Comment Re:Caution is warranted (Score 1) 499
It is best to be cautious of who we let into the door for federal service.
Yes, god forbid the federal service be representative of the people. It should only have a certain brand of dyed in the wool pro-government fanatics working for it.
No... the opposite is true. "Snowden" would never have happened if there had been more people like him in government. If more people were willing to question government, and step up when they saw something wrong, then the oversight committees, and internal audit processes would have actually been working properly. There would have been people he could have reported the issues to, and genuine internal investigation and audits would have happened with genuine results.
If it had been working properly Snowden's revelations wouldn't have happened because the level of abuse going on wouldn't have risen to that level in the first place.
Its important to keep actual spies out of sensitive government jobs. Its important to keep people with easily leveraged liabilities -- gambling problems, debt problems, etc out of sensitive government jobs. But a healthy distrust of government is just that HEALTHY.
One of the reasons government doesn't function well, is that it self selects people who are convinced it does. You can't fix what is broken if you only hire people are convinced nothing is wrong.
We desperately need to staff the government with people who have a healthy distrust of the very programs they run, who GENUINELY recognize the potential for abuse, and who are genuinely receptive to reports of abuse.
But those people are systematically turned away.