Second-class? What about people in Gitmo, people without security clearances, people not in the NSA? Sorry, classified. On principle. Outsiders are not guilty until proven innocent, they are guilty, period. Insiders are innocent, period. That's how I see it when I max out the contrast. That China or other countries are that way is no excuse to do the same, it is even more reason to be not like that. The US is not the only country doing it, but it's the most powerful and it has the people in it that are used more than any to freedom. If the US falls too deep, the world would get real dark real quick, that's how I see it.

> "How many people have been tortured?"

How would I know? e.g.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2012/1212/9-11-trial-An...

This blob of classified is, to those without clearance, just one, big, and in parts kind black, blob. It seems to like to snatch up things and return them 50 years later. Anything connected to that blob is by default important to me.

There also was something recently about something like this on HN, but I couldn't find the link since the exact title escaped me. IIRC the defense attorney mentioned the plaintiff had been waterboarded 118 times, and the judge called him to order, because torture is classified. The question is, are some things mistakes just mistakes made in good faith, or does this structure of power consider itself beyond accusation out of principle?

> I don't even know how to guess. A few hundred? Divided by 6 billion? 5 X 10^-6 percent of the world's population, maybe?

It would not be 0.00something of some imaginary unnamed unit, it would not be a pure number in a vacuum, it would hundreds of people, each of them indivisible. And the severity matters, too. Don't forget the drone strikes; being killed and then first responders getting hit with a second, delayed strike, is "just" one event, but for how much torture does it count? Why can't honest mistakes not be acknowledged, and maybe even explained? Why can't there be consequences for mistakes out of neglect or other reasons? Because everybody else has to go first? Then we're fucked, because everybody else says that, too.

I would love for US media and citizens to expose such shortcomings in my country and all, nothing could be more helpful and welcome. It's not about pointing fingers because others aren't as bad as the US, not to mention worse, or because anyone could claim to sit on a high horse, it's about everybody else being that bad or worse, and the US being so immensely powerful and influential. In my mind, the US should be the best bet against such things, not the country that does them the best.

And to me a deep, continuous concern is not "outrage", either. Declaring something "too much outrage" is not a valid argument for something, and a useless argument against something. It's really kind of a red herring.

How total has control to become before you start worrying about it falling into the wrong hands, into real deep shit at some point down the road? How would total control be safeguarded? Would even honestly striving for total control for the sake of "good" not be an argument for all other states to completey controlling their own territory, too? How would you try to ensure that you'd a.) always stay "two-tiered but good" and b.) never loose the race against the other fascist systems?

So, assuming the answer is "you really can't, you just have to hope and work hard and what not", how is the race itself not bad and crazy? Then why play with such kind of fires? Because it's like a social nuclear bomb and we can't even comprehend the scope before we detonated a few, a chain reaction with states that are just interacting with each other and all have more scapegoats than things to excuse? Why can't the information age not be the age of being well informed, instead of being well informed on?

> Politicians live in the public eye.

Are you serious? In their private lives maybe, but these power structures are decisively not (trying to be) in the public eye, and as far as individuals are in the public eye.. if almost all things they say are soundbites, and if the public stops adding all those little soundbites and actions together, and has hardly any long-term memory, then the systems the "visible" individuals work for and enforce on others still becomes effectively invisible and untouchable.

> This has been shown time and again, in the US and elsewhere, that especially in the Internet age they get all the oversight needed.

Please, take me to that planet, I just don't see it sorry :/ The internet tells me more and more about how much oversight is lacking, am I holding it the wrong way or something?

> Obviously the same is becoming true for agencies, given the prevalence of leaks and whistle-blowing.

Yeah, and given how those are being treated and mostly ignored, up until Snowden anyway. In reaction to which the NSA said they'd cut down on employed engineering a bit and use more machines, and effectively you're saying this is getting better, well enough fast enough, so nobody should worry about this particular thing - because there was this one guy with this one set of documents, and because you're sure there will be more?

The thing is, the worse stuff like this gets, the harder blowing the whistle on it will be. How much change did whistlebowers achieve so far? Any, at all? And do you think it made secret police in general more transparent, or more opaque?