The case against secret government

Guy Fawkes

My grandfather once said that you know you’re doing something wrong when you don’t want to tell anyone about it. Unless the NSA is using our phone records and social media data to plan an awesome surprise party, there is something suspect in the claim that domestic surveillance was kept secret for our own good. Secrecy is antithetical to democracy. Tim Weiner argues as much at Bloomberg, where he points out that presidents from LBJ to GWB have demonstrated that you can’t trust the executive. At Esquire, Charles Pierce puts a simultaneously finer and more vulgar point on it when he asks that the federal government please tell him what it is doing in his name.

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