>But the thing is, those leaks weren't one-man attempts to re-architect the US This is a good point. The same applies to many other things in history; communi

>But the thing is, those leaks weren't one-man attempts to re-architect the US This is a good point. The same applies to many other things in history; communism wasn't some kid who thought up a new ideology in his basement and pushed it on everyone else; it took the endorsement of the intellectual elite and a broad movement to make it happen. Still it went badly for billions of people. Your implication is that this stuff is happening whether we like it or not, and that that somehow invalidates criticism of the naivety of it all. But then you side with it. If it is an inevitable march of history, surely it is as reasonable to criticize it as it is to endorse it, or as futile to endorse as it is to criticize? The thing is that these broad movements are made up of people like Snowden and Swartz and so on who make things happen because they believe in it, and we do have some control over that. For example, if the international intellectual community had been less naively infatuated with democracy and independence movements, perhaps they would not have pushed so hard on Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo, Zimbabwe and the DRC would be first-world countries instead of hellholes. If you make the inevitable march of progress cool, it will happen faster, whether it's a good thing or not. If we make reasoned caution and sanity cool, we might get a better outcome for the future of humanity.