Probably the most spirited session of the day was the standing-room-only panel on government secrecy, chaired by Tom Connors and featuring Rick Blum, Ira Chinoy, and Tom Blanton.

Blanton is with the National Security Archive, a repository at George Washington University that gathers and disseminates declassified materials. He is a thoughtful and passionate critic of excessive government secrecy, and his thoughts helped clarify how the current culture of secrecy came to be.

Chinoy made me wish I was back in journalism school. Although I became aware of Computer Assisted Reporting after attending a NICAR conference, I never took a formal class in it during my four years at Syracuse. Chinoy not only teaches such a class, but he requires his students to identify a database held by the state of Maryland that should be public record, and then attempt to get it from the state. Having provided technical expertise for reporters making this sort of request while I was at The Tennessean, I am very aware of the many ways government officials can find to stymie information requests. Having students do this sort of thing increases awareness of the importance of open government — both among students and among state government officials. Chinoy says his favorite thing is when students get so fed up with the fact that the information is being witheld that they pursue it after the end of the semester — one student kept going for nine months until he finally wheedled the database out of the state.

Look below for another voluminous set of notes…


Speakers:
Tom Blanton, National Security Archive
Ira Chinoy, Professor of Journalism, University of Maryland (Previously worked at the Providence Journal and Washington Post)
Rick Blum, Sunshine in Government Initiative (formerly of openthegovernment.org)
Tom Connors, Session Chair

Q: What are we talking about when we talk about this administration?s penchant for secrecy?

Blanton ? According to government statistics, we?ve had more secrets created now than in the Cold War (according to number of classifications tracked by the Information Security Oversight Office.) At the same time things like Google and the Internet give record setting openness in government. The national sec. archive started in 1985, then in 1995 won ?cool site of the day? award, and then web traffic exploded. We?re just a huge collection of released documents, Every day on our website people download 30,000 declassified documents. That?s the paradox ? we have record setting secrecy and record setting access.

Also don?t want to blame it all on this administration. Two turning points; in 70s ? Nixon didn?t trust bureaucracy and centralized a lot of power, but also opened up tons of formerly secret documents going back to ww1 to expose how government worked. Steve Garfinkel went to the Archivist and asked for more people to handle the load. So the archives then got 100 new professional positions to implement this order.

In 1995, Clinton did more declassification than all previous. presidents put together. Same Steve Garfinkel went to the archivist of the United States (Carlin), great opportunity, Clinton did this order let?s get more people. But the archivist declined to do this ? ?we?re reinventing government, we?ll make do with what we have.? So now NARA is mired in documents.

So system was already broken in 2001 when Bush administration came to government. The Bush people believed that the power of the presidency was at a low ebb. (I believe this is not true ? while Clinton was being impeached, he was able to drop 75 missiles to try to get Bin Laden. That?s a sign of power.) But they said presidency was weak, we have to recoup power. This has been the unifying factor — does this expand presidential power or contract it. They have done anything that will expand presidential power. They were working on memos saying they would support those who blocked FOIA releases. They took away the power of archivists to decide release policies for presidential records, and instead gave it to former presidents and vice presidents.

The net result is the rollback or attempted rollback of a whole series of open government reforms. They?re in danger, but they?re not gone. That?s the good news and bad news.

Rick ? I think we?re talking about a shadow in our government. We?re talking about a cultural change. In the week after Katrina hit, friends of mine were using Google Earth to get on their web connection to figure out if their place had been flooded. That?s a good thing. At the same time, we have a cultural difference. If you search for ?Google Earth? using Google News, you get tons of articles about foreign governments saying say how Google Earth will destroy their internal security. It shows the cultural disconnect around access to information. There is a culture of fear about information flows.

The other part is that it?s a technical problem. The other week the house held hearings on technical changes to FOIA. The same week that was going on, the FDA called me and said ?Hey, we?ve got a FOIA request here that you filed.? I said ?I did?? Turned out it was from when I asked about FDA scientific advisory committees in February 2002.

I asked ?Was this really a malicious attempt to undermine my right to find out what was happening with scientific advisory committees?? they said, ?Well, you?re just next.? So there?s culture, and then there?s technical problems.

Ira ? There is some continuity. The thing that hasn?t changed is that in the halls of government there are people called ?public info. Officers.? But this is often a cruel misnomer. They walk around with notebooks that say ?Just Say No,? the drug slogan from the 80s. That hasn?t changed. I think since 9/11 we?ve seen some strange things in public records request. I teach classes in computer-assisted reporting at Maryland. This turns out to be a centerpiece of the class ? students try to get a database from the state of Maryland to use in class. I tell students that they are the defenders of democracy. They roll their eyes, but they get it by the end of the class, because they hear every excuse under the sun.

The discontinuity is that people are constantly finding new excuses not to give you records. A bunch of stuff was added to the Maryland equivalent of FOIA since 9/11. For example building plans. But it also says you can?t get things ?related to the security of a database system.? If you know anything about databases, you know they?re not much good without documentation ? without a record layout. Agencies now are saying ?We can?t give you the documentation ? it would compromise our security.?

Another example. There?s something called the national inventory of dams. All dams are inspected, and there is a database. A student was interested in db. Contains lots of pretty interesting stuff. Pretty important issue. The student was told we can?t give you that because then terrorist would know which were the weakest dams and they would blow them up. Let alone that the public should know which was the weakest dam. The irony was that even though the state wouldn?t give it, you could get the same data from the federal government.

We?ve decided in our course that fear is the big thing. I will ask you all a question. How many of you have ever seen a news story where there was an error and you knew something about it. So the question is, is the fear rational or irrational?

Tom ? Re: NSA ? the NYT found out that the NSA was doing warrantless wiretapping and sat on it for a year. If you?re a very careful reader of journalism, which I?ve learned to be. There are errors ins stories, but also a lot of truth. If you look at the material printed in the book, and the version that ran in the paper, you?ll see the kind of secrets that got the story in the paper. There are currently subpoenas about this.

What Jim Riesen had in his book was that the intelligence community rapidly expanded wiretapping with and without warrants after 9/11. NYT decided this wasn?t a big story because that?s what you?d expect after 9/11. What made it a story was that senior justice dept. officials believed that this was illegal and possibly criminal ? not just the government officials, but telecom companies were possibly culpable.

I called up Ford library and asked about the original debates over FISA law. Found a memo about a conversation in 1975-1976 ? Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, George HW Bush, Henry Kissinger, white house chief of staff Richard Cheney, Phillip Bukim and Levy (one of these white house council.) who said, look we need a law governing wire taps so that we can use this type of thing. At end of meeting, the white house council wrote a memo to file saying ?well, at least we?ve gotten them to the point where they won?t veto it immediately.?

That the justice department felt the wiretaps were illegal was not secret and should not have been secret. But that distinction has been blurred. There is no distinction between what we need to know and the true secrets. Secrets are kept because they protect higher ups from accountability.

Ira- In some situations, people know what?s in the data and don?t want people to have it,. And in other cases, they don?t know but just suspect something in there might be bad for them, and so they come up with reasons for opposing release of data.

Tom ? ?Blacked out? is a good book by Syracuse Professor about this. The epigram to the whole book is Donald Rumsfeld?s quote along the lines of: “there are knowns and unknowns, and then known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, which are the most dangerous.?

Connors ? government is contracting out so much now, and there?s no way that FOIA can affect them.

Ira ? this is really important. Not just contracting out, but government agencies deciding to be profit centers with regard to information. You run up against this if you?re a journalist or citizen researcher.

Someone will go and want the database of parking tickets in College Park ? and they?ll be told to call a company in Florida, because they run the database.

We?ve decided that this copy of the Maryland public records act is our best friend. And there?s typically a attorney general?s manual that goes with it. A public record is no more or less than what the law says it is. There?s nothing in the law that says records aren?t public if a private company helps maintain them.

But problem is that these agencies work on billable hours. And often when agreements were set up, no one thought to say ?this is a democracy ? we have to provide access to records?

Even if they don?t contract out, many governments have agencies that charge back the cost of work. The issue that goes along with this for databases is that they?ll say that will be $5,000/40 hours. That may be ridiculous. So sometimes you have to get someone elsewhere in government who understands the issues and can help go to bat for you.

One thing I love about this assignment is the students who get pissed off that they haven?t gotten anything in the 10 weeks they have for the assignment and keep going. Our masters students spend a semester working for our capital news service, and keep going on this. One student kept going on it for 9 months. At the end, he wrote them a letter, I know this takes your time, but I haven?t gone running to the Attorney General. Finally went to an official who understood and came to the college, we worked through it together, and we opened database, deleted several fields, and sent it to the student ? took about a minute and a half. At the end of the day, you have to know the law and have someone who appreciates it.

Blum ? There have been white papers about this method: to have ?information sharing and analysis centers? funded by homeland security grants centers ? which are quasi private organizations and as such supposedly not covered by public records laws.

A guy decided to test port security ? asked a truck driver about it. Driver said to hop in! The driver showed an expired driver?s license got in to the port, the cargo was never inspected. Is this something that people who really want to do us harm know about? Yes!

Tom ? this is the fundamental critique of secrecy ? it just doesn?t work. A guy named Steiglitz won the Nobel prize recently for the idea that ?there is no market ever where there is perfect info. So every market has asymmetries.? Same is true for government. Read the 9/11 report. There are hundreds of examples of info asymmetries. There was a whole FOIA request that was lost ? data was withheld ? because it would help guide terrorists to ports that were least inspected. In reality they were hiding the fact that they didn?t do systematic inspections. Secrecy is proven as not keeping us safe. That?s a cold war paradigm that doesn?t work anymore.

There?s the old story. Guy who runs across red square saying ?Khrushchev is an idiot? He was arrested and given 5 years for being a counter-revolutionary , and 20 years for revealing a state secret.

It came out that the specs for Air Force 1 were public. Second and third day story was that the reason these things were public is so that first responders in all 50 states would know where to go to rescue people in case of an emergency.

Leslie Groves, guy who designed secrecy for bomb ? His son asked: Why?d you need all that secrecy? He answered: ?The Germans, the Japanese, the allies, congress, our own staff!?

Most of what the system generates isn?t truly a secret in that way.

They did a study of holes in Microsoft software in a computer magazine. Security problems were fixed 60% faster when the holes were published on the Internet. 60% faster if embarrassment was part of the picture. That?s what drives fixing problems ? publicity.

Ira ? People were outraged about 9/11. People don?t get outraged about government outsourcing database work. I get the feeling that it?s going to take something really horrible where someone tried to get info an the government blocked it on purpose. Someone blowing up a chlorine laden tank in a community and making it uninhabitable.

I want to get back to archives, though. Sometimes we can look to the past and see how this sort of things play out. We have more people in my class showing up from the archives track. What?s been interesting is to go back at agencies that used to be secret and now records are released and look at the records. Some of the outrage is lying in the places where you work ? in your archives. Invite journalists and students in to have a look.

There?s a famous case where Bush rolled out Military tribunals which hadn?t been used since WWII, and several journalists went to archives and found the precedents he was calling on, which were two small teams of unsuccessful German saboteurs during WWII. Hoover and the FBI angled to have this story come out as having broken the case, instead of the actual fact that these guys basically turned themselves in.

Tom (moderator) : even Lyndon Johnson, who signed first FOIA wasn?t thrilled about it ? he didn?t have a signing ceremony ? and he edited press secy. Bill Moyers’ statement to avoid too much ringing language about revealing mistakes of officials. Ford vetoed an attempt to put teeth in it ? it?s not just this administration.

Democrats under Eisenhower had proposed right to know, but couldn?t get a single sponsor. But ? Rumsfeld actually signed on as a sponsor of FOIA because government was getting too big. He was then on presidential staff when congress overrode veto.

Blum ? different than it was 10 years ago. It is not illegal in the US to disseminate classified info. And there is more reaction now. There are more attempts to monitor what is going on. But something almost slipped through ? an amendment to the official secrets act. Clinton was going to let this thing become law on a Saturday. Some publishers made some calls, and it was vetoed. Now bills like this are introduced, and we hear about it right away. People are paying more attention.

Washington needs a media lobby ? not just the business stuff, but journalism ? how stories are covered, freedom, etc. This is not an issue that has been covered in the paper because it?s seen as a conflict of interest. We have to get past that. Now there are sunshine organizations formed that are doing this. There is 1 beat reporter in Washington who covers secrecy full time ? Rebecca Carr from Cox newspapers. We need more.

There is not an institution in the executive branch or outside of it that looks at secrecy issues of policy. Why not? That?s a great use of taxpayer dollars.

Q – congress has introduced some reforms. Are these sincere efforts?

Blum ? there are some efforts to make the obvious reforms. There have been some executive orders, and some agencies have realized that they have problems with their procedures.

Tom ? You asked if the effort was sincere. Senator Cornan of Texas, when he was attorney general of Texas, actually put two people in jail for holding secret meetings and not releasing records. His sound bite is that ?We need to bring Texas standards of openness to Washington.? I give Sen. Cornan points for credibility.

Senator C. of Oklahoma is proposing a web site that would help people sniff out corruption. The interesting thing is that these openness issues can be a threshold issue for everybody. That?s why these issues are getting bigger, why the press is covering them.

The other piece is the revolt of the JAGs. The top three JAGs of the military services are telling the congress that the president is full of sheep dip in what he?s saying about the tribunals. They say that the tribunals will hurt US security and make military personnel less safe.

What we know about these things now were because career people in government decided to blow a whistle.

Our founders never thought of a career civil service. Our founders thought the system would keep itself in balance. But what happens when you have a one party state, where the president only casts one veto in six years, because he?s in lockstep with the congress.

What?s important is a sense of ethical standards. It has become a savior of our democracy today.

Ira: I think we come back to this notion of fear. People who don?t want to release information are tapping into all our fears about security. But as Tom has pointed out, the facts don?t bear that out historically. A question: what do people fear more than the release of information.

We talk about laws, about changing these things. That?s not going to happen until there?s a groundswell. That comes back to you as archivists, and you as just citizens.

We?ve had a sea change ? it?s taken us 30 years to get to this point of lockdown, and it?s going to take a while to turn it around. Maybe it needs to be taken up by PTAs and church groups. Grass roots. It?s the kind of thing where over time we need to see momentum in that direction.

Questions from audience:

Q: need to talk about misinformation? This administration is an expert at putting out disinformation. We have to be intelligent consumers of the news. We can?t expect our government officials to stop running and hiding.

Tom ? I?m hopeless in this regard ? I?m an optimist. There is a contested sphere. There?s this wonderful quote that Ron Suskind featured in a New York Times article from an unnamed Bush official a few years ago. Calls archivists, librarians, journalists, etc. ?Reality-based people.? ?While you people are out there studying this, we?re going to go out there and make new reality, and then you?ll get to study that too.? I thought it was a fantastic diss of 400 years of reason.

I agree with you that part of the problem is structural. I don?t know if you saw that the white house is going to change the press room to have a video wall behind the spokesman. The quote from Tony Snow was that ?this is a way to get our message across directly, without filters.?

Jerry Mander had a quote in book re: abolishing TV. Image media bypasses thinking.

Dumbledore ?Harry ? I thought you were too young to handle the information.? Thus secrecy caused the death of Sirius Black!!!

Ira ? when you see news coverage of something that doesn?t add up, call a reporter!! The best exercise I did in school was taking a paragraph out of a book and having to write five pages about it. Taught me a lot about parsing releases. If I see something, I call the reporter. If they don?t write about it, I call the editor.

Rick ? before you call your reporter, call your member of congress.

Q: Could you give us an idea of how to engage young people who aren?t reading newspapers, who are blas? and uninterested in current events? How do you inspire that sense of outrage.

Connors ? analogy might be Vietnam war. That got people in the streets. How can we do that for this?

Ira : I don?t know. I?m trying to do that one student at a time. People learn a lot in Journalism school ? for example a lot of Fs first semester for misspelled names. They get accuracy, but this takes longer.

We?re the elders ? we have to lead on this. We have to figure out how to get this in schools. Maybe that?s what we can do as journalists, archivists, public advocates.

Tom ? I spent a semester in Louisiana in school on the war between the states, with the first piece being ?the lost cause.? We?ve come a long way!

Essay by someone at Rice Univ: ?objectivity is not neutrality ? being fair to all views is different from not taking a position.? Archivists make decisions about what?s important to save, access, etc. To the extent that the human race has a saving grace, it?s this striving toward thought and empiricism ? the opposite of how the Bush administration sneers at these things.

I have a friend at the Philly Inquirer who said to me ?we have a business problem ? our circ is at an all time low. Yet I have more readers now than ever before because of the web.?

I?m not as pessimistic. I think young people are absorbing a lot of information. These people have this stuff in their cell phones. They?re blas? about it. But if you look at the learning curve among young people about the Middle East over the last few years, you see a capacity to become engaged.

Ira: you make a good point ? for young people, you have to meet them where they are. If you picked up your newspaper one day and four of the inside pages were blank, that might make an impression. If I told my daughter that she couldn?t have information about Lizzy Maguire or Pink for a week? Maybe that?s what it takes are these really visceral demonstrations.

Q: Re: reclassification project at National Archives ? what could be the justification?

Tom : I?ll try to be fair, although it requires a great stretch! The mid 1990s, with first big burst of Clinton declassification, there were a billion records declassified. There were mistakes. They found three related to nuclear weapons. So they marched up to congress and got them to pass a law funding millions of dollars to pay people to look for information with vague connections to nuclear weapon design.

Given what we know now about Pakistan and North Korea, it wasn?t by poring through 50 year old records that they figured out how to do this. But they found these examples. They rehired all these people who retired from the DOE.

The Intel agencies got jealous, and they started having their people doing the same things. They found things that had come from their agencies that were in other agencies records.

This whole process has pulled only 12,000 out of a billion docs ? which is an error rate Toyota would be proud of.

The CIA came in and found 55,000 docs that they had problems with ? because they hadn?t looked at them before the state dept. declassified them. And they got the archivist of the United States to sign a memo and agree to lie to researchers about the declassification procedures. One of the people involved believed that signing that memo was a victory against the CIA, because what they were doing before that was out of control of the Archives. So that memo got the archival professionals involved. From their perspective it was regaining some of the power they had lost. Has any of those pages damaged our national security (of the 55000)? I would argue no, and that the classification laws are not for security ? they are designed to protect the bureaucracy.

To the credit of Archivist Alan Weinstein, when he heard about this in his New York Times, he immediately stopped it and started looking at policies

The problem is that fundamentally that there?s no room for the archives to get back in the saddle on this. But the outrage has helped them fight against it,.