GrizFanStuckInUtah wrote:ATrain wrote:Thomas Jefferson once said "He who would trade a bit of freedom for a bit of security deserves neither." Assange has done nothing wrong that I can see other than release classified documents that indicate our government (and others) haven't been entirely truthful.
I fully support Julian Assange.
You are omitting one word that makes it wrong, period. That word is
classified.
I've misplaced my spy manual and I can't remember how high up the security ladder "classified" is, but if it's anything like "top secret" the whole concept has been watered down quite a bit. I think I read somewhere that upwards of 80,000 additional people gained top secrect security clearance after 9/11.
Posted at 4:50 PM, 7/19/2010
A hidden world, growing beyond control
These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.
The investigation's other findings include:
* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.
With the quick infusion of money, military and intelligence agencies multiplied. Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008 and 2009.
In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11. Each has required more people, and those people have required more administrative and logistic support: phone operators, secretaries, librarians, architects, carpenters, construction workers, air-conditioning mechanics and, because of where they work, even janitors with top-secret clearances.
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top- ... /articles/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Dude. 
