Secrets

Secret laws. Secret courts making those secret laws. Secret programs created by secretive agencies to find out what Americans might be communicating in their private lives, activities that we might or might not intend to be secret.

The past month's worth of revelations about the extent to which we are subject to the prying eyes of the state, and the promise of much more to come in the way of NSA programs, has sort of tuned my ear to the stories that might otherwise flicker by in the news day. The stories about what's being kept from us from pretty much every level of our government. And it seems to me that it's getting just a little bit out of control.

Here's a fun, and by fun I mean vaguely horrifying, story from Iowa, that's affecting the nation. The Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals has determine that 372 people around the country were sickened in an outbreak of a diarrheal disease by "a prepackaged salad mix containing iceberg and romaine lettuce, carrots and red cabbage." The producer of that salad mix, though, is being kept secret. The salad mix, officials said, was off the shelves before they figured out that it was the cause of the outbreak, and besides that "Iowa law restricts the state from releasing such information if there is no public health benefit." Except that "Whether the product is still on shelves nationally isn't known." Okay, then. To be on the safe side, maybe mix your own salad greens for now.

Out in Whitefish, Montana, the city council is trying, and failing, to do secret business in secret meetings to discuss a public dispute it is in with the county over zoning laws, meetings that residents argue violated state laws. Meetings that the law requires the public be given notice and the opportunity to attend, according to the residents who have filed suit against the city. Are the residents of Whitefish entitled to know what the city council intends to do with city funds paid by the tax dollars? Are they entitled to know what the city would intend to do with the land it hopes to gain control over? You sure would hope so, and not just because state law requires it. Unless said law has been secretly reinterpreted.

Here's another, pretty political, one. The North Carolina Department of Insurance is going along with insurers' insistence that the premium rates the three insurances will be charging on the state's health insurance exchange are a "trade secret" that state residents don't need to know yet. They won't allow the information to be released until the federal government has signed off on the state exchange. So even though the information is going to be made public by the end of September, it's a trade secret. Other insurers in other states have tried this, but other states have said "bullshit" and released the information. In fact, in Oregon, a preview of premium rates caused a number of insurers to go back to the drawing board to make their rates more competitive. Which is a pretty nice idea for the people who will be buying the insurance, no?

What you eat, how your protect your health, where your children's school stacks up in performance ratings, how your city plans to spend tax dollars; those are all things that various state and local governments have decided you don't need all the available information about, or that they can decide for you.

Then there's the federal government, where things have become truly Kafka-esque: members of Congress forced to keep secrets from the public by fellow members and by the executive branch, senators legislating in secret, promised to be protected from public accountability, staff forced to pretend public information doesn't exist. Follow me over the jump and through the looking glass.

Here's one to make the blood boil.

The Senate’s top tax writers have promised their colleagues 50 years worth of secrecy in exchange for suggestions on what deductions and credits to preserve in tax reform.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and the panel’s top Republican, Sen. Orrin Hatch (Utah), assured lawmakers that any submission they receive will be kept under lock and key by the committee and the National Archives until the end of 2064.

Want to know whose tax breaks your senators want to protect? Too bad. Max Baucus thinks you're better off not knowing, or rather his colleagues are better off when you don't know.

Or how about when members are forced by their fellow congresspeople to conceal from us the secrets about how the government might be skirting the laws they made on our behalf, or even to share information about the legislative process.

Behind closed doors, well out of earshot of privacy advocates, most other senators, and his own constituents, [Sen. Ron] Wyden [D-OR] sought to amend the bill. He wanted it to direct the Justice Department’s inspector general to determine approximately how many Americans have had the contents of their communications gathered under section 702 of FISA that gave rise to PRISM, and to require government officials to obtain court orders before querying 702 collections with the names of American citizens — in other words, to close a backdoor surveillance loophole.

Both amendments failed, over his pleas, and the committee cleared the broader bill by a wide vote margin.

But what happened next is what really irks civil libertarians and others who want the process of legislating intelligence matters to become more transparent. The chair and vice chair of the committee touted the outcome of the committee vote, while Wyden was prohibited by committee rules from publicly registering and explaining his opposition.

None of what happened in the Intelligence Committee that day was classified information. But the arbitrary rules of the committee put a gag order on one of the committee members, Wyden, and all of his staff who were aware of what happened. Wyden was forced to stay quiet and was hamstrung in building a constituency for his efforts. Because of the secrecy under which this committee operates, sometimes even the actual fact that a hearing is taking place is kept secret.

That's run of the mill for this committee.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reportedly gave its approval last week to an Obama administration plan to provide weapons to moderate rebels in Syria, but how individual members of the committee stood on the subject remains unknown.

There was no public debate and no public vote when one of the most contentious topics in American foreign policy was decided—outside of the view of constituents, who oppose the president’s plan to aid the rebels by 54 percent to 37 percent, according to a Gallup Poll last month.

In fact, ask individual members of the committee, who represent 117 million people in 14 states, how they stood on the plan to use the CIA to funnel weapons to the rebels and they are likely to respond with the current equivalent of “none of your business:” It’s classified.

Those were, in fact, the words Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chair of the committee, used when asked a few days before the approval was granted to clarify her position for her constituents. She declined. It’s a difficult situation, she said. And, “It’s classified.”

It's not just Syria. Who we are at war with right now is secret.

In a major national security speech this spring, President Obama said again and again that the U.S. is at war with “Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces.”

So who exactly are those associated forces? It’s a secret.

At a hearing in May, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked the Defense Department to provide him with a current list of Al Qaeda affiliates.

The Pentagon responded – but Levin’s office told ProPublica they aren’t allowed to share it. Kathleen Long, a spokeswoman for Levin, would say only that the department’s “answer included the information requested.”

There are whole divisions of the military operating largely in secret and without accountability. And paying private contractors very handsomely to conduct that private business, just like at the NSA.

Information Operations has operated in a gray area for the military, an acknowledged specialty but whose practices are mostly kept secret. Despite the high costs, the programs' effectiveness are hard to prove, according to numerous reports, including one by the Government Accountability Office this spring on what the military calls Military Information Support Operations. [...]

The Pentagon relies heavily on contractors to produce the propaganda, and has allowed the private firms to grade their own work. USA TODAY had found that the owners of the top propaganda contractor in Afghanistan, Leonie Industries, had failed to pay $4 million in federal taxes on time despite earning more than $200 million in contracts from the government. Their tax bills were paid after the story was published.

How much of the secrets being kept from us are basically about grift? Probably most.

But when is a secret not a secret? When it's leaked by the government instead of a whistleblower.

So... revealing that we collect data on everyone somehow turns Snowden into a traitor, while having officials in the government tell the NY Times that we directly intercepted emails between Al Qaeda's top leaders is somehow perfectly fine? How does that work?

I don't think anyone thinks it's a bad thing that the feds are spying on Al Qaeda's leaders and their communications. That's to be totally expected. But if you're comparing the two "leaks", it's not difficult to see how the leak revealing exactly which kinds of communications we can see from the folks planning an attack seems a lot more revealing on the "national security" front than anything that Snowden revealed. What he focused on was how those same tools are being used on millions of totally innocent Americans.

Operating in secret, away from public opinion and public pressure, is how our government—at every level—seems to be increasingly working. Last year, the Obama administration classified a little over 72,000 “new secrets." We're meant to celebrate that. It's a reduction of 42 percent in the number of classified things.

The people we have elected to govern the country seem to have decided that it's just a lot easier to do the job if they keep us out of the actual governing loop.