Sen. Al Franken: “I Assure You This Isn’t About Spying on the American People”

[starroute]

18. And just who are these "bad guys"

I'm instantly distrustful of anyone who invokes a nebulous "the bad guys" to justify government secrecy. For one thing, it's a license to keep doing it forever, because there are always bad guys of one sort of another in the world.

But the other is that it deprives the American people of things they might have an urgent need to know. If a dam upstream from you had structural weaknesses and the government kept that secret because "bad guys" could exploit the knowledge, would that be making you any safer? What about if there were safety violations at a nearby nuclear plant? And how many corporations would push to get their operations under the shield of government secrecy in order to avoid making necessary repairs or being liable for deaths and injuries if they did occur?

There's a very slippery slope here, and any line of argument which suggests that the American people can't be trusted to know about things which concern them spells death to the fundamental assumptions of democracy.