The establishment is veering completely off the rails:<p><i>Former NSA director Mike Hayden, in a speech to the Bipartisan Policy Center last week, dismissed the nation’s most outspoken transparency groups and privacy advocates as “nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous twentysomethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years.”</i>
This is from a magazine founded by William F Buckley, Jr. Quite possibly the conservative antithesis to Noam Chomsky. The only people in favor of these programs are those who gain power from them through the imbalance of information they provide.
Coming from the NR, this represents a real (albeit small) addition to the growing chorus of concerned voices.<p>And it only increases my respect for the leakers' strategy of releasing new information bit-by-bit: it allows a parade of NSA apologists to concoct a fresh new excuse for each revelation, then look like the untrustworthy puppets they are once the next abuse blows their ad hoc rationale out of the water.