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Comment by saulpw | Hacker News Reader

> a capable public can make this determination

The public is not capable, either technically nor emotionally nor politically.

The public is not capable of creating an open source ecosystem of highly technical software spanning almost every software genre with multiple options across decades.

The public is not just the bottom most or the average member. It's everyone. If "the public" is not capable of understanding this information neither are the members of "the public" normally producing and consuming this information.

True the average person can't do that.

However there are many organisations who can analyze different aspects from different perspectives and pull out consumable information from it.

By having the raw material available this then can be cross-ckecked. If it's kept secret you need complete trust.

Unfortunately there are several times as many organizations who will take an undecipherable wall of text as an excuse to push their pre-existing beliefs and agendas with cherry-picked out of context quotes, intentionally misleading interpretations, and bad faith arguments.

Bad faith actors would use it and a pile of techniques used mainly by religions and cults in order to try to seize power.

Sure, but they do that anyways, and it's not like holding the documents in secrecy is somehow crippling the ability of bad-faith actors to act in bad faith. If anything, it allows them to claim things _without_ good faith actors being able to scrutinize their claims.

You don't need documents to tell lies. You can invent arbitrary secret sources. However you need documents to disprove lies.

I for one do not wish to give America's enemies access to all of our classified information.

For that it's too late.

The docetns are at British The Guardian and German Der Spiegel and the person extracting those initially sits in Russia and who knows who got copies or extracted them.

> Russian parliament’s defense and security committee publicly conceded that “Snowden did share intelligence” with his government.

https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hpsci_snowden_r...

The deputy chairman claimed. Not the committee conceded. Whoever wrote conceded missed or wished to obscure the deputy chairman could have lied. Failing to get anything from Snowden would have embarrassed Russian security services. Or it could have been an assumption if the English translation is accurate.[1]

At least this claim could be probed. Most claims in the report relied on proven liars.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2016/06/29/483890378/during-tenure-in-ru...

Whether you like it or not, this is not your determination to make.

If that's how you perceive the public, that's an inherently anti democratic view imo. If they can't read documents that journalists have access to, how could they be given the power to decide who is leading them?

We are all the public. Including the people who wrote these documents originally.

It can’t be that hard.

Yes I am. You might not be but don't I count as "the public"?

This is the crux of it. You, me, that guy, we might be capable. But the Public certainly is not capable, never has been, never will be.

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