Posted by
glen ropella on
Jul 25, 2013; 6:51pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/The-AP-kerfuffle-tp7583146p7583529.html
Marcus G. Daniels wrote at 07/25/2013 11:24 AM:
> The public secret (the thing people know but put out of their minds) is not at
> all compartmentalized.
Oh, but it _is_ compartmentalized. Even in the case where everything, all
aspects of every piece of legislation, is public, the composite "law" that
results is too complicated for any one lawyer, judge, court, or agency to
understand completely.
That means that compartmentalization is a natural (perhaps unintended)
consequence of complexity. To see this, try asking a 60 year old real estate
lawyer about the Samsung/Apple law suits ... or your divorce lawyer about the
tax consequences of an S-corp vs. an LLC. ;-) Or look at the variations between
9th circuit rulings and the rest of the federal courts. Compartmentalization is
the rule, not the exception.
> It's secret legislation that contradicts the public law.
Again, that's not as relevant as it might seem because lots of laws contradict
other laws, secret or not.
> Among the bad things about it is how arrogant it is: The idea that the
> chain of command can be used to keep illegal things secret even across tens of
> thousands of employees and contractors.
I agree completely, here. But I don't agree because of the secrecy so much as
because of the byzantine nature of our constitutional republic and the (somewhat
dysfunctional) method for constructing and curating legislation. It's arrogant
all the way around, from the guy arrested for carrying too much marijuana in a
state where the law enforcement has simply decided not to enforce some laws to
the absurdity of punishing Snowden for disclosing something we technically aware
people already "knew".
> Even the military only requires that soldiers follow legal orders.
In letter, but not spirit. If the chain of command decides to blame you for
something (like humiliating prisoners of war or taking pictures with dead
bodies), then they will. If you try to disobey the extant "modus operandi" of
whatever clique you're assigned to, you will suffer for it.
And that's all over and above the fact that most service members, like most
people, aren't lawyers and don't understand the law, even the relatively simpler
military law. By the time any question is settled by a court, the accused's
life is already severely damaged or re-aligned. (witness poor little innocent
Zimmerman who was merely trolling the neighborhood looking for vandals to shoot)
> The proof of the pudding is in the eating: If the NSA *could* keep massive
> surveillance a secret (e.g. not conspire with other government agencies), then
> they'd probably keep the ability to study the minds of dangerous people. But
> they failed to, because they failed to persuade at least one person the mission
> was a good one.
I think their mistake lay in the _choice_ of secrets, not in an inherent
inability to keep huge projects secret. In this, I agree with Aftergood that
we've resigned ourselves to these blanket, broad stroked classifying everything
that moves methods. Perhaps what we've lost is the strategic and tactical
rationale for what to make secret and what to make public.
--
⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella
Say today's for you and I
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