In a democracy, do not elected officials have a right to keep secrets from the people?

[cascadiance]

10. I think this kind of spying (if it is going on) is a special case...

If everyone is being spied upon, and everyone's secrets is being held somewhere where they could be blackmailed, then even having "oversight" by a select few (but especially a "select" few) in this case is not adequate, as all of those "selected" could know and be kept in check from alerting the rest of of us there is a problem because in fact they are being blackmailed to do so. That is what is really ugly about this situation. The nature of the problem that is being kept secret is also the means to keep anyone from having a reasonable check on it's appropriateness and constitutionality as well.

That is why we need some real carefully crafted laws and publicly announced mechanisms for watching this sort of thing, and known punishments, etc. for violations of these laws to make sure that there isn't an ability to do blanket blackmail over everyone who could "blow a whistle" on them, so that we don't have to have people moving to Hong Kong in order to feel like they can escape the "blackmail arm" of the hidden government.