Maybe it's because I've held a Top Secret security clearance once...

[JackRiddler]

123. Rationalizing an authoritarian surveillance state is naive.

Making up stories about why Big Brother is necessary and good is naive.

Delusions that it's bad when China or Iran do it but not the USA are naive.

The idea that the national security state "defends" this country when it has evidently created most of its enemies is naive.

Don't be fucking naive means, wake up, this is a business. A racket of the military industrial complex. Those of you work in it may not be running the racket, but don't come fucking tell those of us who see the racket that we are naive ones.

If it's naive to prefer constitutional government over the arbitrary power of a national security state made up primarily of corporate contractors who profit from fear mongering and war, then I AM NAIVE.

The national security state is highly compartmentalized. By definition most people in it have only a tunnel vision of their small part, don't even know what's going on next door.

I do not consider experience in this state to be a special qualification that makes your justifications of an unaccountable national security state to be any more worthwhile than some pundit's.

I consider people who reject this state and courageously stand up for the right thing to be the real experts. If Snowden was an Iranian or a Chinese, you'd be finding out he was a hero.

Snowden and Greenwald are heroes.