Quote of the Day

“The alternative to journalists making those decisions is, okay we’ll hand it all over to secret courts, and secret committees, and no one will ever know about these balances that are being struck. And the intelligence committee in the UK, I think, its members have been handpicked by the Prime Minister, and you have to say, okay we’ve got no business looking into any of this, and you have to trust Malcolm Rifkin and Diane Feinstein. But you know, every time I look at Diane Feinstein, who’s a Democrat with a great track record of causes behind her but you know she is an eighty-year old woman, I think how much does she actually understand what a twenty five-year old engineer is capable of doing, how many questions has she actually asked, what goes on inside those committees, how many of those documents that we’ve seen they’ve seen, how much have they interrogated them.”

— Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger on BBC Radio 4 Monday night, saying he not only does not believe in the democratic process of government but also thinks Senator Feinstein’s gender (notice the hypothetical engineer does not have a gender) and age (and not her experience) make her unsuited to evaluate the public interest of the stolen documents he continues to publish against two government’s objections. His solution, therefore, is for journalists — who are not elected and not held accountable to anyone save their editors — to make those decisions instead.