Maybe the classified documents are the problem

Last month Tablet published a bracing essay titled “Secrecy is for Losers.” Commenting on the then-ongoing saga of classified documents turning up in the homes, offices, storage units, and outhouses of everyone from sitting presidents to minor federal apparatchiks—a truly bipartisan effort—the essay’s author, Jacob Siegel, noted the scale of official secrecy:

The United States now has more secrets than ever—far more than it can possibly keep track of or justify on national security grounds. As of 2019, 4.2 million people in the United States held security clearances. That’s not a specialized core of security professionals; it’s the population of Los Angeles. And while the clearance holders are now a class unto themselves, that’s nothing compared to the number of classified documents in existence. The government not only doesn’t know how many classified documents it has circulating but also has no way to find out . . . since there is no system for tracking all of them. Mark Bradley, director of the National Archives Information Security Oversight Office, acknowledged that his office has stopped trying to count the number of new secrets being created.

Everyone gets to be James Bond, and M cannot keep up with the reports. Doesn’t even bother, really.

Siegel’s piece is especially good on some of the societal consequences of the federal government’s paranoid addiction to secrecy. Conspiracy theories flourish not only because of the chaotic, omnidirectional, unfocused media ecology—a state of affairs pretty much predicted by Neil Postman—or because of collapsing educational standards, although that is a problem, too, but because secrecy and suspicion breed secrecy and suspicion:

[T]he outrage over Jamie Lee Curtis’ wall art and the far larger scandal over President Biden’s improper handling of classified documents are both products of an enormous, opaque system of secrecy—so opaque we don’t know how enormous it is—that has captured American politics. The principle of democratic self-governance is obviously incompatible with that system, but so too is the sanity of individuals living inside of it. Americans who want to join in their country’s civic life now find that the main way to participate is by following the trail of clues leaked by official sources while trying to solve elaborate, rigged puzzles about the nature of reality. It’s no surprise the country is going nuts.

This situation is only aggravated by the flagrantly partisan way secrecy is used to target political opponents:

The unprecedented use of a state security agency against a former president was justified by what was purported to be an urgent national security threat. And what was that threat? We still don’t know since the whole matter remains a secret. In The Washington Post, anonymous government sources claimed that the raid was triggered because Trump was holding on to documents containing nuclear secrets. Each individual component of the story—the anonymity of the sources, the unknown nature of the documents, the secrecy surrounding the timing of the raid—might appear weak on its own, but together they were mutually reinforcing and created the illusion that there was solid evidence of an imminent national security emergency. Even better, since the claims were secret, they couldn’t be refuted—an arrangement that granted the federal agencies impunity and allowed pundits’ imaginations to run wild devising the most grandiose possible justifications for the raid.

For what it’s worth, I don’t have a dog in this fight. The political gotcha game of which party’s guy was illegally in possession of which secrets got boring very quickly. But watching this unfold, especially after reading Siegel’s piece, got me thinking. Whether classified documents are turning up in the possession of Biden or Trump or one of their cronies, maybe the problem is all that classified information itself. What kind of vast, protean, invasive, totalizing, unaccountable but incompetent government generates this much secret material?

Secrecy, especially for national security purposes, is offered as a solution but rapidly becomes a problem. It’s addictive, pathological, mind-warping. If all you have is a hammer, etc. Siegel once more:

Different forms of government can heighten certain human traits while inhibiting others. Democracy can enhance reason while taming faithfulness. Secrecy turns cunning into a virtue. It rewards plotters, schemers, and the lackeys they rely on.

I’d quibble with whether democracy enhances reason at the expense of faithfulness; I think democracies, if they last long enough, wind up without much of either. But I agree that secrecy is unbecoming of a free people, and a regime of secrecy and classified, need-to-know information will only operate at a greater and ever less accountable remove from the people the government notionally represents.

Siegel’s piece is worth reading in its entirety. You can find it at Tablet here.