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US security — too big not to fail
By James Carroll
Globe Columnist
June 17, 2013
... Two new factors have changed the game entirely. The first is the transformation of the government’s security apparatus from a relatively small enterprise, in which figures like J. Edgar Hoover could exercise dominating influence, into a security bureaucracy vast enough to elude description, much less regulation.
As Dana Priest and William M. Arkin pointed out in their 2010 Washington Post series “Top Secret America,” more than 1,000 government organizations are paired with more than 1,000 private companies in the security labyrinth, all moving about blindly and haphazardly. Almost a million people hold top-secret security clearances, including janitors who manage the waste. Many others hold lesser security classifications. The Post subtitled its series “A hidden world, growing beyond control.” PRISM shows where that loss of control leads, but so does the fact that a low-level analyst like Snowden could lay bare one of the NSA’s deepest secrets.
Such massive bureaucracy, staffed by unnamed millions but commanded by no one, generates an impersonal dynamic of its own. No individual or group of individuals, no matter how well-intentioned, is capable of supervising it. Moral responsibility is diffuse. Such a massive institution gathers its own momentum, and neither laws nor the Constitution nor oath-bound authorities may be able to channel it or stop it ...
The greatest secret being revealed through all of this is that secrets themselves are becoming a thing of the past. How can Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning, each from his unimportant place deep in the bureaucracy, yet each wielding the radically unchecked power of the computer, so readily penetrate the most secure of government barriers? Their access shows what an illusion those barriers have become. The crisis here is that responsible governance, including that of a liberal democracy, requires the reasonable management of secrecy. What happens when both responsibility and management become impossible? ...
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/06/17/edward-snowden-reveals-deeper-secret-there-are-secrets/znKlnQQ6edHiWlsTQBHbYP/story.html
