Jubbergun wrote:
I think it is set up this way because an "individual" doesn't have a legitimate interest in asking that someone receives a security clearance, but a company providing services to the government would have a legitimate interest in doing so.
No, it's set up like that because there are no legitimate interests there at all.
The secrecy crap has wasted trillions of dollars (as in, assuming black-budgeting has been 5% of the defense budget for the last 50 years, that is enough to alone and without any other cuts cover the entire national debt - in reality, it's probably many times that), it has turned potential allies into hardened enemies (basically all of South America and Africa plus Iran), murdered American citizens (MKULTRA, the JFK assassination, LSD testing), and has left a legacy of malfeasance and abject, pathetic failure from Vietnam to Cuba to Lebanon to East Germany to Afghanistan to China.
It's not only setting an unimaginably vast pile of money on fire, it's choking on the smoke while doing so.
In that period of American history you like to idealize, we got by without top secret clearance etc, and managed to successfully wage wars on both offense and defense without it. And the argument that "things have changed" isn't valid, because since the time of Pericles (part of his famous speech was "lol intelligence agencies") secret services have been more trouble to their own people than to national enemies.
Jubbergun wrote:
Aestu wrote:
I doubt Galileo would have been persecuted if he was wrong.
I doubt the clergy involved with accusing him of and trying him for heresy thought he was right.
They feared him because at some level they knew he was and - as with you and other like-minded people - they didn't want their self-interested world view disrupted by inconvenient facts. Better to stick with willful ignorance.
Historical proof? As Galileo walked away from the tribunal, he was heard to say, "Nonetheless, it [the Earth] does move."
