David Brooks on Leaks

From "When Governments Go Bad":

This scandal arises from a larger cultural virus: leakaphobia. Every administration centralizes power more tightly than the one before and is more paranoid about leaks than the one before. Every administration successively narrows the circle of debate, forsaking wide deliberation for the sake of reducing leaks (except the politically useful ones). Why do they do this? Because people who go into government not only have a tendency to want to control other people but also to control information.

…

People can only have faith in a government that self-restrains, and there’s little evidence of that now.

I have no idea why I wanted to post that. It must have reminded me of something else, but I can't quite put my finger on what.