A thought or two on NSA, security and secrecy...

[punpirate]

... just putting a couple of things together that have been forgotten in the debate that were better-known thirty or so years ago.

At a recent symposium sponsored by the National Security Archive, co-founder Scott Armstrong said that there's a hierarchy of effort expended by the government in the application of secrecy--that the most energy is used to keep the public and press from knowing what it's doing. The next largest amount of energy expended is in keeping Congress from knowing what the Executive is doing. The next largest is in preventing the various agencies of government from knowing what the Executive is doing, and the least amount of effort is expended in preventing the rest of the world from knowing the administration's secrets.

Here's a concrete example of that, from Robert Fisk's recent book, The Great War for Civilisation: when students overran the American embassy in Tehran in 1979, some of them managed to seize burn bags of shredded documents which had not yet been destroyed. The students formed a team to reassemble the shreds. While this effort took many months, hundreds of documents were reconstituted, and after being compiled according to subject matter, were reprinted in paperback form and the various editions were freely distributed on the streets of Tehran for around 15 Iranian rials each (at the time, about forty cents). Western reporters who purchased these had them seized by customs when they entered the United States. The United States claimed these were classified documents and were illegally obtained. So, what Iranians (or anyone in that city) could buy on the streets of Tehran for a pittance and read was denied the American public.

Let's keep in mind that the level of secrecy on the part of the President is directly proportional to the need for the President to prevent the American public from knowing what he has done. That was the primary lesson learned from the Nixon administration, and it should be the primary lesson today. Any invocation of national security is, therefore, suspect, and protestations of national security made in the face of public scrutiny must be assumed to be hiding criminal behavior. Bush's saying that al-Qaeda members would know they were being monitored by the revelation of criminal behavior directed by the administration is a very poor smokescreen--if al-Qaeda doesn't know they are being spied upon at every opportunity and by every means available, they certainly aren't the clever people the administration makes them out to be.

It's very important--essential, in fact--to remember that the administration's primary goal when invoking national security is to prevent the American people from knowing what its government is doing--or not doing well. Even more important, everyone had better realize that the primary purpose of the national security state is to further remove control of government from the citizen and place that control in the hands of an information elite. At this juncture, any other conclusion about the nature of secrecy is foolhardy.

Cheers.

[Warren Stupidity]

1. K&R Good essay. Consider an LTTE. nt.

[Tace]

2. Well Said

It's the old banking families -- in control of the central banks and corporations, and by extension, governments -- who are ripping blind the people of this world.

Secrecy is key to making this rip-off possible.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

3. Excellent and true.... K&R LTTE a must. nt.