Daniel Ellsberg Quotes
There are some things that should not be leaked without authorization.
Ellsberg, Daniel. Interview by Steve Inskeep. NPR Morning Edition, 1 July 2011.
Glaxo issued Avandia a drug for diabetes, but the company began receiving reports of heart attacks and other cardio-vascular problems occurring with the drug. A team gathered the data and summarized it for the Senior Management. Drug companies are required by law to inform the FDA of any adverse data that they may know about relative to any of their drugs. Glaxo did not. Further, the Senior management ordered the data “suppressed” and it was so for a decade. Finally the e-mail was leaked to a Congressional Committee when there were other data coming in about the problems with Avandia. The FDA began a new review of the safety of Avandia, but the company had the profits for a decade. Some people had dead friends and relatives. It was generally thought that this sort of thing would never happen in an industry where all the companies are very substantial and a loss of income of any drug would not bankrupt the company, but more and more incidents began coming to light in the early 21st century.
The “wrong” people to Helms. Were Americans who disagreed with his methods and politics—especially members of Congress who wanted to make the CIA more accountable for its actions. If nothing is ever written down and everything is secret, there is no practical way of holding the agency accountable in a democracy. Helms was later convicted to perjury for lying to Congress.
Assuring the public of the privacy and confidentiality of the national census:
The large credit reporting and data gathering companies collected information on Americans without their consent and then sold their information through “data brokers” to companies who would then try and sell products and services based on the information they obtained. In many cases the brokers sold the information to fraudulent operations who swindled or committed fraud against the names they bought. When members of Congress investigated the industry, the companies who collected the data claimed that they had no idea that there were consumer rip offs they were facilitating and claimed to have “rules” that prevented such use. But they said that they could not possibly know what the data brokers were doing as they were independent companies.
Daniel Ellsberg is an American economist, political activist, and former United States military analyst. While employed by the RAND Corporation, Ellsberg precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of the U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York Times, The Washington Post and other newspapers.
