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When government misdeeds are exposed, the only people who should ever be punished are those who perpetrated them, and those who tried to cover them up. Teixeira, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Daniel Hale, David McBride -- they should all be living free and without fear of persecution. And those who persecuted them should be imprisoned.
It's just so crazy how it's taken as a given that governments keep these secrets for good and noble reasons which must be protected with as much force as necessary, when we know for a fact that this is false and have known it for generations. As Julian Assange once said, "The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security."
People shouldn't be punished for revealing the secrets of the government, governments should be punished for keeping secrets from the people.
It shouldn't be illegal to expose the abuses and deceptions of your government, it should be illegal for your government to abuse and deceive.
The government says it needs secrecy in order to win wars and protect freedom. History says the government needs secrecy in order to start wars and restrict freedom.
The amount of power you have should be inversely proportional to the amount of secrecy you're allowed. Those with the most power should be a completely open book who aren't permitted to hide anything from anyone, while those with the least power should have complete unimpeded privacy. Instead it's the exact opposite: ordinary powerless people are getting more and more surveilled, while governments get more and more secretive and unaccountable.
Slashing government secrecy would solve so many problems -- partly because malfeasance functions best in the dark, and partly because it would give democracy a fighting chance by letting the electorate make informed decisions about what's going on in their world. You can't claim to have democracy when you're using government secrecy, censorship, propaganda, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and the war on journalism to control what people see. People can't use their votes to advance positive change if they can't see what's happening.
That's the thing about The Washington Post's slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness": it's completely true. It just happens that The Washington Post actively works to help keep things in the dark.
If I ever stumble across a magic genie's lamp there's a limit to the things I'd be willing to change about the world because I wouldn't want to intervene on human sovereignty, but eliminating the ability of the powerful to obfuscate and distort the truth is something I'd happily commit to. End government secrecy, end censorship, end propaganda, end Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and end the war on journalism, so that people are free to see what's really going on in their world and help steer things in a positive direction.
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