It's my belief that individual privacy is entirely NOT the same as government classification (as secret, top secret, etc) of information.
Governments do NOT have a "right of privacy". Our government is supposed to be "by, of, and for" the people. It's use of secrecy is appropriate (and should be protected) when that secrecy serves to protect those people, not when it serves to protect the individuals who do the classifying (or those they serve) from embarrassment or legal prosecution. Such uses are (and I'm pretty sure this is not just my opinion), illegal. We all kind of "knew" that classification has been used this way. We all hear or see or read anecdotes. Well, the Irag war papers proved it. As have all the subsequent leaks. I think that until the government and all its agents demonstrate that they can use the tool of keeping secrets correctly, that they should not be allowed to keep secrets. Wikileaks has done the American People a great service. Now I hope that they (we) are smart enough, and outraged enough, to move to fix what's broken. (IMHO, that's congress / campaign finance / influence peddling). ~~James www.turtlezero.com On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 4:41 PM, Jochen Fromm <j...@cas-group.net> wrote: > In the age of social media and social networks > privacy has become an issue of intense debate. > Privacy means an individual has the right to be secure from unauthorized > disclosure of information about oneself. > > Now if a state has "state secrets", is this fundamentally different from > privacy issues for > the individual (only for the state)? Should > a state in a democracy have any real secrets > at all? And if the state has the right to prevent invasion of privacy, > shouldn't the individual have the same right, too? > > It is clearly evil what Wikileaks has done recently, > they went to far this time. But too much censorship > and secrecy is not a good idea, either (as the "top secret america" > investigation from the Washington Post showed). What do you think? > > -J. >
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