A ‘right to know’ only if we can show a ‘need’?
"And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers."
-- John Adams, "A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law," 1765
It's a classic contradiction, an unavoidable affliction that can lead one to conniptions.
We have a civil government established under the principle that the citizens are the final arbiters, the masters of their fates and the rulers of our elected and appointed public servants. To accomplish these duties we have a "right to know" what our government is doing.
Yet within this government we have security and intelligence functions whose guiding principle and watchword is: Do you have a "need to know"?
It makes no difference whether one has a top secret, crypto or other level of security clearance: The question of access rests on whether one needs to know a certain thing in order to do one's job.
If you are not actively involved in strategic planning you have no need to know the Pacific fleet is steaming toward Midway, because loose lips could literally sink ships.
Of course official secrecy can be used for self-serving purposes. When I was working on "McNamara's Wall" in the late 1960s, stringing electronic sensors that each cost as much as a Volkswagen across the Ho Chi Minh Freeway, the most secret thing about the top secret operation was its cost. The American taxpayers did not have a need to know, apparently.
Recently this conflict of concepts revealed itself in the mundane and the momentous.
The mundane: Review-Journal reporter Jeff German followed up on a story he had reported earlier revealing many of the security cameras at the Regional Justice Center were blocked by trees and shrubs. He reviewed e-mails from judges talking about the story.
Instead of being concerned about whether taxpayers are getting efficient and cost-effective government service, instead of concern over the safety of the thousands of jurors and witnesses forced to come every day to the courthouse, the judges were concerned the security lapse would now be known by the bad guys.
One wrote that the story "compromised security at the RJC by exposing potential weaknesses to those who may wish to do harm "
The public's right to know that there was a problem and nothing was being done about it was of no concern.
The momentous: The Washington Post this past Monday under the title "Top Secret America" began reporting on a two-year project delving into the massive scope, cost and redundancy of the nation's intelligence gathering bureaucracy. The three-part series revealed there are 854,000 people with top secret clearances and 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies in 10,000 locations carrying out counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence functions.
An online database produced by the Post shows that in the Las Vegas area alone there are more than 2,000 work locations for the FBI, CIA, Department of Defense, Homeland Security, National Security Agency and several others. It lists three private contractors in the Las Vegas area.
One of the companies did not appreciate the unsolicited publicity.
On its website DownRange Global Solutions carries a "notice to the public":
"On July 20th, 2010, The Washington Post released an article and listing of all U.S. Government Contractors involved in classified government projects. As a consequence of this treasonous and irresponsible action, I have removed the names and backgrounds of all executive personnel from the website. This is to insure the safety and security of the management team and employees as well as their families.
"The Washington Post has committed an unforgivable act that will provide foreign intelligence services, terrorist groups and others who wish to do America harm, with a wealth of information regarding the United States intelligence capabilities and have endangered those who put their lives in harms way to help insure our freedom and protect our citizens from danger.
"The Washington Post in my view is a treasonous organization and should be viewed as a danger to the national security of this country."
On the other hand, the taxpayers now have some idea that they are funding a massive bureaucracy hidden behind a veil of secrecy with no possible way to determine whether it is effective, whether it is capable of preventing anything or what it costs.
Thomas Mitchell is editor of the Review-Journal and writes about the role of the press and access to public information. He may be contacted at 383-0261 or via e-mail at tmithcell@reviewjournal.com. Read his blog at lvrj.com/blogs/mitchell.
