From the Youtube video of Logan Price vs. Obama

On the morning of April 21st, 2011, eleven months after Manning had been taken into custody, Logan Price had the most expensive breakfast of his life.

Price is a professional leftist activist. “My background had been in global justice and environmental justice work,” the 29 year-old said. He’d been traveling around the country, moving from contract to contract until the end of 2010 to the beginning of 2011, when the state department cables came out. The blockade of WikiLeaks, the Anonymous DDoS response, and the start of the Arab Spring pulled him out of his normal routine. “I just said, what am I working on right now? This is obviously what’s going to be happening this decade. It felt like a really amazing moment.”

He found his way to working for the Bradley Manning Support Network, and eventually, a $5,000 a plate Obama campaign fundraiser breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco. Some well-heeled supporters of Manning decided they wanted to do something to put the issue of his detention in front of Obama. They had 15-20 seats bought, and they needed activists to fill them. Price, with his rough good looks and easy professional manner was ideal for the job; he is never more than a button-down away from looking every inch the establishment. The activists had a song to sing, and they jumped up and sang it, interrupting Obama’s speech that morning. The President took it in stride, waiting for the activist to finish singing before he continued his speech.

Price took pictures and tweeted the whole thing, but when it was all over he was struck by the singularity of the situation. “This is… a once in a lifetime thing, where you’re in a room with the president.” But the action had seemed anti-climatic. Price wasn’t sure what to do. He had no plan. He considered jumping up and shouting something, but while he was still thinking about it, Obama finished his speech, and that was it. The President got up to go. Price got to his feet and ran to the front of the room. He managed to shake Obama’s hand, and then hold on. “It’s classic bird-dogging,” he told me later. “Grab their hand… and lead with a strong question.”

Price’s question was this: “Mr. President, why didn’t you talk about Bradley Manning?”

Obama: Look, there are better ways and more appropriate ways to bring this up than interrupting and causing a scene…

Price: I understand. That’s why I am asking you now. I wasn’t singing or chanting and I want to know. I think he is the most important whistle-blower of my generation. Why is he being prosecuted?

Obama: Well, what he did was irresponsible and risked the lives of service-members abroad. He did a lot of damage. So people can have philosophical views on…

Price: But I haven’t seen any evidence of that, and how can you say that the leaks did more harm than good? What about their effect on the democratic revolutions in the Arab world? And isn’t this going to help the war on terror?

Obama: No, no, no, but look, I can’t conduct diplomacy on an open source [basis]. That’s not how the world works. And if you’re in the military… I have to abide by certain rules of classified information. If I were to release material I weren’t allowed to, I’d be breaking the law. We’re a nation of laws. We don’t let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate.

The Secret Service was beginning to tug on Price’s arm, but Obama waved them off. “No he’s being fine,” he told his detail, “He is being courteous and asking questions.”

Price: But didn’t he have a responsibility to expose…

Obama: He broke the law!

Price: Well, you can make the law harder to break, but what he did was tell us the truth.

Obama: What he did was he dumped…

Price: But Nixon tried to prosecute Daniel Ellsberg for the same thing and he is a [hero].

Obama: No it isn’t the same thing.What Ellsberg released wasn’t classified in the same way.

This is true.The 7,000 pages Ellsberg dumped was much more stringently classified, a potentially much worse violation of the law.

Now 81, Ellsberg lives in the Berkeley Hills in a serene little house off the main road. The bright and airy space is filled to the ceiling with books and scattered with papers, presided over by knickknacks and statues. A reclined Buddha lies above the dining and work area, and a white porcelain Guanyin, the Chinese Bodhisattva of compassion, stands in the corner, frozen in the act of pouring holy water.

Once a cold warrior of the nuclear age, Ellsberg had been moved by conscience more than forty years ago to violate his clearance and leak evidence to the press that several administrations had lied to the public about the nature and theory of the war in Vietnam. He’d run from the police and his president, with paper copies of the report that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, continually giving them to news outlets until the story couldn’t be stopped anymore.

After he turned himself in, Ellsberg faced over 100 years in jail. But his case was dismissed due to FBI misconduct. He walked free, and straight into a kind of mythic status, as America’s most prolific and most flamboyant whistleblower. Four decades later he is still fast and sharp, clear eyed, and incisive. He is still moved by the force of ideas, and he is still part of the world that fights the world of secrets he fled in the 1970s.

“I know a lot of whistleblowers now,” he said. “I make a point of trying to meet them and support them. It’s very hard to say, they can’t answer the question, ‘Why did you do it and none of the others did?’”

Looking at the hounding Ellsberg faced, the pretrial solitary confinement Manning endured, the global chase of Snowden with even the forced landing of the Bolivian president’s plane, it’s easy to see why people don’t do it. To betray an institution, even for a greater cause, is to risk everything you know as your life. It is the end of one life, but only the beginning of another if you happen to be very lucky indeed, as Ellsberg was.

It still cost him dearly. He lost friends. He lost the prestige of his career. He had chosen a side in a culture war about who deserved to be consulted about the Vietnam War. But more than that, he had defied authority, and in doing so, defiled his way of life. Ellsberg doesn’t regret that choice, but in his pauses and the strain of his voice, the echoes of the community he lost are still there four decades on.

Ellsberg related the story of a panel on which he debated his own actions and those like him, with someone who seemed to him a surprisingly vigorous opponent. “I asked him after we’d had a debate, whether we really disagreed as much as had appeared in the debate,” Ellsberg continued,

“And he said ‘Oh, I think you’re evil.’ That was a little startling. And I said really? Why do you think that? He said ‘You undermine authority and that’s evil.’”

Can we really do without authority? Can we make a better world by letting everyone in on the secrets, by letting everyone act according to their conscience? Our system, for better or worse, isn’t about that. Democracy as we know it, the democracy invented in the 18th century, was never about everyone being equal. It is about getting rid of bad leaders peacefully, and hopefully arriving at better ones, more closely aligned with the people, committed to serving them better.

I asked Ellsberg, “Weren’t you undermining a system?” Speaking of himself and Manning, Ellsberg answered: “[We were] undermining the sense that the American state is a force for good on the whole in the world… I have no doubt that the majority of Americans think that we intend to and prefer to support democracy in the world.” Instead, he explained, we are a self-interested empire with no particular regard for global democracy. “What Bradley Manning did, and what I did, with these two large leaks… what they revealed was the long term or wide spread operations of an empire.”

And Snowden in the time since has revealed the dirty details of its mass surveillance, its tools of control.

The empire hasn’t liked that enforced openness one bit, as Obama made clear to Price at breakfast. But in September of that year, the empire had a new problem. The spirit of the Arab Spring and the Spanish summer protests moved into a park in Lower Manhattan, and set up camp, just as they had done elsewhere. They were lit up not only by anger but by a network. Occupy Wall Street was born, and spread across the U.S. and the Western world faster than an epidemic can travel, faster than the sound of their own voices. The spread of Occupy was constrained only by the speed of light and thought. Once again, WikiLeaks and even more the still quiet, still-in-custody Manning became one of the movement’s many rallying points.

Occupy Oakland’s Nov 2 2011 Port Closure

This was because at its core, Occupy Wall Street was a disagreement with power about what America is. Not a new disagreement, but one whose tension and time had come — a disagreement that became a battle. To the government, Manning had defiled the chain of command, the principle that makes things work. To many, perhaps most, of the people who filled the streets in the fall and winter of 2011, he stood for something they would not let go of. He stood for their right to be consulted on what the U.S. did in the world, to be part of the process that makes things work. Snowden was there again, long after Occupy’s moment in the sun had passed, as much of the Internet closed ranks around him, even more than it had Manning.