re: #33 Targetpractice

Josh Marshall posted a message from a reader that I’ve seen echoed elsewhere, which is the idea that Greenwald and Snowden have no business designating themselves as the people who should be responsible for releasing this information. They are not accountable to the American people, they are not bound by any responsibility to us, and they do not have the knowledge necessary to make an informed decision as to just how much damage they’re doing by releasing this information.

Then… who does?

Say that there really WAS some illicit spying going on, but in the midst of its illicit uses/purposes it also had a few legitimate ones. Who’s got the right and/or responsibility to be the whistleblower on that? It’s incredibly easy to just say ‘stuff needs to be secret because turrists and reasons’ and thus excuse the government from any responsibility to its citizens whatsoever.

That’s sort of the whole point of objection to the PATRIOT act. The entire premise of it — that anything can be excused as long as we do it ‘to fight the turrists’ — is repugnant and possibly evil. Basically, the government can do pretty much whatever the hell it wants as long as it says ‘we have to do this to fight turrism’, and everything can be kept a secret from the people because ‘you don’t want the turrists to win, do you?’

This is the problem with a culture of secrecy. Once you start justifying giving the government covert power over its citizens in the name of ‘national security secrets’, where does it end? Who can expose abuses without being branded a traitor/spy for ‘revealing national security secrets’?

This is a serious issue, even if you believe that what Snowden and Greenwald have done is wrong (it likely is).