The flip side is that the rights and freedoms we take for granted in the US are fundamentally upheld by the people believing that we have them. The broad first pass in this case is referenced by the 1st amendment, which we generally take to mean living in an open society where we have the freedom to report on what we can observe. This thread being full of people chiming in to defend the general concept, regardless of whatever small-picture legal theory has motivated the government to do this, demonstrates this dynamic. Ultimately, the more people that naively say "These actions are plainly un-American", the better off we are.
You are saying that it is plainly un-American to have military secrets?
They go back to George Washington, before the founding of the country.
The rights and freedoms we have are not absolute. They are also tempered by responsibility to maintain, sometimes by force, the ability to have those freedoms.
Of course, all of us would like to live without the need for police or military. But the fact of the actual (not ideal) world is that there are always bullies and authoritarians who are happy to take what they want and rule how they like, not by assent or fairness, but by deceit, force, and violence. Anyone who wants to live a self-determining life or live in a democracy must be better armed than the bullies and expansionist autocracies, or they will soon be ruled by them.
Military and technological secrets are a key part of maintaining an advantage over expansionist autocracies, and are at least as American than Apple Pie.
So, NO, people claiming that we should not have a military or secret technologies are not making us better off — they are literally helping undermine the only force that keeps us from being ruled by the likes of Putin or Xi. Ask any Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Latvian, or Taiwanese. They did not enjoy the privilege of growing up well-enough protected to be ignorant of the threat. Consider that before posting that ignorance.
You do realize there is a huge distinction between having military secrets, and persecuting private citizens who report on things that are openly discoverable, right?
This tension has also been there the whole time. Leaking classified information is a crime, while propagating information that has leaked into the public domain is not. For good reason - those with deliberate access to classified information have been entrusted to keep it secret, whereas the public and the press have not.
As far as military advantage, we are made stronger by the military needing to stay ahead of the investigations of an open society. Because if private citizens can discover things from mere curiosity then foreign spy agencies most certainly can. If you care about military strength, attempts by the military to maintain superiority by lazily asserting control over civil society should concern you very much.
Seeing and disseminating info are two vastly different things.
Seeing something, vs taking a photograph, vs publishing a set of photographs are very different things.
Assembling a set of information, making a drawing, documenting in a more digestible form, analysis, those are all actions more related to leaking classified information than publishing info someone else found.
That distinction is what the laws are about. Plus, the legal conventions surrounding prior restraint are strong, but not absolute.
So, if you're talking about publishing a picture of the front of the Pentagon building, which thousands walk/drive by every day, fine. Using dozens of visitors to compile an architectural drawing of the interior locations of guarded rooms and publishing that? Not so much.
Inhibiting the compilation and free exchange of information is absolutely an inhibitor to adversaries. Even if they could technically see any of it publicly, it becomes insurmountable to see all of it publicly, or enough to compile an accurate picture.
That is why information is highly compartmentalized and distributed only on a need-to-know basis. I'm literally now working on components to a Navy machine that I can only guess what are the other parts and how they fit together. My parts aren't classified, but fall under CUI, Confidential Unclassified Info".
There's a very good reason that. E.g., even though you and I could walk to the door of every data center and power substation in the country, these things are kept obscure. Every data center I've seen is extremely nondescript. If you start assembling the exact location and configuration of every such installation, you'll soon and rightly see some friendly guys with FBI badges.
No professional pretends that this is an absolute protection, anymore than any professional pretends that an uncrackable safe can be built.
Of course a foreign spy agency could discover anything a curious citizen might. But they can't discover everything that every curious citizen might.
The point is to increase the workload and uncertainty for the adversaries.
Permitting open information compilation and publication at all times would dramatically reduce that workload, especially with the internet. So, look and be curious all you want. Just don't start compiling and publishing it.
And in this case, using drones to look "over the fence" into a USAF secret testing grounds should indeed get you targeted for investigation real quick, just as it would any foreign adversary's agent doing the same thing.
And no, it is not an argument that "stay[ing] ahead of the investigations of an open society" 'makes us stronger'. That is no more of an argument that curious hackers digitally wandering around some org's network will make them stronger. Yes, it is the responsibility of both to keep themselves secure, including employing white-hat hackers and such, but that doesn't mean that randos should be tolerated.
