Don't fear the leaker

The federal government is so huge that no one can really oversee it. (This was, remember, an excuse offered by Obama’s defenders in the IRS scandals.) It’s certainly too big for congressional oversight to do the job, as is evidenced by the numerous unfolding scandals ranging from the NSA to Benghazi to the IRS, all of which seem to have caught Congress by surprise.

So who’s left? The people actually involved. A government as big as ours can’t do much of anything without hundreds or thousands of people knowing. Since the president and Congress can’t keep track of it all, it falls to the people on the job to expose wrongdoing. “If you see something, say something,” as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is fond of observing.

The freer people are to blow the whistle on wrongdoing, the more we can assume that when no whistle is blown, things aren’t so bad. The more the government cracks down on whistleblowers, the more likely it is that they’ve got something to hide.

This system isn’t perfect. Leakers can abuse their power for reasons of revenge, ego, or politics — but then, so can congressional overseers, or attorneys general, or presidents.