In my experience, government does routinely abuse its power to classify information, sometimes for ridiculous reasons. Sometimes it seems that officials declare something secret just because they can. As a transportation reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, I remember battling state transportation officials to release accident information — I wanted to write a story about which intersections were the most dangerous. Never mind that knowing where it was most treacherous to drive would be useful for public safety, and that the agencies involved in collection this data were public agencies, the numbers were, I was told, a state secret. When I walked through the old U.S. Embassy Chancery Building in Tehran in 2005, now an anti-American museum, there was an exhibit of documents seized during the 1979 takeover. The papers looked damning. They were stamped impressively, ‘Top Secret,” and “Eyes Only.” Few of the Iranian students who were marched through read English, and I’m sure few doubted that the documents on display revealed details of the Great Satan’s “plot” to derail the glorious Islamic Revolution. Close inspection revealed that the framed papers were orders from the embassy motor pool for spare parts.
There have been a few things in the Manning and Snowden leaks that might have warranted taking a principled stand, but the great bulk of what they delivered shows our nation’s military, intelligence agencies, and foreign service working hard at their jobs — doing the things we the people, through our elected representatives, have ordered them to do. It came as no surprise to me that America has been aggressively collecting massive pools of data in order to discover and derail terrorist attacks in advance, an enormously difficult thing to do, and yet the very thing Americans demanded after 9/11.
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