It does seem difficult balancing an open and free society with mechanisms for protecting and maintaining government secrets, and punishing those who betray those secrets.
Do you believe it is plainly unconstitutional simply because it posting to twitter involves words?
Democratic governments where the premise is "of the people by the people" I believe it is be highly undemocratic and corrupting to allow government to hold secrets from the very people that granted them power and are suppose to hold them to account via the ballot box
Democracy can only work when the citizens are informed about what their government is doing
The 1st amendment clearly states the Congress can not pass any law abridging speech. The espionage act clearly prevents whistleblowers and others from coming forward with information the government does not desire to be public which today is more often to be documents and evidence of crimes and embarrassing actions by government
I do understand the dangers of a government that can arbitrarily declare something a "state secret" and subsequently stifle speech on some arbitrary grounds.. but at the same time, can you recognize that there may be
legitimate grounds to forbid dissemination of particular information on the grounds that it is advantageous to hostile entities, and thus a detriment to the US as a whole?
While conceptually I can see such information can exist, I take it the same way I do free speech as a concept, over all I believe the negatives of allowing governments to hold secrets to be more damaging than any positives
Just like I do not believe tech companies, or governments to censor "misinformation" or "disinformation" because the negatives of controlled speech far far far out weigh any net positives that would come from censorship
Back to state secrets, I think the clear and obvious abuse of the practice should make it more than clear we should cease giving government agencies the
"benefit of the doubt" and massively shift the Overton window back in the direction of total transparency
State secrets, if they exist at all, should be EXTREMELY abnormal, rare, and continually in need of justification. Today however state secrets are the default, standard procedure, and we need justification to open records which is a complete inversion of how it should be
Do you believe it is plainly unconstitutional simply because it posting to twitter involves words?