Worth repeating, and remembering
"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." -- Justice Louis Brandeis
(thanks to RefDesk (2.25.2004) for putting the quote up on his page)
- posted by Chris @ 10:06 AM

 
CYA is not raison d'etre
I'm reading now that some of the documents used in Paul O'Neill's book about his Executive Branch experience were "classified" ... I've worked with classified material, and I know that there is a lot of it so marked to cover someone's ass, not because the content necessarily needs to be protected. Our goverment is supposed to be transparent unless it's vital to our security for information to be closely held by only a few people. Blueprints for nuclear weapons? Yeah, I think that needs a "top secret" stamp. Comments President Bush made about targeting Iraq long before we would have thought? Why is that "secret"? So we wouldn't know that he had plans for it even before September 11? Maybe we should be discussing more of our national interest IN PUBLIC. Maybe our government officials should be less concerned with electability and more interested in a successful long-term outcome ... a strong, stable country that can still be a beacon of freedom for the rest of the world.
- posted by Chris @ 11:49 AM