Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that's a charitable interpretation of the majority view. 64% of Americans familiar with Snowden have a negative view of him: http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/04/21/edward-snowde....

The people are entitled to trust the government and condemn those who leak state secrets. You or I might think that's short-sighted, but the whole point of democracy is to give people the power to make these value judgments. America wasn't set up for a class of self-appointed civil libertarian guardians to tell people what their priorities should be.

View on HN

> The people are entitled to trust the government and condemn those who leak state secrets. You or I might think that's short-sighted, but the whole point of democracy is to give people the power to make these value judgments.

Isn't that a self-fulfilling prophecy? If the government is allowed to lie to the people and keep secrets from them without oversight then the people have no way to make an informed decision, and will consequently be more inclined to make a decision favoring the government.

It's all too easy to win a public debate when everyone with the information required to refute your position is prohibited by law from disclosing it.

The decision is not about individual programs. It's a much higher-level one. What do we fear more: the potential for leaks to undermine security, or the possibility of government surveillance abuses that go uncaught and unpunished? That's a decision people can make without knowing the specifics of what kind of surveillance the government is doing.

> That's a decision people can make without knowing the specifics of what kind of surveillance the government is doing.

I don't think it is. To make that decision you have to know the cost of secret abuses. And how are you supposed to know that if they're secret?

To make the reductio ad absurdum, suppose the government's line is that a plague that becomes contagious before it becomes symptomatic is ravaging the population and everyone is being tested and the people infected are immediately taken to quarantine where they uniformly die of the plague, but in reality what's happening is that genocidal fanatics in the government are doing genetic testing and sending people to death camps.

There is no amount of undermining security that can overcome that amount of harm. But if people are assuming that the harm is dramatically less than that and are not allowed to be corrected then they can't be expected to make the right decision.

People are entitled to trust the government not to do that, and also to presume that the really gross abuses will be hard to keep secret.

> People are entitled to trust the government not to do that

People are entitled to trust that the government won't do the sort of things that governments have historically done? This is getting dangerously close to the point of legitimizing the government of North Korea because it's nominally democratically elected.

> and also to presume that the really gross abuses will be hard to keep secret.

Isn't this directly at odds with aggressive systemic and cultural protection of secrets and imposing severe criminal penalties on whistleblowers? You're effectively arguing that the government can only get away with as much malice as they have the capacity to keep secret, and then using that as justification for bolstering the government's ability to keep secrets. That seems like it should go the other way.

But most people who are "familiar" with him don't really know the details - for example, many think he planned the escape to Russia.

A valid point of view, but the US is technically a constitutional republic, not a true democracy. Certain values and principles are written into our DNA via the Constitution, and I contest your assertion that they can simply be voted away by the majority.

Technically the US is a form of democracy. It is a type of representative, or indirect, democracy.

It is not direct democracy, which is also called a pure democracy, with the best known example being James Madison in Federalist 10.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_democracy for a list of some of the types of democracy. It does not list a "true democracy". I suspect that you meant to use "pure" instead of "true" in your comment.

Yes, that is what I meant. That's what I get for being a pedant.

Liberalism and democracy are not automatic bedfellow, but somehow people think it is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com