Im surprised that majority of the comments are about how they are dissapointed about their carelessness and not noting that leaking classified information is bad regardless of your ultimate aim. This is exactly what we should expect to happen when people leak classified information regardless of your ultimate motivation
Dan Carlin had a podcast about this. He said something to the effect of, "what if you had a stamp and every time you stamped something, your boss would never find out about it. How long do you think it would take before you start putting the stamp on your mistakes?"
What he was trying to get at is, how does a democracy function properly when it has no idea what it's leadership is doing, because the leadership makes everything secret and classified? It's a good question and I don't really have an answer.
On the reverse side of that, how can a government function when everybody feels like they are privy to know everything about its operations. Its like having a meeting with too many people in the room. Nothing ever gets done. Democracy functions in that we have a democratic process to elect those who represent us, and at some level we need to trust them with certain elements of operations because everyone knowing everything could cause harm in some cases. If we dont trust who we elect to office then thats a seperate issue that we need to tackle on its own.
> Its like having a meeting with too many people in the room. Nothing ever gets done.
I'm not sure I accept the metaphor - visibility is not participation. Too-large meetings are useless because they have too many participants, and everything falls to bike-shedding. Plenty of organizations, from public companies to the Federal Reserve, get things done with visible meetings where interested parties can't speak but do see the minutes. In my version of the metaphor, non-secrecy is totally consistent with small-meeting democracy: we elect people to go and represent us, but demand information about how they did so in order to hold them accountable. (If Congress voted by secret ballot, do you think it would represent us better or worse?)
(The question of information which is harmful to share is a fundamentally different one than a general argument for privacy, and a much harder one. Those cases are real, but it's also true that there's a long track record of government claiming information is harmful to release when it's actually embarrassing or unethical.)
> If we dont trust who we elect to office then thats a seperate issue that we need to tackle on its own.
Great, we haven't tackled it, and without clear information about what officials do it's not clear how we can.
There's never been an era of declassification and leaks where we looked around and said "yep, everything in there looks like it was done in good faith". I'll embrace an end to leaks around the same time they stop containing evidence government bodies knowingly classifying horrible misdeeds.
Hell, I'd even settle for "no war crimes lately", but we haven't managed that yet.
> I'm not sure I accept the metaphor - visibility is not participation. Too-large meetings are useless because they have too many participants, and everything falls to bike-shedding.
I was about to reply with exactly this point. Transparency does not entail everyone gets their say, merely that the factors and interests considered in a decision are ultimately disclosed with no secrecy. Then perhaps there can be a public commentary period before proceeding so there is some participation, but participation at every step isn't necessary for engendering trust via transparency.
This obviously gets trickier on national security matters, but the judiciary is supposed to judge what is and isn't too sensitive here. Secret court proceedings are skirting dangerously close to crossing that line though.
This is why we have meeting notes that get broadly sent out. We are not talking about inviting all citizens to be decision makers, we are talking about making transparent what the decision makers are doing so they can be held accountable.
IMO that issue can be tackled by making laws prohibiting financial conflicts of interest removing the incentive to be untrustworthy. Then we get civil servants in office again.
Leaking classified information is good. This is the only way people can get a peek behind the scenes and understand that the state absolutely doesn't work in a way it wants people to believe it does.
Many of us have observed that the federal government, from time to time, conducts unethical and/or illegal behavior and should not be blindly trusted. We also know they use classification to hide embarrassing or illegal actions.
Leakers are one way we can learn how the sausage is really made, and in most cases that knowledge is in the public interest.
