Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

June 14, 2014

Access To Information Is Power

Filed under: Information Theory,NSA — Patrick Durusau @ 4:52 pm

No Place to Hide Freed

From the post:

After reading No Place to Hide on day of release and whipping out a review, now these second thoughts:

We screen shot the Kindle edition, plugged the double-paged images into Word, and printed five PDFs of the Introduction, Chapter 1 through 5, and Epilogue. Then put the 7Z package online at Cryptome.

This was done to make more of Edward Snowden’s NSA material available to readers than will be done by the various books about it — NPTH among a half-dozen — hundreds of news and opinion articles, TV appearances and awards ceremonies by Snowden, Greenwald, Poitras, McAskin, Gellman, Alexander, Clapper, national leaders and gaggles of journalist hobos of the Snowden Intercept of NSA runaway metadata traffic.

The copying and unlimited distribution of No Place to Hide is to compensate in a small way for the failure to release 95% of the Snowden material to the public.

After Snowden dumped the full material on Greenwald, Poitras and Gellman, about 97% of it has been withheld. This book provides a minuscule amount, 106 images, of the 1500 pages released so far out of between 59,000 and 1.7 million allegedly taken by Snowden.

Interesting that the post concludes:

Read No Place to Hide and wonder why it does not foster accelerated, full release of the Snowden material, to instead for secretkeepers of all stripes profit from limited releases and inadequate, under-informed public debate.

I would think the answer to the concluding question is self-evident.

The NSA kept the programs and documents about the programs secret in order to avoid public debate and the potential, however unlikely, of being held responsible for violation of various laws. There is no exception in the United States Constitution that reads: “the executive branch is freed from the restrictions of this constitution when at its option, it decides that freedom to be necessary.”

I have read the United States Constitution rather carefully and at least in my reading, there is no such language.

The answer for Glenn Greenwald is even easier. What should be the basis for a public debate over privacy and what government measures, if any, are appropriate when defending itself against a smallish band of malcontents into a cash cow for Glenn Greenwald. Because Greenwald has copies of the documents stolen by Snowden, he can expect to sell news stories, to be courted and feted by news organizations, etc., for the rest of his life.

Neither the NSA nor Greenwald are interested in a full distribution of all the documents taken by Snowden. Nor are they interested in a fully informed public debate.

Their differences on the release of some documents is a question of whose interest in being served rather than a question of public interest.

Leaking documents to the press is a good way to make someone’s career. Not a good way to get secrets out for public debate.

Leak to the press if you have to but also post full copies to as many public repositories as possible.

Access to information is power. The NSA and Greenwald have it and they are not going to share it with you, at least voluntarily.

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