You know what I find the most frustrating? The totally illegitimate laws that allow these state secrets to exist are 100% public. Most of Snowden's revelations could be infer in the text of laws stating what the NSA can do.
I think there is the mentality that progress depends on ~~superheroes~~ whistle-blowers whereas I think that a sane and functioning network of privacy defense non-profits and appropriate public education could have prevented this situation to begin with.
It is a very sad democracy when you confuse legitimacy and legality. Slavery, apartheid, death camps were legal.
Let me sing you the song of my people. Once upon a time, a french government surrendered to the German invader and changed form to stop being a republic. A colonel (de Gaulle) decided to stop obeying their orders, claiming he was a servant of the French republic, and claiming it was now alive in a government in exile in London and never surrendered.
The legal mainland non-republican government declared him a traitor and his supporters terrorists. They were serious about that and killed many of them.
At the end of the war, de Gaulle won and declared the mainland government "nul et non avenu" (void and never happened) which cancelled all the legal acts it took. People who during all that time followed the rule of the law were considered traitors to the nation, especially if they (as the law mandated it) denounced Jews or people helping them to German authorities.
This is what we are taught in history class: following the law is not enough. You also have to think further than that. In some cases, the right thing to do is illegal.
If you compare the definitions in say a dictionary[1][2][3], they have high overlap, but are not the same.
Phrases illegal law and illegitimate law have different meanings. While the first seems an oxymoron and the second may be, both seem to be legitimate descriptions of objects in existence.
Ok, my bad, I was not aware that legitimate could actually be synonymous with legal. In my native language, legitimate globally means that it is the general consensus in society, something that ideally the law tries to capture but it is actually importantly distinct from legal and is never used in replacement of it.
I think there is the mentality that progress depends on ~~superheroes~~ whistle-blowers whereas I think that a sane and functioning network of privacy defense non-profits and appropriate public education could have prevented this situation to begin with.