The secrecy hangover

Tom Blanton, the Director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, gave a talk about the US government's penchant for secrecy, particularly in recent years with the Bush administration and how things might be changing under President Obama. His talk was at times entertaining, alarming, hopeful and depressing, but always eye-opening. He began by pointing out that the issue of government secrecy is particularly timely at the moment, with the front-page story of the New York Times this morning being about Dick Cheney concealing the CIA programme from Congress, but swiftly moved on to emphasise that government secrecy did not begin post-9/11 and that the struggle against it has been going on a lot longer than that. The NSA has been fighting this battle since the 1980s, when the FBI Library Awareness Program came out - from the 1960s to the 1980s, the FBI wanted librarians to keep an eye out for people with foreign-sounding names or accents, and actually opened files on librarians who complained. They have gone on to fight battles about White House emails (at which point we were shown statistics on the explosion in quantity from some 200,000 emails during the Reagan administration to 220 million for George W. Bush, and the Obama administration is apparently archiving every Blackberry message too), the National Security letters (143,000 letters were sent to librarians between 2003 and 2005, and only one terrorism-related conviction resulted), among other things. He showed us graphs depicting classification and declassification over the last 20-30 years (secrecy was much less under the Clinton administration, but increased dramatically under Bush) and numerous examples of documents that have had their classifications changed, or different parts blacked out at different times - in many cases resulting in the absurd situation that by comparing the versions released at different times you can reconstruct almost the complete document. His main argument was that decisions about the level of secrecy are in many cases (arguably most cases) arbitrary and depend more on fashions in bureaucracy or desire to prevent embarrassment than actual need for secrecy. This results in a huge amount of overclassification and a culture of secrecy that can actually put people in more danger than we would be if things were more open. The most shocking example of this was the line highlighted in the 9/11 commission report stating that the attacks would most likely not have gone ahead if there had been more publicity about the arrest of Moussaoui in August 2001. Openness and sharing of information both keeps us safer and makes problems easier to fix.

This main point made, Tom Blanton moved on to discuss the Bush administration's penchant for secrecy in more detail, with numerous examples relating to Iraq and the War on Terror. Unsurprisingly, he was damning in his criticism, arguing that there was a 'testosterone attack' in the White House after 9/11, and that in situation after situation, a small group of very powerful people made decisions and kept them secret, and it is only just now starting to come out. President Obama was elected on a platform of transparency - "sunlight is the best disinfectant" - but isn't quite living up to his own ideals as yet, releasing some information but by no means all. However, change is slow, and still almost half of the top officials in the administration have not yet been appointed, so an awful lot of people in government are still operating under old assumptions - perhaps therefore this is a hopeful sign that eventually things will improve further, but on the other hand, inevitably "the longer they are in government, the more they will have to hide", even if only out of embarrassment. The realist has to admit that governments will always want to keep things secret to a greater or lesser extent, and that it is much easier to talk about openness when you're not in power. But at least if you have an administration whose instinct is that you should be as open as possible, combined with people like Tom Blanton and the NSA and all the other people in government who have exposed things in the past, you have a chance that the unnecessary secrecy will be kept to a minimum, and we will all be safer as a result.

This was a fascinating and informative session, resonating with both my belief in freedom of information (as Tom Blanton pointed out, the raison d'etre of librarians) and my interest in American politics, and is definitely one of the highlights of the conference so far.