http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/08/AR2007060802496.html
America's Secret Obsession
By Ted Gup
Sunday, June 10, 2007; B01
"If you guard your toothbrushes and diamonds with equal zeal, you'll
probably lose fewer toothbrushes and more diamonds."
-- Former national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy
* * *
In April 1971, CIA officer John Seabury Thomson paddled his aluminum
canoe across the Potomac on his daily commute from his home in
Maryland to CIA headquarters in Langley. When he reached the Virginia
shore, he noticed a milky substance clouding the waters around Pulp
Run. A fierce environmentalist, Thomson traced the pollution to its
source: his employer. The murky white discharge was a chemical mash,
the residue of thousands of liquefied secrets that the agency had
been quietly disposing of in his beloved river. He single-handedly
brought the practice to a halt.
Nearly four decades later, though, that trickle of secrets would be a
tsunami that would capsize Thomson's small craft. Today the nation's
obsession with secrecy is redefining public and private institutions
and taking a toll on the lives of ordinary citizens. Excessive
secrecy is at the root of multiple scandals -- the phantom weapons of
mass destruction, the collapse of Enron, the tragedies traced to
Firestone tires and the arthritis drug Vioxx, and more. In this
self-proclaimed "Information Age," our country is on the brink of
becoming a secretocracy, a place where the right to know is being
replaced by the need to know.
For the past six years, I've been exploring the resurgent culture of
secrecy. What I've found is a confluence of causes behind it, among
them the chill wrought by 9/11, industry deregulation, the long
dominance of a single political party, fear of litigation and
liability and the threat of the Internet. But perhaps most alarming
to me was the public's increasing tolerance of secrecy. Without
timely information, citizens are reduced to mere residents, and
representative government atrophies into a representational image of
democracy as illusory as a hologram.
* * *
The explosion in government secrecy since 9/11 has been breathtaking.
In 1995, according to the Information Security Oversight Office, the
stamp of classification -- "confidential," "secret," "top secret,"
etc. -- was wielded about 3.6 million times, mostly to veil existing
secrets in new documents. Ten years later, it was used a staggering
14.2 million times (though some of the bump-up was the result of
increased use of the Internet for government communications). That
works out to 1,600 classification decisions every hour, night and
day, all year long. (And not one of those secrets is believed to
reveal where Osama bin Laden is.)
Managing this behemoth has required a vast expansion in the ranks of
those cleared to deal in secrets. By 2004, the line of 340,000 people
waiting to receive a security clearance would have stretched 100
miles -- from Washington to Richmond. Many must still wait a year or
more. And the cost of securing those secrets -- as much as $7.7
billion in safes, background checks, training and information
security -- is about equal to the entire budget for the Environmental
Protection Agency.
But the notion that information is more credible because it's secret
is increasingly unfounded. In fact, secret information is often more
suspect because it hasn't been subjected to open debate. Those with
their own agendas can game the system, over-classifying or
stove-piping self-serving intelligence to shield it from scrutiny.
Those who cherry-picked intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war
could ignore anything that contradicted it. Even now, some members of
Congress tell me that they avoid reading classified reports for fear
that if they do, the edicts of secrecy will bar them from discussing
vital public issues.
Real secrets -- blueprints for nuclear weapons, specific troop
movements, the identities of covert operatives in the field --
deserve to be safeguarded. But when secrecy is abused, the result is
a dangerous disdain that leads to officials exploiting secrecy for
short-term advantage (think of the Valerie Plame affair or the White
House leaking selected portions of National Intelligence Estimates to
bolster flagging support for the Iraq war). Then disregard for the
real need for secrecy spreads to the public. WhosaRat.com reveals the
names of government witnesses in criminal cases. Other Web sites seek
to out covert operatives or to post sensitive security documents online.
* * *
The abuse of secrecy is emboldened by technology, which hands those
who would stymie transparency a powerful new tool. Federal courts
have adopted an electronic management system that is the gateway to
about 26 million cases. The hope was that the system would augment
the already formidable measures taken to conceal the results of
sealed cases and to dissuade the curious, including journalists, from
prying into them. So the system was given a default setting that
responds "Case Does Not Exist" whenever anyone inquires about sealed cases.
Among the cases whose existence the system would deny are many in
which leading U.S. corporations -- including Ford, General Motors,
America Online, Sprint, McDonnell Douglas, Goodyear and Sunbeam --
are defendants.
In my research, I learned of a case involving a child named Destiny
who had allegedly been injured by a product manufactured by Graco, a
prominent maker of children's furnishings and equipment. The case was
settled in 2001. Attorneys for both sides declined to discuss it and
said they had not alerted the government to any alleged risk posed by
the product. There was no finding of liability and today, the product
still can't be identified.
In March 2005, Graco agreed to pay the Consumer Product Safety
Commission a record $4 million after the government accused it of not
reporting defects promptly. About 12 million Graco products had been
recalled over a decade, some implicated in the deaths of six children
and injuries to 900 others. Destiny was not counted among them.
In response to my inquiry, the federal judge in the case invited me
to petition the court to have the case unsealed. But first, I was
told, I would have to sign a promise not to reveal what I learned. I declined.
Courts that once served as an effective early warning system for
public dangers now collude in suppressing them. Other sealed cases
involve racial, sex and age discrimination; antitrust issues; fair
labor practices; and racketeering -- all litigation in which the
public has a profound interest.
Sealed court cases aren't the only way that excessive secrecy puts
the public at risk. Fourteen states have signed secrecy agreements
with the Agriculture Department under which they will be notified
about contaminated foods but agree not to ask about the source of
those foods or the markets and restaurants that carry them. A federal
database set up to warn people about dangerous doctors is
inaccessible to the general public and available only to those in the
health-care field. A government-run database designed to give the
public early warnings about unsafe vehicles and tires does not reveal
certain negative findings out of concern that they may "cause
substantial competitive harm" to the manufacturers.
That same excessive secrecy is reflected in the states. Sensitive to
issues of privacy, Ohio refuses to release the names of more than
33,000 drivers who have been convicted of driving drunk five or more
times. Last year, two Ohio college students were killed by a driver
on his way to his 12th drunk-driving conviction. The casualties of
such secrecy play out in state after state.
* * *
Not even the past is safe from the clutches of excessive secrecy. In
the manuscript reading room at the Library of Congress, a public
archive holding the papers of many eminent Americans, I asked for a
list of everything I'm not allowed to see because of "national
security." Some of what's on the list is ludicrous: 1953
correspondence of then-ambassador to Italy Clare Booth Luce, stamped
"Top Secret;" economist Gerhard Colm's 1946-48 papers on German
currency reform; a general's diary from June 1944.
But other items raise more disturbing questions. Among them are
materials, still considered classified even though they may have been
used in front-page stories or in bestselling books, donated by
leading journalists and authors, including four Pulitzer
Prize-winning reporters: former New York Times writers Hedrick Smith,
Neil Sheehan and William Safire, and former Washington Post
investigative reporter George Lardner. Today, no member of the public
-- not even the authors who donated them -- has access to those
papers unless the government formally declassifies them.
Each year, the State Department prepares several volumes of official
diplomatic history known as the Foreign Relations of the United
States. For years, the CIA, saying it must protect its "sources and
methods," has withheld or selectively shared its records with the
authors of the series, sometimes holding up volumes for years and
leaving glaring omissions in others.
A few years ago, the State Department and the CIA entered into a
memorandum of understanding on the FRUS series. The department denied
my repeated requests for a copy of that agreement, which is not
classified but is, like a growing number of government documents,
considered to be for "official use only." Not even members of the
State Department's Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic
Documentation were allowed to see it. Department historian Marc
Susser told me that the agreement permits the CIA to read not only
those portions of the draft histories related to agency activities
but the entire volume in advance and gives the agency a voice in when
the histories are published, lest they come out at a time of
heightened sensitivity. Beyond that, he would say little about the
agreement -- not because it holds critical secrets, but because the
State Department wants to stay in the CIA's good graces.
* * *
Even before 9/11, the nation was expending enormous energy sifting
through historical records that had been public for 25 years or more,
searching for anything that might aid terrorists. At the National
Archives, an Energy Department employee, relying on a list of key or
"dirty" words, spent month after month going through hundreds of
thousands of dusty records for anything that might be used against
the nation and therefore require reclassification.
He and a cadre of security specialists were focused on the nuclear
threat. On Sept. 10, 2001, he found himself perusing a box of
decades-old files in which he found records chronicling the story of
a B-25 bomber that flew into the Empire State Building in a thick fog
on July 28, 1945, killing 14 people and traumatizing the city of New
York. But neither "airplane" nor "skyscraper" appeared on his word
list, and he had the records returned to the open shelves. The next
day he realized that he had been staring into the face of the real peril.
It was a humbling lesson in the limits of secrecy -- and a stark
reminder that what we have to fear is not information but a lack of
imagination.
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