Basically, governments are rational actors. Not really surprising but many people seem to assume the government will be either irrationally benevolent or irrationally evil.
A collection of rational actors may, as a whole, behave irrationally - as defined as 'against their own best interest'. Tragedy of the commons is but one example.
Organized systems may easily have structures that create irrational and destructive behavior, and those structures can be stable enough so that for each separate employee attempting to change the system would be risky, disadvantageous and irrational.
Citation needed. :)
There are two schemes that assure irrational governmental behavior -- dictatorship, and democracy. For different reasons, of course.
> Not really surprising but many people seem to assume the government will be either irrationally benevolent or irrationally evil.
There's plenty of historical support for those views -- you know, evidence?
In the theoretical sense, I agree with that, but in a world of social interconnections, we need a meaningful framework and vocabulary for judging these sorts of things. While I believe that true objectivity is hard (and maybe impossible), I think there's a lot of social value in coming up with widely accepted definitions of rational vs. irrational, at least on a case-by-case basis.
It has meaning. It means "we have insufficient information" or "something is going on here that we don't know about or understand."
In any case, that's a false dichotomy. Governments are not uniform entities, and there's no point talking about them as if they are. Governments, like people, do some rational and some irrational things.
High-ranking intelligence officials will push for more power, more capabilities, and will scrap things if they become risky.
If there's somebody sufficiently powerful whose career would be threatened from some risk of exploiting the bug, that risk will be taken seriously.
If there's somebody sufficiently powerful whose career would benefit from the government letting people know about that bug, it'll happen. This sounds unlikely, but this isn't my area of expertise and if somebody wants to correct me please do so.
Congress will largely ignore it because it has nothing to do with their constituency, they're mostly technically illiterate, and because they're being lied to anyways.
...and so on.
Daniel Kahneman says this has been proven false in his book Thinking Fast and Slow.
It think it is wrong on two levels. First individual's "perceived best interest" is often very far off of their real interest. Second, individual, and not only a few edge cases, are often not behaving in their best interest, even if we consider it to be their "perceived best interest".
Kahneman listed the three attributes of humans modelized as "econs" in the most common economic model: They are rational, selfish and their taste do not change over time. All three are obviously wrong.