General Discussion

babylonsister

(171,032 posts) Tue Mar 20, 2018, 05:46 PM Mar 2018

What Is Donald Trump Hiding?

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/all-the-presidents-ndas/555884/

What Is Donald Trump Hiding?

A report that the president had senior White House staff sign non-disclosure agreements is the latest reminder of how much he conceals from public view.

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

Conor Friedersdorf 10:53 AM ET Politics

Donald Trump has little regard for the privacy of the masses. During the 2016 campaign, he bought access to psychological profiles of millions of voters created by scraping and studying their Facebook accounts without most of them having granted permission. He signed a bill repealing FCC rules that limited the ability of Internet service providers to sell data on our browsing habits. Like his predecessor, he presides over surveillance agencies that collect metadata on the private communications of hundreds of millions of Americans whether they like it or not. And his administration pays a private corporation for access to billions of photographs that reveal where and when particular cars drove on public roads and highways.

Yet even as President Trump exploits information so private that gathering it would have been unthinkable a generation ago, he engages in unprecedented efforts to prevent voters from getting a full, accurate picture of matters bearing on his public life.

snip//

Law-abiding citizens of modest means are subject to inescapable government surveillance and opaque corporate data-gathering in their private lives, while the most powerful elected officials and many of the most powerful figures in tech— which rivals government in its ability to intrude on the privacy of billions—marshal their wealth and power to obscure even actions that profoundly affect the public sphere.

snip//

One wonders what the public would find out about its elected officials if the law ceased to allow them to enforce any non-disclosure agreement pertaining to past misbehavior even in their private ventures, or from barring assessments of their character by the people who know them best.

What would we learn about Trump in particular?

The current Congress is unlikely to force any information out of the White House. But it should end the ability of federal officials to enforce most non-disclosure agreements, whether against a mistress or a wronged woman or a former underling in the private sector or campaign staff. Speaking truth about people seeking or holding positions of great civic power should not be verboten in a representative democracy.