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> The unauthorized disclosure of a top secret U.S. court document threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respon

> The unauthorized disclosure of a top secret U.S. court document threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation. > The article omits key information regarding how a classified intelligence collection program is used to prevent terrorist attacks and the numerous safeguards that protect privacy and civil liberties. The dissonance between those two sentences, which appear consecutively in the statement, could not be mores striking. "Transparency damages your security! Yet your lack of information makes us seem unreasonable!" So convince us! Don't hide behind a wall of unconvincing secrecy and then tell us it's good for us. We're the People; we're happy to decide how much you can spy on us for the sake of our security. You know what I think? I think you kept this all a secret because your case for doing it utterly sucks, and you knew we'd object. And I think you've earned precisely that level of trust. Edit: minor expansion

mtgx 13y ago
I love their circular logic: "The disclosure of our illegal spying threatens our illegal spying in the future". Hey at least they don't use the "we don't tell you we're spying on you so we don't infringe on your privacy" line, anymore. These comments go to the top, along with FBI's last year's quote "Warrants make our job hard" i.e. check and balances make their job harder, which is kind of the point, I think.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  Put yourself in the spooks' position. You may know for a fact that parts of the story are simply inaccurate, but you're sworn not to reveal unclassified material without authorization, and you can't know for sure how good the criteria for classification are due to compartmentalization. Only a few people, like the President and the DNI, are in a position to make those determinations, and they're in a somewhat similar double-bind insofar as selective declassification may later turn out to be a mistake. If you talk to a lot of conservatives, you soon find that when the administration increases transparency or answers a FOIA request with meaningful information, there are plenty of hawks ready to criticize the administration for compromising security, putting American lives at risk, and so on.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    Oh those poor spooks. What are they to do! Life must be rough for them; we should be more considerate.
    - anigbrowl 13y ago
      I'm not asking you to feel sorry for them; I'm just asking what you would do if you had their job. Saying you wouldn't take that job is beside the point; they literally don't have the option of explaining themselves fully. The number of people who are empowered to declassify information is very small in comparison to the number of people who are empowered or mandated to classify it.
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        If I were a spook, I would throw myself under a bus. Barring that, I would just keep my mouth shut if I were in an unprivileged position like that. If I don't have permission to declassify it, what business is it of mine to say that the public does not have the full picture? I can't imagine even saying that much isn't frowned upon. No, I imagine any official statement to the effect of "you don't know everything" is only authorized very carefully. There is no real "partial explanation" option here. There are only full explanations, and unverifiable PR spin. Nothing in between. Unverifiable PR spin is the only option? Tough shit, I am not satisfied.
        anigbrowl 13y ago
        If I were a spook, I would throw myself under a bus. Are you saying that you don't believe that governments (at any level) should engage in any kind of intelligence-gathering or espionage, ever? Or that there is ever any role for secrecy? If so, I regard that as a valid position, but also a naive one.
        jlgreco 13y ago
        Being a spook is incompatible with who I am. If I were forced to be a spook, "drafted into spook-dom", I would do anything necessary to end the coercion. If necessary, I would throw myself under a bus. I believe this to be a principled response to coercion. Actually on second thought, that is short-sighted. I would leak everything that I could, then I would throw myself under a bus. If you are asking me what I think spooks, who are not me, should do in this situation, then I think I have answered that. They should either expect the criticism they will receive for their worthless PR spin responses, or they should respond in a way that would not cause such a reaction. I don't care if they think the later is not an option, or even if it actually is not an option. That is their problem, not mine. Shitty position for a spook to be in? They don't have any other options? So fucking what. They made their bed. Criticism of what they said should not be tempered just because you think it is the only think they could say.
protomyth 13y ago
If "numerous safeguards that protect privacy and civil liberties" does not include a judge and an actual warrant with the person's name on it, then there are no safeguards. This type of abuse has happened before (see FDR for a bit of history), but not on the scale technology has enable.

mtgx 13y ago

I love their circular logic: "The disclosure of our illegal spying threatens our illegal spying in the future". Hey at least they don't use the "we don't tell you we're spying on you so we don't infringe on your privacy" line, anymore. These comments go to the top, along with FBI's last year's quote "Warrants make our job hard" i.e. check and balances make their job harder, which is kind of the point, I think.

anigbrowl 13y ago
Put yourself in the spooks' position. You may know for a fact that parts of the story are simply inaccurate, but you're sworn not to reveal unclassified material without authorization, and you can't know for sure how good the criteria for classification are due to compartmentalization. Only a few people, like the President and the DNI, are in a position to make those determinations, and they're in a somewhat similar double-bind insofar as selective declassification may later turn out to be a mistake. If you talk to a lot of conservatives, you soon find that when the administration increases transparency or answers a FOIA request with meaningful information, there are plenty of hawks ready to criticize the administration for compromising security, putting American lives at risk, and so on.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  Oh those poor spooks. What are they to do! Life must be rough for them; we should be more considerate.
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    I'm not asking you to feel sorry for them; I'm just asking what you would do if you had their job. Saying you wouldn't take that job is beside the point; they literally don't have the option of explaining themselves fully. The number of people who are empowered to declassify information is very small in comparison to the number of people who are empowered or mandated to classify it.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      If I were a spook, I would throw myself under a bus. Barring that, I would just keep my mouth shut if I were in an unprivileged position like that. If I don't have permission to declassify it, what business is it of mine to say that the public does not have the full picture? I can't imagine even saying that much isn't frowned upon. No, I imagine any official statement to the effect of "you don't know everything" is only authorized very carefully. There is no real "partial explanation" option here. There are only full explanations, and unverifiable PR spin. Nothing in between. Unverifiable PR spin is the only option? Tough shit, I am not satisfied.
      - anigbrowl 13y ago
        If I were a spook, I would throw myself under a bus. Are you saying that you don't believe that governments (at any level) should engage in any kind of intelligence-gathering or espionage, ever? Or that there is ever any role for secrecy? If so, I regard that as a valid position, but also a naive one.
        jlgreco 13y ago
        Being a spook is incompatible with who I am. If I were forced to be a spook, "drafted into spook-dom", I would do anything necessary to end the coercion. If necessary, I would throw myself under a bus. I believe this to be a principled response to coercion. Actually on second thought, that is short-sighted. I would leak everything that I could, then I would throw myself under a bus. If you are asking me what I think spooks, who are not me, should do in this situation, then I think I have answered that. They should either expect the criticism they will receive for their worthless PR spin responses, or they should respond in a way that would not cause such a reaction. I don't care if they think the later is not an option, or even if it actually is not an option. That is their problem, not mine. Shitty position for a spook to be in? They don't have any other options? So fucking what. They made their bed. Criticism of what they said should not be tempered just because you think it is the only think they could say.

protomyth 13y ago

If "numerous safeguards that protect privacy and civil liberties" does not include a judge and an actual warrant with the person's name on it, then there are no safeguards. This type of abuse has happened before (see FDR for a bit of history), but not on the scale technology has enable.