Is our anger as atheists invalid?

[gcomeau]

75. Umm... no. Not really at all.

1. Absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability.

Except to... you know.. the rest of the government and the elected officials that oversee the group. You can argue that oversight is incompetent or misguided or ineffective, but it's there. And if you want to argue any of those above things the fault would be with those responsible for that oversight would it not?


2. No tolerance for questions or critical inquiry.

By this I assume you mean "no willingness to accommodate our desires that they just declassify all their classified material so everyone in the country can all look at it"


3. No meaningful financial disclosure regarding budget, expenses such as an independently audited financial statement.

Last I checked Congress set the NSA budget and audited it's expenditures.

4. Unreasonable fear about the outside world, such as impending catastrophe, evil conspiracies and persecutions.

More accurately, vast swaths of Americans have that fear, which drives them to vote for people who pander to it (woo, Patriot Act, we're sooooo much safer now...), who then set the mission parameters for the intelligence community.

But yes, that fear and paranoia *also* exist in that community... so you could mark down one here. Although technically that's also kind of their job.


5. There is no legitimate reason to leave, former followers are always wrong in leaving, negative or even evil.

And by this I assume you're talking about people who leave with classified materials illegally secreted upon their persons, and thus there's no legitimate reason to commit a felony, flee the agency, and then disseminate those materials to, say, the Chinese media?


On the other hand there are HORDES of ex employees of the NSA who were allowed to leave just fine while not trying to steal classified materials.


6. Former members often relate the same stories of abuse and reflect a similar pattern of grievances.
7. There are records, books, news articles, or television programs that document the abuses of the group/leader.

See above.


8. Followers feel they can never be "good enough".

???


9. The group/leader is always right.

Pretty sure that's anathema to intelligence operations, in which you are NEVER supposed to assume your results are infallible and always look for worst case scenarios of what happens if your analysis is screwed up or your data is inaccurate. You may be confusing the Intel community with, say, how the Bush administration referred to and employed the Intel community's findings.


10. The group/leader is the exclusive means of knowing "truth" or receiving validation, no other process of discovery is really acceptable or credible.


I have never heard that the director of the NSA was the sole source of all intelligence, and all the analysts and operatives employed there were getting their information from them and not the other way around. That's remarkable! How does one guy manage all that?