Well, that's the issue, isn't it? The people in the government justify secrecy by one standard and then use it for whatever they can get away with, and you can get away with a lot if no one is ever allowed to see what you've done. So they claim strenuously that exposing secrets will endanger people, yet the exposed cables show them suppressing investigation of a mistaken extraordinary rendition which put an innocent person in the hands of torturers.
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/01/wikileaks-and-the-el.html <http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/01/wikileaks-and-the-el.html>Because "they" decided that it was better that the German car salesman just take a few cattle prods in the nads for the freedom team rather than admit that "they" might have made criminal mistakes by kidnapping a citizen of an ally and whisking him off to Afganistan for information extraction. I watched Brazil again a month or two ago: it all starts with a swatted fly mutating someone's name into someone else's name, and it ends with tidying up all the loose ends that might interfere with the operation of an essential government service. We've been through multiple reviews of the abuses of secrecy in this country, and the net result is that the amount of stuff which is kept from public eyes just keeps on growing. Got a check or balance on that trend? -- rec -- On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 11:04 AM, James Steiner <gregortr...@gmail.com>wrote: > On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 12:54 PM, Scholand, Andrew J <ajsc...@sandia.gov>wrote: > >> In February 2009 the State Department asked all US missions abroad to list >> all installations whose loss could critically affect US national security. >> >> The list includes pipelines, communication and transport hubs. >> >> > Well, considering the tendency to slap "national security" and "classified" > labels on everything, I'd expect the list also includes a fair number of > vending machine suppliers and escort services. > > Cynically, > > ~~James > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org >
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
