THE case of Private Bradley Manning, convicted this week by a military court of leaking secrets to the WikiLeaks website and now

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问题 THE case of Private Bradley Manning, convicted this week by a military court of leaking secrets to the WikiLeaks website and now facing up to 136 years in jail, looks as if it might be the high-water mark of America’s zealous security culture. It certainly ought to be. After the attacks of September 11th 2001, George Bush tipped the balance too far from liberty towards security, and it has stayed there under Barack Obama.
As Mr Manning awaits his sentence, Edward Snowden, a contractor for the American intelligence services, was reported on August 1st to have gone to Russia, where he has been offered a year’s temporary asylum. He had set out to shed light on the warrantless warehousing by the National Security Agency(NSA)of private data belonging to millions of American citizens, possibly in breach of the Patriot Act and the Fourth Amendment. His revelations continued this week. Meanwhile the Obama administration has seized journalists’ telephone records and pursued leakers with a legal sledgehammer.
Neither Mr. Snowden nor Mr. Manning is a perfect ambassador for a more liberal approach. Both broke the law by revealing secrets they were under oath to keep. America’s spying agencies cannot function if their employees squawk—and, when "mass leaking" has become politically fashionable and technically feasible, deterrents are needed. Mr. Manning’s public-interest defence is especially thin: he leaked over 700,000 files with little judgment about what harm or good this would do. Mr. Snowden’s initial disclosure was selective, but his flight to Hong Kong and Russia was damaging, and he has ended up disclosing secrets about how America spies on China. America is right to want to put him on trial, like Mr. Manning.
But both men also show how America still leans too far towards security over liberty. Every intelligence service will impinge on individual liberties—and America’s has succeeded in its main job: to prevent attacks. But every democracy also needs to keep those impingements in check and to hold its spies to account. Of all the world’s democracies, the one that should best understand this tension is the United States. Its constitution rests on the notion that the people in charge are fallible. As Mr. Manning waits to hear the judge’s sentence, it is time to remember that.

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答案 在曼宁等待宣判的时候,有报道称美国情报机构的一个承包商雇员爱德华?斯诺登已于8月1日去了俄罗斯,获得了一年的临时避难许可。据他披露,美国国家安全局未经允许而存储了上千万美国公民的个人数据,这一行为涉嫌违背了《爱国者法案》和《第四修正案》。他本周还将披露更多事实。同时,奥巴马政府已经获取了几名记者的电话记录并运用法律武器对泄密者展开了追击。 斯诺登和曼宁都不是走更加自由道路的典范。二人都违反了法律,泄露了曾经发誓要保守的秘密。如果雇员们可以你一言我一语的话,美国的情报机关就无法发挥功效了,若“大规模泄密”在政治上流行,在技术上可行,那么就需要一些威慑力了。曼宁对公共利益的保护意识是最微弱的:他泄露了超过70万份资料,而丝毫没有权衡孰轻孰重。斯诺登最初倒是有选择性地披露信息,但他去了香港和俄罗斯就具有破坏性了,而且他最后还泄露了美国监视中国的秘密。美国想要控告他是情有可原的,就像曼宁一样。 但两起事件都表明美国太注重安全和轻视自由。每个情报机关都会侵犯到个人的自由,而且美国成功履行了自己的职责:防止了袭击。但每个民主国家都要对这种侵犯行径有所控制,并承担相应的责任。在所有民主制国家中,美国最应该明白这一点。美国宪法建立的基础就是掌权的人很容易会犯错。在曼宁等待法庭宣判的时候,美国当局也需要铭记这一点。

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