There is today a mass of information on the current NSA scandal, along with the Defense Department activities which are in reality a separate scandal. . .
William Arkin is a first rate analyst and he deserves a round of applause for having published Code Names when he did. That took guts.
Check this out . . .
Arkin is as I said, a first-rate analyst, but he has been acting strangely lately, as if he had been taken over by the dark side of the force. . . His latest stuff. . .I would check out his last four posts, are definately worth a read. . . . I think everybody is very interested to see how this all turns out.
At this point in time from a Weberian perspective of two dueling forms of social domination, in our model two ideal types - "the Reaganist State", a label for a modern form of patrimonial domination as an ideal type, and the "rational bureaucratic state administration" of the early 21st Century as the second type. Reality will seem to fall somewhere in the middle, and if not, you replace the ideal type with a new anti-thesis. Quite an undertaking of course, and the results are only conceptual models. Yet, they could explain to us why we might see more US government officers coming forward. Should our "elected representatives" subvert their oath to the US Constitution, it may be that more of our career officers will make their final appearance. . . this will be the final duel of the Reaganist State against what is left of the former US's rational bureaucracy, those officers who stand true to their oath to the Constitution of the United States, reject what has been placed before them . . . there are sooo many scandals swirling about at this point, that it is hard to keep track of what is going on, to keep the various betrayals in perspective. The least of these is certainly not the behaviour of Congress, which it must be remembered individually swore exactly the same oath. . .