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Comment by devindotcom | Hacker News Reader

I agree that the anger should be directed at the laws, but the problem is that we are so woefully uninformed about those laws. And not just that we're not paying enough attention - these laws are being formed and executed in secret! How can you take action against something you don't know exists?

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Secret laws are the death of democracy; not just that, they are the death of the Rule of Law itself. The whole point of having written laws was that everybody could know and challenge them in a fair way, without being reliant on the whim of rulers.

"Secret laws" are not laws, they are tyrannical pseudo-rules that belong in the Middle Ages.

In France you have a principle that says "Nul n'est censé ignorer la loi", ("no one should ignore the law") that has a double meaning: you can not escape your responsibilities by saying that you ignored a law, and, as a corollary, no law should be purposely hidden from you.

Still, I've no doubt that french secret services practice all kind of immoral if not illegal stuffs (at the widest scale they can afford), and they have "interesting" theories about what allows them to do that (or maybe they they are just crazy enough to don't care at all, like the recent declaration about the law not applying at all to those programs seems to says...)

> And not just that we're not paying enough attention - these laws are being formed and executed in secret! How can you take action against something you don't know exists?

You start by demanding that this process, this subversion of democracy, be made illegal.

This is the root of the problem: secrecy. Secrecy corrupts as much as power, and absolute secrecy corrupts absolutely.

I'm inclined to suggest that secret laws are themselves a symptom of an already corrupt government, and simply open the door to further corruption.

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