Wild on: state secrets
Love, life and freedom of the press in 2010
Forgive the 90s reference (but, for the record, E! network still exists–I recently watched their broadcast of Knocked Up from a hotel bedroom). The Washington Post is launching today a major expose on the U.S. intelligence community. Entitled “Top Secret America,” the project has been “nearly two years in the making,” and explores “hundreds of thousands of public records of government organizations and private-sector companies” to describe the ” the huge national security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”
The Post is sparing no expense. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Dana Priest and William Arkin led the reporting, which will be presented through a unique website, a three-part story, a PBS Frontline special, a Twitter account, and a Facebook page.
A headline from the right-leaning Washington Times blog sums up the classic conundrum that faces intelligence reporting: “Is Wash Post harming intelligence work?”
Editors from the Washington Post went out of their way to explain their scrupulous approach to investigating a critical story while respecting the bounds of this highly-sensitive national security domain:
Because of the nature of this project, we allowed government officials to see the Web site several months ago and asked them to tell us of any specific concerns. They offered none at that time. As the project evolved, we shared the Web site’s revised capabilities. Again, we asked for specific concerns. One government body objected to certain data points on the site and explained why; we removed those items. Another agency objected that the entire Web site could pose a national security risk but declined to offer specific comments.
We made other public safety judgments about how much information to show on the Web site. For instance, we used the addresses of company headquarters buildings, information which, in most cases, is available on companies’ own Web sites, but we limited the degree to which readers can use the zoom function on maps to pinpoint those or other locations.
Our maps show the headquarters buildings of the largest government agencies involved in top-secret work. A user can also see the cities and towns where the government conducts top-secret work in the United States, but not the specific locations, companies or agencies involved.
Is that enough?
The Supreme Court has traditionally held that concerns about national security alone are insufficient to restrain newspapers from publishing state secrets. In this case, it seems clear that the Post went to great lengths to assess the reasonable risks that might come with its reportage. The findings were revealed to government agencies, none of whom saw fit to either object, or provide useful detail to the Post about what might actually be objectionable.
But the Constitution is only one arbiter of what is right. One may reasonably ask what the Post, and its readers, hope to gain from a report that could well compromise lives.
How might the series do this? At least a couple of ways:
1.) It could reveal state secrets that make our opponents more effective in detecting and evading our intelligence services
2.) By revealing a structure in which “no expense is spared and few questions are asked,” the Post may accidentally result in the dismantling of some key element of our intelligence apparatus deemed erroneously to be wasteful, depriving us of its capacities
Without many details, neither of these objections has much merit. The real failure for our national security, in fact, seems not to be the Post‘s decision to undertake this investigation, but rather the fact that no government agency took the time to analyze the findings with much detail or concern. Should our future security come under threat thanks to the report, the first fingers pointed ought to be squarely aimed at the agencies who got free help from the Post and essentially passed the buck.
-Sam
Image used under a Creative Commons attribution license by Flicker user Mike Licht.
Related posts:
- Obama administration and state secrets
- Is WikiLeaks WikiLegal?
- State Dinner crashers
- Wild horses
- Who caused the financial crisis?
ShareComments
One Response to “Wild on: state secrets”
Leave a Reply
[...] week I sided with transparency over state secrets in the case of the Washington Post’s special reporting [...]