Reply #9: When the Bush administration sought to subvert the weak FISA Court walls, trust DIED that day!

[cascadiance]

When even friendly to the administration courts (the FISA court who was headed by the judge that let Microsoft go the week before the first midterm elections of the Bush administration (Kollar-Kotelly)) "had to be worked around" for the Bush administration to pursue their warrantless wiretapping, etc. amongst other things, the people had every reason to WANT whistleblowers to burst through the normal walls of protection and expose the wrongdoing that was going on.

That's the problem when you have a system that becomes dysfunctional when those at the top are corrupt and try to use it for their own ends, and not what these agencies, etc. have been set up for. In order to fix the problem, you have to bring down their secrecy to do so.

YES, that does put us all more at risk when some of those secrets come out, but what is MORE damaging is to let that corruption and misuse of secrecy grow in scope and power that becomes far more dangerous unchecked to all of us than some of these leaks coming out). It has been noted that even Assange has held back some of these documents he has access to to focus on those that expose wrongdoing than those that might just damage our intelligence infrastructure.

Those that are in charge that are misusing their power, should not only be held accountable for their misdeeds in abusing the system, but should also be held accountable for the damage that those that are risking a lot to expose their misdeeds may in fact trigger in order to expose them.

As noted by so many others here. It is one thing to subvert our intelligence processes, expose parts of them for personal selfish agendas that reward only those that are engaged in criminal and treasonous behavior for their own rewards. It's entirely different to expose the wrongdoing of those with even potentially damaging information if the intent is to help FIX our system and get the wrongdoers out of their positions of power that has lead to the damage they've inflicted on us.