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I'm going to place the contrarian argument that for there to be a nation of the people there needs to be total transparency in the governments actions. Anything less is tyranny.

You cannot possibly make an informed vote when the government is a black box you cannot see into. The entire inner workings should be public knowledge. This mountain of secrecy left over from the cold war does not make for a free society and has no place in a just world.

My argument boils down to the government keeping secrets first place is inherently amoral.

>My argument boils down to the government keeping secrets first place is inherently amoral.

That is an idealistic viewpoint that simply isn't possible in the real world. Yes, I believe the government should be more transparent about these things, but they can't be transparent about everything. How do you protect a country like the United States without any intelligence or military secrets?

> How do you protect a country like the United States without any intelligence or military secrets?

It isn't about having no secrets, it's about minimizing secrets. Which improves security, because secrets are a liability. They consume resources to keep and cause harm when revealed. The more of them you need the less secure you are. Government secrets are attack surface, not an unmitigated good.

That [ending state secrecy entirely] is an idealistic viewpoint that simply isn't possible in the real world.

If anything, the dynamics of the our "real world" show that we heading towards a future of either complete openness or unlimited state secrecy (with unlimited state secrecy sadly looking the likely winner).

Beyond the particular illegal (or simply immoral) activity revealed by Snowden's revelations, we see the ability of secret powers to extend themselves secretly and thus grow without being bounded by any democratic norms or public debate. And we see the scale of the state and the scale of technology as only accelerating this.

It seems that NSA hacks every single hackable subsystem of every electronic device out there, keeping the cleverest things things for national security (the ability to track cellphone location even with batteries removed was considered a crucial tool for drone-killing Taliban/Al Qaeda leaders, etc).

The existence of an intelligence agency's "crown jewels" implies that "parallel construction" must be used with the information that these "crown jewels" gather, in the fashion Alan Turing's crowd already only selectively using their interceptions against the NAZIs.

But here we see that what in the 1940s a small region of secrecy and control can be in 2016 a potentially limitless area where a military paradigm is mobilized against the individual and where institutions like the courts serve the military purpose of decoys and misdirections (with even the secret courts winding up manipulated through even-more-secret programs and methods, etc). A military facing an opposing state wants to find weapons that give its opponent no recourse - secretly the opponents plans being one a great instance of this. But the court system and the democratic requires real debate, a real fight of opposing positions and thus the reality of democracy and rule of law is progressively degraded.

The existence of the means of secrecy justifies their expansion (discussion of the "most important" secrets requires more secret action to stop said discuss, etc) and this expansion naturally must be secret. Clearly, this complex will either rise to omnipresence or come to an end as things go forward. Sadly, it's hard to see how it will come to an end.

You protect it by not picking fights and minding your own business.

Once again, this is a naive and idealistic viewpoint that doesn't have a place in real world governing. There is a reason why even countries like Switzerland have intelligence and military arms. Simply "minding your own business" only goes so far and isn't a fool-proof protection scheme.

Where did I mention closing military or intelligence? The question at hand is whether the govt should be more transparent.

>Where did I mention closing military or intelligence?

Where did I mention closing them? I am just making the connection those are two aspects of governing that require some level of secrecy. If countries "minding their own business" need secrecy there, then it isn't a path to the US abandoning secrecy.

>The question at hand is whether the govt should be more transparent.

If that is your argument, I agree with it. But that wasn't the original argument. The original argument was complete transparency and "the government keeping secrets first place is inherently amoral."

> why even countries like Switzerland have intelligence and military arms

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowback_%28intelligence%29

I'm not interested in arguing absolutes, as perhaps the original ancestor was.

Small imagination :)

Ahhhh, don't you love the smell of rancid corrupt realpolitik in the morning..,..,

Do you think the government should release plans and schematics for nuclear and biological weapons?

Or maybe the IRS should release every tax return it has ever received?

Or in a time of war, we should announce where all of our troops are going in advance?

> Or maybe the IRS should release every tax return it has ever received?

That's not so bizarre.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Finland#Publicity_...

> Even when information of earnings and the taxation procedure of individual persons and companies are not public, the amount of taxes carried for each person and company is public information. Tax Administration authority is required to submit information for free if request is targeted. Larger records are submitted for journalistic purposes. Capital income and earned income, are both public information, while taxation of dividends from unlisted limited company is not

Closer to home, I can see exactly how much property taxes each and every one of my neighbors pay:

https://www.acgov.org/ms/prop/index.aspx

The nuclear info should be secret because it protects us from our enemies. The info on population surveillance should be secret because? Oh wait, the government thinks we are the enemy...

You should see Snowden in context.

Whistleblowers before Snowden (Drake, Binney) tried to do it the normal way. They were investigated, prosecuted, charged in secret and shut down. They were the only people investigated. Only Snowden has changed things.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/22/how-pentagon-...

> They instead grabbed everything they could get their hands on in the off chance it was something they were looking for.

I'm generally in favor of what Snowden did, but I agree that he should have been a lot more selective in what material he handed off to the press. In dumping everything he could get his hands on without exercising any discretion, he definitely neglected one of his basic responsibilities as a whistleblower.

The situation calls for a nuanced approach, but it seems neither side has the capacity for it, with one side hailing him as an infallible beacon of justice and the other as a traitor that must be punished and made an example of, due process be damned. I'm sure at this point Snowden himself would be happy to return to his homeland if he could just be granted a fair and open trial in the court of law, but that seems rather unlikely in our current political environment.

> revealed information that has little public interest

This is false, in a very strict sense; after almost 3 years, the entire world is still debating about his work - if this is not "public interest", what is?

> isn't illegal activity > you can't simply say the good outweighed the bad

This is actually a serious problem of it. Actually, under a certain interpretation, this is the radical problem - lack of accountability. The Clappers of the situation can do/say whatever they want, and get away with it.

If you put this in a political context where if you make a documentary about Iraq you go in the government dissidents watchlist [Poitras], you see the direction towards authoritarian themes; in my book, this is as bad as it gets.

> has the right to release information they morally object without any legal repercussions.

This is misinformed; Snowden said he would have come back in his home country, if there had been a fair trial. Whether this is true of false, everybody knows, that the alternative to "without any legal repercussions" is being crushed by some draconian laws of the early 20th century.

> They instead grabbed everything they could get their hands on in the off chance it was something they were looking for. Isn't that the exact problem we have with mass surveillance in the first place?

If we put aside rhetoric, then definitely are very different problems. There are several reasons why the Mannings/Snowdens could actually keep releasing documentation (including survival, or keeping the public interested, or in unrealistic worst case, frivolousness, arrogance or else), which are radically different from the reason of mass surveillance, which boils down to power.

Other commenters have voiced objections to various bits of this argument which I won't repeat, but I want to highlight a point that is extremely important in cases like Snowden; we agree that his action was unlawful, but this says little about it being immoral when the relevant laws are condoning immoral behavior.

He certainly did things that in general people shouldn't do, and that the law doesn't allow for; but he did them for reasons that, we'd contend, outweigh the reasons he shouldn't have. Absolutely, the law doesn't work in a "does the good outweigh the bad" fashion, but morality often does (namely, if we ascribe to the view of moral utilitarianism, which is extremely popular both in everyday intuition and academic philosophical circles.) So morally speaking, there isn't necessarily a serious problem with Snowden or Manning's grab-everything approach, either- the damage from what they shouldn't have released can be judged less important than the benefit from what they wouldn't have made available if they were going more carefully.

Snowden getting pardoned would be an individual act of some politician(s) intervening on the legal system, and different from institutionalized whistleblower protection as discussed in the article. The latter is an attempt to get the law back into sync with morality, both directly and through allowing a legal channel for individuals to spur changes to existing immoral systems. There's definitely a tension between whistleblower protection programs that would satisfy both the demands of morally-minded government agents and also the necessities of secrecy-centric government capabilities.

> The intentions of both were noble, but you can't simply say the good outweighed the bad. That isn't how the law currently works or in my opinion should work. You have to take all of the good and bad into account.

Isn't saying the good outweighed the bad how you take all of the good and bad into account? Anything else is to say that everyone who is not without sin should be in prison, which is... everyone.

The problem with your alternative is that no one looks to the sins of mostly-good common people, but anyone who moves against the establishment is thrust into the spotlight where any human fallibility is seized as an excuse to punish them, not for the thing being punished, but for the thing that put them in the government's cross hairs.

High ranking government officials have been known to reveal classified information when it's in their political interest and not be prosecuted because no one was out looking for an excuse to prosecute them. There is no justice if the same thing doesn't happen in the case where the thing revealed is inconvenient to the government.