If millions of people know something, can it really be considered a secret anymore? That’s one of the questions at the heart of an ongoing debate in Washington about how much, and which, documents to classify in the age of Wikileaks, iPhones, and Edward Snowden.
That challenge, underscored by Mr. Snowden’s leaks of details exposing the National Security Agency’s top-secret surveillance programs, has given transparency experts new hope that they can help intelligence agencies take advantage of new thinking around classification to ensure that what needs to be secret stays secret.
“The calculation has changed recently, because a single individual, either out of negligence or malice or some other motive, can disclose whole libraries of records,” says Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. “That’s something the government has not yet figured out how to deter or prevent.”
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 26 2017, @10:23PM
The problem isn't that the government is violating citizens' privacy on a massive scale and creating a situation where democracy is in danger; the problem is with those evil whistleblowers who blow the whistle when the government does something wrong or when the information is valuable to the public. We should all feel sorry for the poor little governments and help them be even more secretive as they violate our rights en masse.