Transparency is coming, whether the government likes it or not. The only question is whether they decide to bring it to the public before whistleblowers do it for them.
That’s the underlying message of Laura Poitras’ mesmerizing new documentary, Citizenfour, about Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency that debuted at the New York Film Festival on Friday night.
That message will have a tough time penetrating the hubris surrounding the intel community.
The story comes from the Guardian: The Snowden documentary shows that only government transparency can stop leaks
Our government knows this "message" well. But we can't underestimate their proclivity to ignore it if it fails to fit their self-serving narrative. Glen Greenwald delivered one such message through Newsweek right after the first Snowden leaks appeared in the Guardian.
“Government and businesses cannot function without enormous amounts of data, and many people have to have access to that data,” Greenwald says, adding that it only takes one person with access and an assaulted consciences to leak, no matter what controls are in place.
But Greenwald's expectations were low back then and remain so now. As depicted in the film's second act, when Greenwald and Poitras met the then unknown Edward Snowden in Hong Kong, the whistleblower hinted at just how realistic the aforementioned prediction would turn out to be. He was also resigned at that time to becoming both pursued and demonized by his own government.
“They can stomp me if they want to, but there will be seven more to take my place.”
That's the prognosis. But it's at the conclusion of Citizenfour where we discover a new revelation. In the film, Snowden learns on-camera that Poitras and Greenwald now have a second source who gave The Intercept information about the government's ginormous "terrorism watch list."
That watchlist, which contains 1.2 million names – most of which have no direct nexus to terrorism – is governed by Kafkaesque secrecy rules that were recently ruled unconstitutional (and which took another blow from a fed-up federal judge on Friday night).
New developments in the no-fly/terrorist watch-list issue were articulated in an excellent diary earlier today written by xxdr zombiexx. It's here.
Anybody endowed with a semblance of authenticity admits to our government's intractable secrecy problem, including President Back Obama, who paradoxically has spoke out against and presided over government secrecy's massive expansion during his watch. But old habits are hard to break. And the institutional response has been increasingly reflexive, and become even more secretive, calling for more leak prosecutions, and imposing more draconian limits and restrictions on federal employees who already work in a proverbial fishbowl.
Recently, the US Director of National Intelligence took the extraordinary step of banning millions of intelligence employees from talking to the press about even unclassified, mundane topics. And the government’s pernicious “Insider Threat” program is stalking government employees’ every move, equating communication with journalists with spying for a foreign enemy.
But the most obvious lesson has escaped our government: the massive, classified data leaks from Manning and Snowden were not done in isolation. There are five million government employees with security clearances of varying degrees. And many of them are part of a new generation far more critical of the national security state.
If the government doesn't heed the message. If the term "open government" continues to be nothing but an empty cliché, a new generation of federal government employees may just force their hand from the inside.
There will be consequences