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Comment by oinksoft | Hacker News Reader

This paragraph is the ultimate in irony:

  He betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create
  the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could
  make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed.

Founders weren't interested in the rights of the individual, protecting him from his own government? Frankly, I find that view deeply cynical, far more so than anything the author points to in 'dem youths.

I think that this author's viewpoint boils down to: Whisteblowing on the US government is fundamentally immoral. Young Americans are restive because they are at the core antisocial, being raised in a newly flawed society that fails to make clear that the status quo, the hulking paternalist nation-state, serves the common good.

Frankly, it reads like an old defense of Royalism.

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The whole article is so ad hominem ("look, here we have a freak breaking the law, he is a poor lonely guy without friends and almost a sociopath") and so wilfully pseudo-naïve ("And, of course, he’s right that the procedures he’s unveiled could lend themselves to abuse in the future.") that it is more than insulting. It is unbelievable that this has made the NYT.

Unbelievable.

Patronizing, like any government sponsoring person looks nowadays.

Don't forget the forced repetition to drive the point home He betrayed...He betrayed...He betrayed...He betrayed...He betrayed...He betrayed...He betrayed...

Nothing in his editorial comes as a surprise. David Brooks remains the same neoconservative apologist that he was in the spring of 2003, when he was beating the war drums for President Bush. Show me a David Brooks editorial and I'll show you a point in an unbroken ideological party line that goes back for more than a decade. He even got a guest appearance in David Brooks' new book "So Wrong for So Long", highlighting his role in propagandizing the Iraq war. All that said, his argument is lacking an important detail as well--the recognition of culture and society on the Internet. We're not all solitary loners, naked against the machine of the state. We're a global culture that is based on free exchange of information, as well as open, informed, and vigorous debate, and a fluid voluntary participation in social groups and organizations that is nothing like the clubs or companies of yesteryear. Our culture is strong enough to be building toward an immense demographic shift in U.S. politics. Tomorrow's senators and congressmen are today's high schoolers and college kids. We aren't likely going to allow a system of lifelong surveillance to jeopardize the future integrity of our social structures either. On the whole, I'm not too swayed by Mr. Brooks' arguments.

It's almost classic conservatism: structure is good, people in authority know better than you, listen to your elders, and so on.

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