February 4, 2018
CLASSIFICATION IS OVERCLASSIFICATION:
Against Overclassification (David French, February 2, 2018, National Review)
Here's a shocking idea. Let's see the transcript. Let's see what McCabe actually said. And while we're at it, let's see the other relevant documents -- like the FISA applications themselves -- with only the lightest and most necessary of redactions. At the very least disclosing the relevant portions of the McCabe transcript won't threaten national security in the slightest, and it would have the salutary effect of exposing one or more of our "public servants" as partisan liars.Knowledge is power, and there is no doubt that Washington likes to hoard power. I reviewed vast amounts of classified information during my military career, and I can assure you that only the smallest fraction of that information was truly dangerous. Most of it was classified by default -- some of it classified (believe it or not) simply because of the kind of computer a soldier used when he sent the email.The result is a lack of public accountability. The result is a breach of public trust. Public officials can say what they wish about some of the most contentious issues in American life while being reasonably sure that no one will ever be able to check their work. And if someone does, they can scream "leaker!"To be clear, I'm not advocating for self-help. I'm not advocating for leaking. Public officials have an obligation to follow the law. I am advocating for reform. It's time to carefully reconsider the extent to which we wall off information from the public and the extent to which we permit public officials to hide their bias, incompetence, and sometimes even malice behind that red "classified" stamp.
Mr. French mentions several problems with classification, but we'd emphasize them differently:
(1) Obviously, the biggest is that closely held "information" is not submitted to the marketplace of ideas and is, therefore, never tested for veracity/utility in the manner we universally recognize is most effective.
(2) The fact of being "classified" lends a certain cache to the "information" that, by the standard above, is least reliable, when, in reality, the information available from open sources, which is rigorously dissected and contested ought to be lent particular credence and the classified looked at askance.
(3) These effects are exacerbated by the power relationship that Mr. French cites. The aura of power associated with access to classified "intelligence" discourages those who hold it from ever allowing it to be validated by others.
(4) Of course, not all classified intelligence is intrinsically useless. And that accurate information which contradicts conventional wisdom is particularly valuable. Unfortunately, when it is kept classified we keep the general population ignorant and decisions uninformed. In essence, we render even solid intelligence useless by classifying it.
Take just four instances of these problems at work: two American, one fictional, one Soviet:
(1) How Baseball Betrayed Cuba's Covert Ops: American intel looked for telltale diamonds (ADAM RAWNSLEY, War is Boring)
[N]BC's Tom Brokaw recalled a briefing he'd received in advance of a trip to Nicaragua by one of the maestros of Iran-Contra, U.S. Marine Corps colonel Oliver North. Writing in The New York Times, Brokaw said North excitedly pointed out baseball diamonds in grainy satellite footage of what he alleged was a Cuban training camp in Nicaragua."Nicaraguans don't play baseball," North told Brokow in an apparent attempt to cast himself as Kissinger at Cienfuegos. "Cubans play baseball!"Of course, both the Cubans and Soviets supported the Sandanista government in Nicaragua. But as Brokaw quickly realized, North's contention was astonishingly ignorant of the country's long history of baseball fandom. "His declaration will come as a surprise to the Nicaraguans who have made it to the major leagues," Brokaw wrote.
(2) As Michael Beschloss explained in his terrific book, Mayday, it was largely because of intelligence gathered by U2 flights that Ike was able to trust his instincts that the USSR was much weaker than it claimed and not to launch a costly and unnecessary military build-up to "match" them. In effect, he cashed in a Peace Dividend that resulted in our nostalgia for the economy of the 50s. But because he did not share with the American people (and the world) just how trivial a threat the Soviets represented, we were prey to the hysteria of folks like JFK and the John Birch Society and the rest, with myriad awful results: crediting communism as a workable system; doubting democratic capitalism, wasting money on a military we did not need, getting embroiled in wars of no strategic significance, etc.
The result, after twenty years of this was that:
In perceiving the Soviet Union as permanent, orderly, and legitimate, [Henry] Kissinger shared a
failure of analysis with the rest of the foreign-policy elite--notably excepting the scholar and former
head of the State Department's policy-planning staff George Kennan, the Harvard historian Richard
Pipes, the British scholar and journalist Bernard Levin, and the Eureka College graduate Ronald
Reagan.
-Robert D. Kaplan, Kissinger, Metternich, and Realism (Atlantic Monthly, June 1999)
(3) John LeCarre is generally tedious, because of his hatred of America, but Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy nicely illustrates the points here. Recall that the Source Merlin material is only circulated amongst a select group of the highest-ranking officials at the Circus, so no one who would actually understand the material ever gets to tell them it's all useless, until George Smiley gets ahold of it.
(4) We in the West like to credit Mikhail Gorbachev for initiating the reforms that toppled the USSR, even giving him a cuddly nickname, "Gorby." But the truth is that he was trying to save a Soviet system that only his predecessor, Yuri Andropov, genuinely understood had failed completely. Why only he? Because as head of the KGB he had access to global information sources, the mere perusal of which would have put his peers in the gulag. Even other Soviet leaders shared the same failure of analysis as the foreign-policy elite cited by Mr. Kaplan. We perhaps saw this most famously when Nikita Khruschev refused to believe that the kitchen Richard Nixon showed him was typical of our middle class.
We can multiply these tragi-comic examples out endlessly--keeping the Venona intercepts secret is another good example--but the overarching principle is the same in all of them: secrecy is harmful to precisely those it is putatively intended to protect.
Posted by Orrin Judd at February 4, 2018 8:17 AM