Transparency

Building on yesterday's theme about the danger of having secrets, you might think today would be about the importance of individuals living their lives in such a manner that they have nothing to hide, but it's not.

I do believe in doing good things and living a good life, and also I have seen how shame and secrets isolate in a continuous spiral, but I have already written some things about that, and I probably will again. Yesterday was about politicians, today is about government.

It's been a few years since I read Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes. At the time I was focusing on the disasters of US foreign policy and the CIA, and how sometimes the root of the problem changed, but there always was a problem. That could be wrong-headedness on the part of the president, the head of the CIA, or head of individual departments, and part of that was certainly the idea that communism was worse than anything else.

What has become more clear to me now is that the reason things could keep on going wrong was the secrecy. It was easy for incompetence or insanity to be hushed away. If someone didn't agree with orders and acted against them because they knew better, it was not always obvious.

In today's world, secrecy has become significantly more difficult. Yes, some of the Benghazi outrage is because Republicans and Fox hate Obama, so similar attacks that happened under Bush just don't matter.

http://www.policymic.com/articles/40811/13-benghazis-happened-under-president-bush-and-fox-news-said-nothing

Beyond that, there is just more information out there. We are always online, links are shared via social networking, there are more cameras everywhere, and once something is online even if the original site deletes it, some other site has usually captured it. That's just the way it is. Clinton wasn't the first president to cheat on his wife, but he did it in a world that has changed a lot since Kennedy (who also was not the first).

In this world, we find out about programs we would not have known about in earlier times. We know about drones and PRISM, and we know some things about Gitmo even though there are other things that are not released, and it can make the current administration look awful, but I don't think the others were better - we just didn't know.

In some ways there is a loss of innocence, and contentment; I see a lot more bitter people than there used to be. I still want more of it. We need to know, because then it forces us collectively to behave better.

My biggest disappointment with President Obama was when he renewed the Patriot Act. That needs to go. PRISM needs to go. There should not be warrant-less wire taps. If there is a valid reason for the tap, there is no reason not to get a judge to agree. Taps are for gathering information over time, so there should not be a time crunch on what can really be a speedy process.

(That's just one example. A lot could be said about drones here.)

There are times when the checks and balances in the Constitution result in gridlock, and that is frustrating, but the idea that no one should have too much power is a good one, and that should hold true in the legal system as well.

The Patriot Act gave too much power to the executive branch. That wasn't an Obama thing; that was a Bush and Cheney thing (especially a Cheney thing). Yes, the people who complain about it now and didn't then are rotten hypocrites, but that's not the point. The point is that it was wrong then, and still wrong now. The person who has too much power does not see it as too much, and it is hard to get it back.

(Here I am largely influenced by Charlie Savage's Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy.)

We need to move towards transparency, and away from the covert. Yes, there will always need to be some subterfuge in intelligence gathering, but there need to be limits on it, and safeguards. Building on Lord Acton's remark - "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" - perhaps we can view it as the level of corruption being proportional to the level of power. Secrecy increases the effect of the power, because it takes away the chance for others to interfere.

And because it relates, I'm going to reiterate something. Before any of these new programs, we had sufficient warning about September 11th. There were desperate unheeded warnings, because priorities were not set based on the intelligence. We did not need better intelligence; we needed better leaders. We are not going to get better leaders by giving them the opportunity to become ever more corrupt.