Do You Wanna Know a Secret?

Before World War II, so the story goes, an American Secretary of State refused to scan intercepted transmissions of a hostile power on the grounds that gentlemen don’t read other people’s mail.



Times certainly do change. For the United States and other countries, reading other people's mail or its equivalent is today an essential component of national security.

And a controversial one.

The never-ending stream of leaks and media disclosures concerning details of various surveillance programs testifies to that. The latest of the disclosures, first in the New York Times and then in other media, focused on a Bush administration program to scan international banking records in order to check on cash flows that may be linked to terrorism.

Maybe there's more to this particular story than has come to light up to now, but it's hard not to find this leak worrisome. The argument that the administration deserved what it got because it's often abused secrecy seems wildly beside the point even if one agrees. People who say that should recall that two wrongs don't make a right.

That aside, some general principles may be helpful in thinking about this case and others like it.

It goes without saying that the central issue concerns the rights and wrongs of secrecy. Sometimes it's warranted; sometimes not. The problem is telling the difference.

Generally speaking, there's a presumption in favor of secrecy when individual privacy is at stake. The reason is easy to grasp in a day and age like this, when we're all uneasily aware that large quantities of information about us repose in shadowy data banks, accessible to whom and for what purpose we have little or no idea.

The presumption is the other way around — against secrecy — when it's a question of secrecy as practiced by groups. That is eminently true when the group in question is government. This isn't to say government may never rightly keep what it's doing from prying eyes, but only that when government wants to keep secrets it needs to be prepared to make a persuasive case. “Trust us, we know what we're doing” really isn't good enough.

Here, too, the reasoning is obvious. Democracy requires accountability. No matter how well-intentioned, high-minded, and good-hearted public officials may be, the tendency will be irresistible for some to cover up mistakes and cut corners of all kinds if they're not held publicly accountable for their decisions and their actions.

Still, this rule isn't absolute. Secrecy's claims sometimes trump the claims of accountability, and that is notably the case in the national security sphere.

When the claims of accountability and security clash, the conflict can only be settled in light of a more basic principle: the common good. The unilateral assertions of interested parties — leakers of classified information, news media that publish it, government officials who want to keep it secret — that they are acting for the common good are inherently suspect.

Just as “trust us” is unpersuasive when it comes from government, so too are knee-jerk media invocations of the “public's right to know.” In a free and open society, however, no independent authority exists to adjudicate such conflicts before the fact. It could hardly be otherwise in America, given the First Amendment's strictures against prior censorship.

Very likely the republic will survive both abuses of secrecy and unwarranted disclosures of classified information. But to say it will survive doesn't mean it will suffer no harm, from one direction or the other. Or, quite possibly, from both of them.

Russell Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, D.C. You can email him at RShaw10290@aol.com.

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Russell Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, DC. He is the author of more than twenty books and previously served as secretary for public affairs of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops/United States Catholic Conference.

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