Democracy in the Dark

The Seduction of Government Secrecy

Frederick A. O. Schwarz

• Editorial: The New Press
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781620970522
• Categoría: Politique et relations internationales
• Categoría: Sécurité nationale

"A timely and provocative book exploring the origins of the national security state and the urgent challenge of reining it in" ( The Washington Post ). From Dick Cheney's man-sized safe to the National Security Agency's massive intelligence gathering, secrecy has too often captured the American government's modus operandi better than the ideals of the Constitution. In this important book, Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr., who was chief counsel to the US Church Committee on Intelligence—which uncovered the FBI's effort to push Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide; the CIA's enlistment of the Mafia to try to kill Fidel Castro; and the NSA's thirty-year program to get copies of all telegrams leaving the United States—uses examples ranging from the dropping of the first atomic bomb and the Cuban Missile Crisis to Iran–Contra and 9/11 to illuminate this central question: How much secrecy does good governance require? Schwarz argues that while some control of information is necessary, governments tend to fall prey to a culture of secrecy that is ultimately not just hazardous to democracy but antithetical to it. This history provides the essential context to recent cases from Chelsea Manning to Edward Snowden. Democracy in the Dark is a natural companion to Schwarz's Unchecked and Unbalanced, cowritten with Aziz Huq, which plumbed the power of the executive branch—a power that often depends on and derives from the use of secrecy. "[An] important new book... Carefully researched, engagingly written stories of government secrecy gone amiss." — The American Prospect

PART ONE

History

From Genesis forward, the powerful have been tempted to limit access to information. Beyond the timeless link between secrecy and power, and beyond the psychological seduction of secrecy, history teaches that there are many other factors that either foster or undermine secrecy.

Changes in modes of communication have undermined secrecy through millennia. The invention in the West of the movable-type printing press led to an information explosion that empowered many to challenge powerful leaders’ information monopolies. But the printing press is just one example. A common language, reading, writing, expanding literacy, translating information into popular (or vernacular) languages, photography, radio, television, computers, cell phones, camera phones, the Internet, the digital revolution, and now cloud storage have given ordinary people new ways to acquire, store, and spread previously secret information.

But new communication techniques also often stimulate the powerful to struggle to maintain secrecy. Sophisticated communication techniques have been used by regimes to intimidate their subjects (and thus help enshrine the regime’s secrets)—a truth foretold in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which envisioned Big Brother’s two-way telescreens connected from every room to government watchers, and reinforced in the movie The Lives of Others, detailing the pervasive surveillance used by East Germany’s Stasi.

Changes in political systems also influence secrecy. Rome’s shift from republic to empire led to less openness. The shift from British monarchy to democracy in America led to more openness. Within democracies, increases in executive power tend to increase secrecy. More bureaucracy often also leads to more secrecy. And certainly, as America’s recent history proves, democracy itself is not protection against growing government secrecy.

Perhaps most consistently, wars and crises stoke fear, and fear spawns and shores up secrecy.

The history of secrecy and openness is filled with change—in both directions. Often long periods of minimal change have been followed by periods of relatively rapid change, usually connected to changes in the culture of the time and place. Along the way, history and journalism—the “first rough draft of history”—nibble away at secrecy. For historians and reporters, inquiry is the means, and truth the goal. Only with truth can history be useful.¹ To get at the truth, secrecy is always the first barrier to breach.

1

From the Garden of Eden to America’s Founding

In the beginning . . . there was secrecy.

God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden because, seeking to become “wise,” they ate the forbidden fruit to learn the secret knowledge of good and evil. Then, after the Flood, people sought heaven’s secrets by building the Tower of Babel. Using their “one language,” the people united to build a tall tower “unto heaven.” God said nothing “will be restrained from them” and then “confound[ed] their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” People were scattered across the Earth. Building stopped. Heaven’s secrets remained untouched, unheard, and unseen.¹

These two stories teach a timeless lesson about secrecy and the impulse, among the powerful, to limit the people’s access to information

At the dawn of history, leaders controlled the spigots from which it was thought information flowed from the gods to the people. Though oceans apart and unknown to each other, Egyptian pharaohs and Mayan kings both exercised monopoly power over information. Egyptian pharaohs were “the sole intermediar[ies] who could serve the gods and hence maintain the flows of energy” into the world; and Mayan kings were the conduits “through which supernatural forces were channeled into the human realm.”²

Early Egyptian dynasties provide another telling example of the timeless tendency of the powerful to control communications and thus limit access to information. Writing itself was “a centrally-controlled facility in a state which was focused on its chief representative, the king.” This allowed “manipulation of scarcity” of the skill of writing, which enhanced both secrecy and kingly power.³ Nonetheless, in later eras writing proliferated, and Egypt (and Babylon) pioneered preserving information. Herodotus praised the Egyptians for “their practice of keeping records of the past.”⁴

Writing about the Greek defeat of Persia in the early fifth century BCE, Herodotus, generally recognized as the world’s first historian, used the term historia (research or inquiry) to describe recounting facts about the past—what we call history.⁵ Ancient Athenians believed their openness helped them win their epic battles with Persia. According to Herodotus, whose landmark history focuses on those battles, Athens became the great proponent of Greek freedom in opposition to Eastern despotism. Herodotus contrasted Athenian openness with the opaque Persian court: “Instead of the claustrophobic, sycophantic, sometimes fearful atmosphere of a despotic court, where such discussion as there is consists of advice, which can be given privately as well as in conclave, we have the overt, vigorous, fiercely factional and disputatious public life of the Greek city states, conducted characteristically in public debate and expressed through speeches designed to sway opinion.”⁶ According to Herodotus, when the Athenians were “ruled by tyrants,” they were “no better in war than any of the peoples living around them,” but once they were rid of tyrants and Athenians had “an equal voice in government,” they became “by far the best of all.”⁷

Archeological work on stone inscriptions in Athens has shown that Athens’ transition to democracy was accompanied by a substantial leap in transparency. After the transition, inscriptions revealed government actions to the public—not only laws and decisions but also “accounts,” “relations with foreign states,” and “details of military affairs.” More “inscriptions have been recovered in Athens than in all the other cities of Greece combined, and this is no accident; it derives from the character of Athenian democracy.”⁸ Moreover, during its democracy period, Athens subjected public officials to scrutiny of a kind that has seldom, if ever, been repeated. All were questioned in public before entering office and after their term. Indeed, the ten most important officials were publicly questioned ten times a year to ensure that they were doing their job properly. Transparency fostered accountability, for no such scrutiny would have been possible without transparency.

Athens’ openness was tied to its being a direct participatory democracy—with America’s closest analogue being New England town meetings. Assemblies of all citizens (that is, all free males) made key decisions. The Council of 500, a representative cross-section of citizens chosen by lot with one-year term limits, made routine decisions and set the agenda for the larger assemblies, placing important proposals on whitened boards for all citizens to read in Athens’ central town square. Enacted laws were then inscribed on stele—literally written in stone in public places.⁹

Decades after its transition to democracy, Athens fought Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. In his famous funeral oration, Pericles asked, “What [was] the form of government under which our greatness grew?” His answer: “Our constitution . . . favors the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy.” And according to Thucydides, Pericles argued that openness and information were keys to the success of Athenian democracy. Thus, “ordinary citizens, though occupied with the pursuits of industry, are still fair judges of public matters . . . [I]nstead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.”¹⁰

Modern scholars share the view that openness and shared information were vital to Athens’ success. For example, Josiah Ober’s recent book on Athenian democracy says the success of classical Athens—as compared to all other Greek city-states—derived from its “institutional innovation and open access,” leading to a superior use of “ ‘knowledge in society.’ ” The Athenians created “a kind of machine for aggregating useful knowledge” that required the people to “grasp the value” of “transparency and accountability.”¹¹

Of course, Athens was a direct democracy with a small population. Aristotle contended citizens could not “distribute” offices “according to merit” or manage government, as they do in a direct democracy, unless they personally “know each other’s characters.”¹² But that opinion was expressed before the era of newspapers and other means of mass communication. At America’s founding, James Madison argued that a republic would actually work better in a large community, although he also opined that direct (or “pure”) democracies had “ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention . . . short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”¹³

Rome’s history provides a good example of how change in a political system—in Rome’s case from republic to empire—can affect secrecy. Augustus was just over thirty when, in the latter years of the first century BCE, following the assassination of his great uncle Julius Caesar, he succeeded in defeating his rivals and started the long line of Roman emperors. When Augustus became emperor, he kept much of the form of the Roman republic.¹⁴ There still was a Senate, and there still were consuls. In reality, however, power shifted to one person, the emperor. Among the many consequences of this shift to imperial power was less openness and more secrecy. It is telling that there are more records of the first thirty years of Augustus’s life, up through and including his early reign, than there are about his much longer later life as emperor. This is due not only to the lost texts but also to a “lack of governmental transparency” after the shift to the imperial system.¹⁵

Writing some two thousand years ago, shortly after the beginning of the imperial system, Roman historians made the same point. At the beginning of his Histories, Tacitus—whom Thomas Jefferson called “the world’s greatest writer”—described a time when “the interests of peace demanded the concentration of power in the hands of one man [and the] great line of classical historians came to an end. Truth, too, suffered [from] an understandable ignorance of policy.”¹⁶ Cassius Dio, writing a Roman History in Greek around the turn of the third century CE, similarly complained that under the imperial system “most events began to be kept secret and were denied to common knowledge. . . . [M]uch that never materializes becomes common talk, while much that has undoubtedly come to pass remains unknown, and in pretty well every instance the report which is spread abroad does not correspond to what actually happened.”¹⁷

Rome’s transition to an imperial system was accompanied by a change in the location of power, as well as by an increase in bureaucracy. Both enhanced secrecy. During the Roman republic, decisions had been vociferously debated in the open Roman Forum. But in the empire decision-making moved up the hill to the Palatine, where Augustus lived and worked. The historian was “obstruct[ed]” by a “retreat of political life and the decision-making process from open places (the Senate and Forum) into privacy.”¹⁸ Moreover, under the empire, “the secrets of power, the arcana imperii, were to be untrammeled by rules.”¹⁹ Relying heavily on former slaves (or freedmen), Augustus also vastly increased the bureaucracy (or familia Caesaris) responsible for much of the empire’s ongoing business. This had many advantages for emperors, chief among them that the bureaucrats did not report to anybody but the emperor. So, “what they did was easily kept secret.”²⁰

Jumping far ahead in time, heresy challenged the Church’s power during the Middle Ages. Although the doctrinal issues are interesting, one aspect of heresy is especially relevant to secrecy—Bible translations. Using Bibles translated into vernacular (or local) languages, which...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: History
• Part Two: Legitimate Secrets, and Secrecy’s Dangers, Harms, Culture, and Seduction
• Part Three: Exposing Secrets and Checking Secrecy
• Part Four: Conclusion: Getting to Secrecy Reform
• Author’s Note: Personal Encounters with Secrecy
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author