Comment by exelius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by exelius | Hacker News Reader

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The problem is that the U.S. Government had adopted a policy of "classified by default". It's impossible for us to have a public debate on this issue when anyone who knows about it is legally not allowed to discuss it with anyone who does not have the proper clearance.

It's important to note that discussing the content of a classified document - even if that document has been leaked and is in the public sphere, and regardless of whether or not the information really should be classified - is punishable by serious jail time. This effectively prevents public debate about any program considered "classified", which means if you're doing something shady that would be embarrassing if it came out, you just slap a security clearance on it and claim its for "national security", thus precluding any government officials from acknowledging it.

As more and more government programs are considered classified, the people are given less of a voice in how our country is run. That is the most scary part for me.

5.1 million Americans have security clearance[0]. Let that sink in, there are essentially two classes of citizens in America, those trusted by the government and allowed to look at 'sensitive' information, and everyone else who is distrusted, disdained, ignored, and spied upon.

0:http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/03/24...

Having a clearance does not grant you the ability to look at all classified information. You are only granted the ability to look at information up to your clearance level and for which you have a need to know. Actually, they're probably more spied upon, given the mandatory background checks involved and even interviews with neighbors. Additionally, people with clearances aren't even supposed to look at things like the Snowden revelations because it qualifies as data spillage even though it's already out in the world.

99% of the people with a security clearance are just as "distrusted, disdained, ignored, and spied upon" as the rest of the country, to the extent that is true at all.

You can't get a plumber on to a secure facility to fix a toilet without clearance but I doubt they are part of some secret cabal. Your ignorance is vast.

Thank you for your intelligent, insightful comment which has really improved the discussion regarding state secrecy and the rights of its citizens to know what the government does in their name. Bravo, Bravissimo.

And yet the same people complaining about classified by default as a de facto government policy are pushing for encryption by default everywhere.

This is actually kind of the opposite thing. Individuals should be able to have privacy from the government; but the government works for the people and should be more transparent.

There are definitely things that should be classified - but in classifying everything, you run the risk of the "classified" designation losing its meaning. In Citizenfour, this was something that Snowden explicitly stated: he was leaving it to the discretion of the reporters which information should be published and what should not, because his biases weren't necessarily correct. But this is because so much classified information shouldn't be classified that someone like Snowden can't really differentiate between what is important to keep secret and what isn't.

No more than encrypting information causes encryption to lose its meaning. Something that should be declassified still can be. It just means that the default state is different.

Would you say that if your innocuous slashdot browsing was encrypted even though it "shouldn't be", someone like you or me would become unable to differentiate between what is important to keep secret and what isn't?

I don't see anything unreasonable about that. I can file a FOIA on any topic I want for any reason I want, but the police can't just demand to search through my things without cause.

Our relationship with the government is not intended to be symmetric.

That's not what I said. I'm talking about the default state of information being a more protected one. Not the state it ends up in after some negotiation. To tie it to your analogy, it would be as if you could initially decline any search demand, and then the police would have to go get a warrant.

One thing is government which is supposed to answer to us, another is our own personal information. Way different things.

Neither of those are the thing. I'm talking about default states. You're talking about actual states.

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