PRISM

[sexobon]

I not sure about you Lamp. You put "data gathering" and "intelligence accumulation" in quotes. I talked about information (raw data) gathering and accumulation, the processing of information into an intelligence collection, and how government views the relation of information gathering to privacy differently from the relation of an intelligence collection to privacy. Where you got "intelligence accumulation" from I don't know.

Think of it this way: A guy regularly "gathers" loose "change" from his pockets and puts it in a jar where it becomes an "accumulation." He does this in anticipation of someday starting a "coin" "collection." Right now, he doesn't know if the "change" will be useful or not. When the time comes, he decides to collect just quarters. He takes only the quarters from the jar and organizes them by date and mintmark into a "coin collection". So far this scenario has been analogous to the difference between an information accumulation and an intelligence collection. The term you put in quotes, "intelligence accumulation", would in this analogy equate to something like an accumulation of coin collections! That's something a coin dealer might have; but, nobody would refer to it as that. They'd just call it inventory and it wouldn't really be a part of the story. I hope this helped.

The contention that "an altruistic insider, such as Daniel Ell[e]sberg, can make better decisions than those technically assigned to carry out governmental intentions" is widely seen as bass ackwards. The career government workers in that field, the ones who stay regardless of which politicians are in power, are generally the good stewards of government. They know that for every altruistic Daniel Ellsberg, there are a thousand subversives, mercenaries, and attention whores who will give up classified information while claiming to be altruistic and collectively do more harm than all the genuine Ellsbergs can ever offset. They don't do what he did because they don't want to be part of making it more acceptable. There are better ways to deal with situations than betraying a trust.

If you had said that an altruistic insider, such as Daniel Ellsberg, can make better decisions than those elected to form governmental intentions ... I would have agreed with you; but, still not with his methods.

In any case, you seem to have created a fusion of two different topics when you said: "Ellsberg was wrong legally, but it made little difference, and that's the problem with trying to distinguish differences between "data gathering" and "intelligence accumulation"." The Ellsberg controversy was over his divulgence of government classified information and the government's classifying of information, not about the government gathering information, processing it into intelligence; or, the relation of these activities to privacy rights.

But how nice you're of the opinion the Pentagon Papers brought about the end of the war in Viet Nam. If we had won the war, that opinion might have been worth something.