Charlie Reeve

Secrecy Bad

Wed Dec 11 17:39:12 2002
208.152.73.250

Secrecy Bad

If it's true that knowledge is power — and it is — then secrecy, which denies people knowledge, is bad.

Of course, there is justification for reasonable secrecy in time of war. You would not, for example, want to publicize the schedule of troopship sailings or the date of a planned invasion, etc. Nor would you want to publicize some information gained by monitoring if the person or people being monitored didn't know they were under surveillance.

That being said, the government has an inclination to make classified all sorts of information that is harmless. Except for a presidential pardon by Bill Clinton, the son of a prominent historian would have gone to prison for giving a satellite photo of a Soviet ship to Jane's, an outfit that is the world's best compiler of military information.

Now, the Soviet Union knew it had an aircraft carrier, obviously. It also knew we had satellites capable of photographing anything on land or sea. It knew we were photographing its military facilities. So what harm was done? No harm at all. The photograph should never have been classified in the first place. Doing so only denied the people knowledge that they were entitled to have.

And here's the rub: Governments have a tendency to classify everything. An old colleague of mine who served in Army counterintelligence said they used to clip articles out of Japanese newspapers, stamp them "classified" and send them into headquarters. You think that's an exaggeration?

Another friend of mine recently spent two years trying to get his dossier from the FBI through the Freedom of Information Act. The FBI insisted it contained classified information and could not be released. Finally, a federal judge ordered it released. And do you know what it contained? Nothing but newspaper articles about my friend.

There are far fewer conspiracies than there are examples of stupidity, incompetence and a keen desire to cover up both. There is still stuff classified that dates back to World War I. After all, you wouldn't want a dead Kaiser Wilhelm to know what we knew about the imperial German army.

When I was last on active duty, I had a Secret clearance. But one day I had to type a report that, once I typed it, was classified Top Secret. The commanding officer decided to make a change, and when I reached for the report to make the change, he said: can't have that. It's Top Secret."

"But sir," I said. "I just typed the report. I know everything in it (which, by the way, was useless information)."

"It doesn't matter," he said. "You don't have a Top Secret clearance. Somebody who does will have to make the change."

That's a true story. Never, never underestimate the stupidity to be found in government ranks, both civilian and military. The more you learn about how government really works, the more religious you become, because it's obvious that without God's help, we would never have won a war.

I've read estimates that two-thirds of American history remains classified. I don't know if that's true. I haven't any means of measuring it. I'm sure there are tons of harmless information still classified. I'm also sure that a lot of what we think we know isn't true. Governments, in addition to their tendency to classify and keep secret both the truth and miscellaneous trivia, also have a tendency to lie.

Most government bureaucrats and politicians know darn well that knowledge is power, and they intend to make sure it is they, not the people, who have the power. Sort of the opposite of what our forefathers intended.

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