"Clearly, what you should do is help them [...] and then write a feature article for slashdot."(a slashdot reporter with an innovative response to an ethical dilemma)
"he thought he knew better than the U.S. Government what was best for the United States."
Meeting Daniel Ellsberg and thinking about his experiences made me ponder the quotation above. It's upsetting to me that this should be phrased so contemptuously, so so condescendingly. (The piece is not about Ellsberg but about a more recent case involving a man named Frederick Hamilton, who leaked classified information for altruistic reasons -- once again, to try to stop a war -- and went to jail for it.)
Ellsberg also "thought he knew better than the U.S. government what was best for the United States"; according to interviews, he still thinks he knew better than the U.S. government what was best for the United States:
[Q.] Do you have any regrets about releasing the Pentagon Papers or would you have done anything differently?[A.] Yes. I regret that in 1964 or early 1965 I did not release the documents in my possession at that time to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. These documents were in my safe in the Pentagon. Later they were among the documents in the Pentagon Papers that I copied and gave to the Senate in 1969 and later to the newspapers in 1971. But if I had released them during the 1964 presidential campaign or before the open-ended escalation on the ground in mid-1965, I believe that all the war that came afterwards could well have been averted. That is a heavy burden to bear.
(Daniel Ellsberg, in a 1999 interview with Bay Area high school students)
It seems to me that history will vindicate Ellsberg, so that people will agree that he, in fact, knew better than the government. Perhaps history will also vindicate Frederick Hamilton. It seems that the Department of Energy doesn't consider that a possibility.
You know you've been reading the news media too long when ... you see the news headline "Bush Energy Plan Not Universally Popular" and think "Oh, that must be a new piece from The Onion".
I wrote a few hundred more lines of "Existence and Uniqueness".
I went to the chiropractor and then I went down to the EFF to meet with Shari Steele.
Contact: Seth David Schoen
