Sunday, August 25, 2013

The Empire Strikes Back

How do you combat the leaked reports of criminal wrongdoing by your government? If you’re the government of Great Britain, you begin leaking your own secrets, but you do it to your own choice of source, and then you attribute the leak to Edward Snowden to give the appearance that the former NSA-contracted employee is leaking “harmful” information to sources indiscriminately. What’s the word to use after you’ve blown past “Orwellian”?

---

The U.S. government, incidentally, is not against leaking information. They are the biggest leaker of U.S. government secrets on the planet. Bigger than Edward Snowden, bigger than Julian Assange, bigger than Chelsea Manning. Officials at the Department of Justice, as an example, leak information all the time if it serves the department’s prosecutorial purposes. They leak names and information about Americans they’re trying to build legal cases against for presumed steroid and narcotics abuse. They violate the privacy of sealed grand jury indictments. Indeed, the only leaks they get testy about are the ones that reveal government crimes.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home