“A huge door is closing within our government,” Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists, recently told the Federal Times. “The message is: ‘We don’t want you talking to anybody outside of government.'”
As the Bush administration prepares to begin its second term, much has been written about the president’s intolerance for dissent or even raised eyebrows among those closest to him. Less attention, however, has been paid to efforts by the White House to restrict access to vast amounts of information and to create an atmosphere in which secrecy is rewarded and criticism silenced.
This is the type of story — a gradual erosion instead of a single, headline-grabbing event — that most in the press tend to overlook. Yet in the coverage of government, it may be the most significant event of all. Aftergood’s comments came in response to new efforts by the Department of Homeland Security to keep sensitive — but unclassified — information out of the public domain. According to a department directive cited by the Federal Times, “employees and contractors can be searched at any place or any time to ensure they are in compliance with the policy. They can also face administrative, civil or criminal penalties if they violate the rules.”
“Critics fear the policy at Homeland Security represents a worrisome precedent that, if not challenged, will be adopted at other federal agencies,” writes the Times’ Eileen Sullivan.
Some government secrecy experts, such as Bill Leonard, director of the Information Security Oversight Office at the National Archives and Records Administration, said they fear the department’s policy will squelch information sharing among the department, the public and other federal, state and local organizations.
“It creates an environment exactly opposite, I think, [of] what we’re trying to do in the name of information sharing,” Leonard said. “It creates an environment of uncertainty. And in an environment of uncertainty, most people resort to a default position of ‘Do not share, because otherwise I might inadvertently violate a rule or regulation or a regime that I’m not even familiar with.'”
And just what sort of information is not to be shared? Let’s start at the source of the new directive.
Homeland Security is an agency in need of intense scrutiny, according to USA Today‘s Mimi Hall, who interviewed Clark Kent Ervin, the department’s former inspector general.
The government agency responsible for protecting the nation against terrorist attack is a dysfunctional, poorly managed bureaucracy that has failed to plug serious holes in the nation’s safety net, the Department of Homeland Security’s former internal watchdog warns.
Asked what’s wrong with the department, Ervin said, “It’s difficult to figure out where to start.”
Ervin, who was outspoken in his criticisms of the Department during his year-long tenure, is now out of a job, since the White House has declined to re-nominate him. The likelihood that others still inside the massive agency will continue voicing Ervin’s criticisms is remote; the gag order makes whistle-blowing a federal crime.
The crack-down prompted this editorial reaction from the Austin American-Statesman last month:
“The federal government and the people who work for it are not engaged in private enterprise. They’re doing the public’s work. Federal employees can’t speak for the administration, but they know their own jobs and should not be threatened for providing answers to the public that pays their salaries.”
Elsewhere in the federal bureaucracy, the cloak of secrecy is spreading rapidly under the guise of enhancing national security. In the aftermath of 9/11, Attorney General John Ashcroft sharply restricted information available under the Freedom of Information Act, an invaluable tool for journalists probing the activities of government and government employees.
Consider the ongoing investigation into abuses of detainees in Afghanistan, at Guantanamo Bay and in the Abu Ghraib prison. Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe reported that the CIA has refused to confirm or deny that it has documents and photographs related to the abuse of detainees, citing as legal precedent a ruling involving Howard Hughes’ mysterious efforts to recover a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine in the 1970s. While disclosures about abuses have come from the Pentagon and FBI, the CIA has thus far rejected efforts for information, sought by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The Justice Department currently is weighing a request for a criminal probe into disclosures by the Washington Post and other publications earlier this month about an ultra-secret satellite program criticized by some in Congress after the cost ballooned to $9.5 billion.
But the secrets guarded by those in Washington don’t only involve Star Wars programs run amok, or abuses of civil rights in a time of war, or poor management of an agency vital to national security. Denial of access to information of all sorts is growing “at an epidemic rate,” according to Associated Press President and CEO Tom Curley.
Secrecy — and the conflicts of interest that it promotes — clouds the decision-making process of government in issues as diverse as medical guidance to the nation’s physicians and the acquisition of aircraft. And those are just the instances that have come to light in recent days.
It’s the media’s job to push back on that closing door. The rewards will go far beyond a wealth of great stories.
–Susan Q. Stranahan
Susan Q. Stranahan wrote for CJR.