Government officials should be highly transparent. Privacy for the people, transparency for the government.
And, we know that various political machines are using bots/fake accounts the world over to push various agendas via comments.
Where is the line drawn?
The power is why politicians deserve greater scrutiny than the average person, and anyone who wants to keep their privacy intact can choose not to run for office. The loss of privacy (usually at the hands of the press) is already an implied cost of running for and holding office.
> Also, there are private individuals who knowingly exercise more power than that clerk.
This is partially a pet peeve of mine, but again, almost certainly not. I struggle to think of someone with more ability to kill a project than a clerk that refuses to do their job.
Kim Davis was a clerk that refused a literal Supreme Court order. As best I can tell, she did 5 days in jail and launched a million dollar speaking career out of it. Bezos or Musk can be absolutely sidelined by a clerk who is pissed off enough to accept eventually getting fired as a result.
The claim was that they worked for you therefore they should be subject to constant surveillance. Submit to the same from your employer to prove that that is a reasonable expectation.
People in politics, as I said from the beginning, are still people. We can demand transparency in the decisions made (there are limits, because some of that information is sensitive - eg. National security, or commercial secrecy) but we cannot demand that people are surveiled every minute of their lives whilst at the same time complaining that it's a bad thing to happen to us.
Well, those in power should be held to a higher standard in various ways, and it is tricky. Someone who works on a pharma regulatory board who then the next year gets a gloriously-salaried job at Pfizer should probably not have been able to do that, even though for most people a job at Pfizer would be fine.
Your mistake is thinking public and private are the same.
There's no other explanation.
In a private company the employer has the power over the employees.
If exposing their data leads them to be attacked more, then we need to be careful with this.