VCU news

By Brian McNeill

A new book by Virginia Commonwealth University professor Jason Ross Arnold investigates how the government routinely keeps information on a vast array of topics unnecessarily secret, despite 1970s-era reforms that require greater transparency.

Jason Ross Arnold, Ph.D., a professor in the political science program in the College of Humanities and Sciences, recently discussed his book, "Secrecy in the Sunshine Era: The Promise and Failures of U.S. Open Government Laws," (University Press of Kansas), and explained what reforms he believes are needed to curtail government secrecy.

In the book, you describe how the federal government is far less transparent than it ought to be. What has fueled its reliance on excessive secrecy?

There are many causes of excessive secrecy. Some are more or less constant. For instance, bureaucracies hide information to increase their influence and relevance within governments. Max Weber, the famous sociologist, called this the bureaucracy's "sure power instinct." Officials working within those agencies also have a multitude of motivations to keep secrets, from their sincere desire to minimize national security risks, to a kind of harried bureaucratic conservatism borne out of being overworked and stressed out, or risk averse. Sometimes information gatekeepers work to protect powerful outside interests, or to conceal embarrassing or criminal acts from the public, the Congress and the courts. Even many high-level government insiders have acknowledged this. Nixon's former Solicitor General Erwin N. Griswold, for instance, said that much of the excessive secrecy problem has resulted from the impulse to hide "governmental embarrassment[s] of one sort or another."

Much of the book, however, examines the nonconstant sources of excessive secrecy, such as the clever ways administration officials have circumvented open government laws. Some administrations were more aggressive in their use of circumvention tactics. I think readers might be surprised by some of the conclusions the book reaches in its comparative historical analysis of presidential administrations. For instance, the infamously secretive Bush-Cheney administration definitely earned that reputation, but on some of the dimensions analyzed in the book, the other administrations, including Obama-Biden and Clinton-Gore, did not fare too well.

What do you think are legitimate reasons for government secrecy? And what are illegitimate reasons?

I stand with many critics of excessive government secrecy in recognizing the need for governments to keep some secrets. Indeed, critics and defenders tend to recognize the same general categories of necessary secrets. Even the most ardent pro-transparency advocates see the wisdom in concealing, for instance, the procedures and passwords that launch nuclear-tipped missiles or shut down the electric grid, or information about troop movements in a hot war.

Most of us accept governments securing our private information, such as our addresses, social security numbers, medical records and credit card numbers. But even within the generally accepted categories, not all pieces of information deserve protection. For instance, the Army fought for years to keep secret troop movement information — from World War I! It took a protracted lawsuit to free some of that information about 20 years ago.

There is no question that information workers face hard choices, every day. Most of us would forgive the occasional error, and perhaps even a little bit of unwarranted risk aversion. But the scale is tipped so far toward excessive secrecy that anything that falls near any of the categories is automatically concealed. Plus, as noted, officials have been caught far too many times hiding embarrassments, incompetence and criminal acts. To be clear, many people working in the government make good-faith efforts in their determinations about secrecy versus disclosure. But the book is rife with examples showing the opposite.

Can you give some examples of things the government is currently keeping unnecessarily secret?

Tough question — given the fact I don't have top-level security clearances. But one category of secrets that I argue is unwarranted involves executive-branch legal memos that instruct presidents about how to follow — or not follow — statutes. There are many examples in my book about the use of "secret law" in the executive branch to flout actual laws. The government has claimed the authority to conceal not only legitimately held classified information, but also the legal reasoning in those memos. There are many other examples of unnecessary secrets that I detail in the book, from re-classified information to names of private sector individuals and organization who have access to White House officials to proprietary scientific information which, if released, would directly affect public health decisions and outcomes.

What reforms would you recommend to make government more transparent?

The book includes several recommendations. Here I guess I have the space for only one or two examples.

First, to reduce the bureaucratic impulse to excessively conceal classified and unclassified information, information officers should be randomly subjected to evaluations or audits by their agency supervisors as well as interagency groups like the Information Security Oversight Office. The government currently uses evaluations to ensure that information workers are keeping secrets as needed. The executive should create incentives for information officers to more closely adhere to the transparency-leaning standards set out in executive orders and other presidential initiatives. The personnel evaluations should be linked to decisions about promotions and raises.

Second, I would push for an amendment to the Federal Advisory Committee Act. That is the sunshine law that was supposed to open up executive branch task forces to public scrutiny. Before FACA, private interests could influence policymaking behind closed doors. FACA has proven very useful, but officials have found clever ways to circumvent it. For instance, they play what I call word games, such as calling task force members "guests" instead of "members" to sidestep the language in the statute. Or administrations have used the "running out the clock" tactic in court cases, delaying judicial action while hurriedly completing the task force's work. The law could be rewritten to specifically authorize judges to order injunctions to halt task force work until a court order or settlement is reached, with rare, clearly specified exceptions. In order to stop the word games, it should also contain very specific definitions of terms that have strategically been misinterpreted, such as FACA's "members."

What sort of research went into this book? I imagine it was a difficult topic to research, given the secrecy inherently involved.

Yes, it was a challenge. When I began the research, I immediately recognized that I could not document the secrecy system in full, observing and measuring every secret, knowing every transgression, every overclassification, every circumvention around open government laws. But I discovered that because of those same powerful laws, as well as leaks, lawsuits, investigative journalism and other secret-spilling mechanisms, hundreds of pieces of evidence have made their way into the public record. I spent my days rummaging through that public record, finding every nugget I could. I took those fragments with other parts of the public record — newspaper articles, government documents, interviews, among other sources — to string together narratives that examined the secrecy conflicts in question, as completely as possible.

How did you become interested in this topic?

My interest in secrecy and related subjects first emerged when I was a kid growing up in the 1980s. I remember being drawn to the free speech and government secrecy controversies of that era — from policy proposals to censor or otherwise regulate art and political expression to the revelations about U.S. government secrecy related to the wars in Central America and the Iran-Contra affair. As a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, my attention turned toward the downstream effects of information policies and other forces that hinder or facilitate information flows. Specifically, my dissertation investigated the causes and consequences of widespread public ignorance in democratic societies.

I think what catalyzed the secrecy project was the emergence of Wikileaks in 2010, especially its release of the "Collateral Murder" video in April of that year, leaked by Chelsea (neé Bradley) Manning. It was that, and Daniel Ellsberg's excellent memoir which I read around the same time (fittingly called "Secrets"), that stirred my imagination.

How does this book fit into your larger body of scholarship?

Most of my research is animated by questions about democracy and knowledge – or "information politics." It is an expansive subject, covering a range of topics across several levels of analysis, including secrecy, whistleblowing, surveillance, public ignorance and political ideologies. The secrecy book is my first; my other research has appeared in academic journals and edited volumes.

What will you be working on next?

I am working on several projects. One is about whistleblowing. It's global in scope and covers a wide range of activities not usually considered to be "whistleblowing." Another one is about domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens during the same time period I covered in the secrecy book (late 1970s to the present).

Subscribe for free to the weekly VCU News email newsletter at http://newsletter.news.vcu.edu/and receive a selection of stories, videos, photos, news clips and event listings in your inbox every Thursday. VCU students, faculty and staff automatically receive the newsletter. To learn more about research taking place at VCU, subscribe to its research blog, Across the Spectrum at http://www.spectrum.vcu.edu/