President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

I understand. Just don't agree.

The way to deal with that isn't to criminalize information and erode the first amendment. It's to try to prevent the theft in the first place by creating a steep price to pay for it. Both civilly and criminally. Punish any entity that requires your information but then doesn't protect it -- making them liable for any damage you incur because of their negligence. Punish someone who steals that information. Punish the person who gets the information off the internet and then uses it fraudulently.

But I don't ever want to be in a minority report kind of society where you think you can prevent harm to people somehow by making it a more and more authoritarian world -- where you limit information in a paternalistic way, on the grounds that you are protecting people. Which is the barn door I think you are opening with how you feel. Take it to its possible conclusion, and you are not just be talking about your credit card number appearing on some Bulgarian website. You are talking about websites having to get what they publish approved by the government.

 

One has nothing to do with the other.

This board is privately owned. I am having a discussion about some very basic rights, such as freedom of speech, that the government shouldn't be allowed to restrict. If the government stepped in and put some restrictions on this site, yeah, I'd have a big problem with it. If the person who owns the site creates the terms for his site? That is his right. Nobody has to use the site if they don't want to.

It's apples and oranges. Just as a country club can create rules that its members agree to adhere to, for example.

 

Which was how Daniel Ellsberg ended up staring at espionage charges.

EDIT: Just saw that @Azrael beat me to it.

 

Our government was lying to the public, and he saw his act as an act of civil disobedience. He was actually willing to suffer the consequences.

Regardless, I think you are way missing the important part of it. With the hindsight of history especially, I don't understand why anyone would look at that episode and want to point out a security clearance, or some nondisclosure agreement he may have violated, as why he should have been punished. To me, it would be like looking at what Martin Luther King Jr. did, and not seeing the contribution to the civil rights movement, but instead pointing out that he was violating the law when he organized a sit in and got arrested.