anti-democratic. How are the people expected to hold their leaders accountable if their leaders are legally allowed to deceive them and punish any who would expose that deceit?
Claiming that "national security" should somehow trump what are meant to be the most core tenets of our society is just simply more proof that the ruling class considers themselves above criticism, even if it costs the truth to snuff it out.
Why is it we can have a government that is so consistently anti-Australian? The politics of it don't seem to matter because swapping parties in and out hasn't had any impact. Both sides of the ruling class still believe they are above us while still preaching tall-poppy syndrome for the rest of us.
However Australia's laws are inherently anti-whistle-blower and IMO therefore anti-democratic. How are the people expected to hold their leaders accountable if their leaders are legally allowed to deceive them and punish any who would expose that deceit?
The law doesn't exist to enable democracy in any capacity. Democracy is a system by which the ruling class permits a certain amount of ineffectual governance on their populace while designing every system to inherently favor the wealthy, property/business owners, and capital. Can you make decisions in a democracy? Sure, but nothing actually important.
You want to use democracy to decide on a different style of roadway or another day for trash pickup? Yeah sure, go for it.
You want to use democracy to hold leaders accountable? Good luck.
The chief functions of the law itself are to maintain regulated and as-free-as-possible trade, to prevent theft (inter-business, not theft from the workers, they love that shit), and to maintain the social hierarchy overall. "Keep the poors in line" and all that. This is actually really easy to see in real-time too: in the parlance of our political class and talking heads, "spreading freedom" really just means "opening new markets." People are considered "more free" the more useless shit they can buy, irrespective of being able to do anything a working class person would call freedom. Like, you know, fix your own tractor.
This is a deliberate mischaracterization of democracy. If the system meets these criteria then it by definition isn't democracy. Allowing people to claim that it is democracy just let's them hide behind the idea without having to meet any of the obligations that idea puts on them.
I mean, I fully agree with you. But this is the demonstrable reality of modern democracy. They all meet these criteria, and yes, they all hide behind the term democracy while not actually meeting any of it's obligations. If pressed they would say, "What are you going to do about it?" because they designed a system in which you are powerless, and so they know you can do nothing about it.
Our planet is on fire and our world leaders twiddle their thumbs and prepare bunkers to coast out the collapse. Tell me how that's conceivably a result of an empowered populace after decades of said populace campaigning for climate change legislation.
Absolutely agree with you.
they know you can do nothing about it
And if you try, you become an enemy of the state. A terrorist.
Oh don’t worry, you can also protest. Just make sure to get a permit first and don’t obstruct traffic too much and when the police show up, which they will, disperse peacefully immediately. Just make sure your protest is completely ignorable.
And be sure to protest about things that don't impact the bottom line of capitalists in any way whatsoever. Protest all you want about genders but don't even think about unionizing.
You overestimate the concern of the “populace” with the planet being “on fire”.
Here are the numbers:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/09/what-the-...
9 in 10 democrats want this addressed, yet when the democrats have control, very little happens.
Depending on the question, a majority of republicans do too.
Over 66% of the US population wants more action, and 75% say we should be more involved in international initiatives to combat climate change.
Then pick any issue you wish from the absolute truckload of issues where the people have clearly spoken and yet their government does nothing despite supposedly representing them.
It's interesting to look at the shelf-life of actual, logistical national security issues and compare that to the "peeling an onion" rhetoric around information release. The useful time span seems to be weeks to a handful of years.
What's so special about australian treatment of whistle blowers compared to the US?
Chelsea Manning went to jail for something similar.
I bet other countries act exactly the same way
Surprised to see this on HN.
Contentious and depressing outcome, however rarely with classified documents does a judge rule the ends justified the means.
Australia has outrageous Human Rights legal standards for a western country so this is to be expected.
"western country" is a very fuzzy concept. The definition needs a list of proper list of requirements otherwise you have countries with very varying levels of individual rights
A third of the country is literally called "Western Australia."
Jokes aside, a Western country is typically defined as a nation with cultural, political, and economic ties to Europe. Our UK roots, democratic governance, military ties (e.g., AUKUS), and post-war European migration certainly place us in this category...
I think GP's point wasn't whether or not Australia should count (I agree that it should), but that the level between "the bad" (the US, Hungary, parts of former Yugoslavia, parts of Eastern Europe etc.) and "the good" (Finland, Estonia, Norway, etc.) is pretty big.
I'd just stop calling the "good" ones western, they are something different.
I thought it referred to Western Europe and the Anglosphere exclusively. Central/Eastern Europe wasn't included, especially countries that were part of the soviet bloc. One can talk about them becoming westernized now, but that just emphasizes how they aren't a part of the group, just becoming like it. Also, the US is epitome of western countries. All of it. The good, the bad and the ugly.
I actually think "West" and "East" should go out of vocabulary. Originally Western meant civilised and modern, while Eastern meant crude and backward.
Meanwhile, this guy who was found by the Federal Court of Australia to have committed war crimes including the murder of civilians is walking free.
We can't send to jail, the same people the government previously praised as being national heroes. Discrediting him afterwards would also mean discrediting the government who didn't do their due diligence. So they'll cover for him in order to protect themselves. It's a story as old as humanity.
We (thus far) have not been able to send him to gaol because the civil standard of proof is on the balance of probabilities but the criminal standard is beyond a reasonable doubt. Ben Roberts-Smith has been shown to have committed war crimes on the balance of probabilities, but not beyond a reasonable doubt.
I think that the government would probably prefer he be locked up, since the current situation is the worst of both worlds: he is legally a war criminal, but remains embarrassingly free and unpunished by the criminal justice system.
Presumably the endless run of civil litigations has delayed the criminal cases to date
Office of the Special Investigator (https://www.osi.gov.au) is the government agency that's running the criminal investigation.
That’s why we change the government every x years, so they can blame it all on their predecessors.
Wow, absolutely atrocious. There really is no justice for the victims of war, is there?
This guy must be a sociopath.
"Sharing classified documents...". That's a very complicated issue. If those documents put (innocent) people and national safety in risk he is in a very hard to defend position.
Hmmmm which innocent people and whose national safety?
The way I recall leaks from the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, the leaks typically depicted the U.S. killing or torturing innocent people. Sure, it's plausible they might have made some soldiers less safe.
But innocence is not so cut and dry. You can't only look from one perspective and see the whole picture.
However, if these documents' contents put the nation in shame then it's going to stick regardless of the verdict.
Here's the actual judgment, including the particulars of the offence.
https://www.courts.act.gov.au/supreme/judgments/r-v-mcbride-...
Why do you speculate? The case has been all over the news for months
I mean, he presumably wasn’t sharing them with the enemy. National security is not at risk from the action of sharing documents an sich.
What a weird time, when it's safer to be a war crime whistle blower than an airliner whistleblower.
Why is this being so heavily down voted? Are people actually that bad at understanding sarcasm?
I think the down votes are more because it’s a low-effort take, and this site (while it continues to slide in that direction, still) isn’t Reddit.
Probably because the first Boeing whistleblower died by suicide and the second Boeing whistleblower died due to a stroke secondary to a respiratory infection. The idea that either of these were murders is a stupid conspiracy theory with no supporting evidence, and it deserves to be heavily downvoted.
Weird but pretty much the entirety of human history
Are you sure about that? There were no airliners for most of human history, so how could any statement about airliner whistleblowers stand for "entirety of human history"?
This was somewhat underreported internationally: McBride was whistleblowing because he was dissatisfied with military leadership and the *increased* scrutiny of soldiers.
Ironically, this led to further scrutiny and the identification of alleged war crimes.
This is the story that has been pushed more recently, but the boy boy YouTube channel recently covered and interviewed the man [] in which he claims they misconstrued his intention in order to intentionally discredit him, probably under direction from the government he was attempting to criticize.
Thanks for sharing. I was unaware of this. I’ll have to check it out.
Based on what you’ve said it seems his messaging has evolved since this 2019 article:
https://amp.smh.com.au/politics/federal/what-i-ve-done-makes...
If you actually listen to an interview with him and not reporting about him, you'll see him explain that he identified some scape goats for prosecution the Australian military we're trying to throw under the bus for minor issues or straight up things they didn't do, while letting the real psychos like special forces off the hook entirely.
A fuller detailing of the case is available from this news article:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-14/military-whistleblowe...
While this article is from the nationally funded news broadcaster it is the same news organisation that McBride provided the documents to - which were then used to produce 7 stories, leading to it being raided and the follow-on events. Detailed information of that is available here:
Also, a video covering the topic and an interview with the guy and his side of the story:
"Two experts were set to support McBride’s case, but commonwealth lawyers sought to have their testimony quashed under public interest immunity laws. The laws suppress information that would prejudice the public interest if they were made public. "
I have a hard time understanding why they couldn't do a closed court hearing, is that not an option in Australia?
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/oct/27/david-mcbride-af...
Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations.
George Orwell.
Also, think of Assange, still in high security jail in UK without being condemned to anything in this country : the very definition of arbitrary detention and torture.
Similarly there are still a number of prisoners in Guantanamo illegal prison, some having been there for decades. The very definition of arbitrary detention and torture.
The "West" (the US and their lackeys) has lost any semblance of moral high ground, but keep pointing fingers. That's shameful and despicable.
What an absolute legend of a man
Sadly that’s from the different times, when morality was worth something. Saying such things would be considered childishly naive in modern world. And we know that laws themselves are outdated, especially as demonstrated genre, about whistleblowers.
I would die for my principles, so it stands to reason that I would go to prison for them.
I have this quote painted on one of my favorite possessions. I live by the quote, I'd die by it. I don't consider that childishly naive.
Naive would be thinking that taking a more Malcom X approach won't lead to death and prison as well.
Most people won't even be mildly inconvenienced for their principles.
Such as using less optimal solutions that align more with their beliefs or taking a lower paying job that won't compromise their morals.
And those people will not be walking alongside me, standing up for the freedom of their fellow countrymen. That's fine. I'd rather focus on collectivizing with those who are principled.
Your mental model of the past is idealistic, morality in the past was lynchings, cop raids against gay people, racism against everyone, segregation, sexism, and imperial power.
There has never been a time when everyone behaved morally, and it's unhelpful to view the past in this way.
MLK himself was murdered.
You should see the hit pieces happening in the Australian press right now. They're claiming he's not a whistle blower, but apparently an idealogue. They can do this because, despite the fact that the war-crimes he exposed were real, the actual details of said crimes are still hidden behind a "national security" veil.
What do you expect of a country that has abandoned Julian Assange. Australia is a despicable place when it comes to Human Rights, personal freedom, and privacy
Fwiw:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/15/enough-is-enough-au...
Julian Assange deserves credit for exposing the hypocrisy of the US propaganda about freedom and human rights. Australians should be proud of him as he actually embodies much of the advertised Aussie battler spirit
What could possibly go wrong with demanding "encryption backdoors" in everything...
I'd argue that most high-stakes whistle blowers are idealogues. That's why they're willing to take such a great personal risk.
The international community is a common term for the US and their lackeys (EU, Japan and a couple other countries), and they absolutely support Australia.
The situation is similar in many matters : see how almost all of the international community governments support staunchly the current massacre in Gaza, though the people of all countries are protesting daily. In the UK, both Sunak and Starmer support Netanyahu's crimes unequivocally, while hundreds of thousands protest in the streets.
I've lost any hope about our "democracies". We need a complete upheaval.
You know that words can mean different things, depending on context. You also know it's unproductive to disregard clear contextualization in favor of starting a strawman argument.
We both absolutely agree however that the only path forward involves a complete rewrite from scratch.
The American experiment has concluded, it's time to collect the data, form conclusions, create and test a new hypothesis.