On March 3, 1997 the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy issued its final report.
In its Summary of Findings and Recommendations the commission wrote:
“It is time for a new way of thinking about secrecy.
“Secrecy is a form of government regulation. Americans are familiar with the tendency to over-regulate in other areas. What is different with secrecy is that the public cannot know the extent or the content of the regulation.
“Excessive secrecy has significant consequences for the national interest when, as a result, policymakers are not fully informed, government is not held accountable for its actions, and the public cannot engage in informed debate. This remains a dangerous world; some secrecy is vital to save lives, bring miscreants to justice, protect national security, and engage in effective diplomacy. Yet as Justice Potter Stewart noted in his opinion in the Pentagon Papers case, when everything is secret, nothing is secret. Even as billions of dollars are spent each year on government secrecy, the classification and personnel security systems have not always succeeded at their core task of protecting those secrets most critical to the national security. The classification system, for example, is used too often to deny the publican understanding of the policy making process, rather than for the necessary protection of intelligence activities and other highly sensitive matters.”
The report goes on at great length (This is after all a government report.) to describe the problems created by excessive government secrecy and proposes a number of recommendations. On the whole the analysis is sound. Excessive government secrecy is both extremely expensive and in many ways counter-productive. Senator Moynihan gives a good example of this in his chairman’s forward.
“An example, on a subject that still troubles our foreign relations, is the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April, 1961. Planned and carried out in secret, the object was to arouse a popular revolt against the regime of Fidel Castro, which had become unmistakably Communist units orientation. No such uprising occurred, and the events were set in motion that arguably led to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the closest the United States and the Soviet Union came to a nuclear exchange during the Cold War.
“It need not have happened. In the spring of 1960, Lloyd A. Free of the Institute for International Social Research at Princeton (no friend of the new regime, but a social scientist, withal) had carried out an extensive public opinion survey in Cuba. Polling techniques now common to American politics were already quite developed by scholars such as Free and his associate Hadley Cantril; in this case the technique was the ‘Self-Anchoring Striving Scale.’ One thousand Cubans were asked to rank their well-being at that time, five years previously, and five years hence. Cubans reported they were hugely optimistic about the future, and mostly dreaded the return of the previous dictator Fulgencio Batista. They would learn better, as peoples the world over would do as the earlier excitements of revolution gave way to Leninist terror and intimidation. But they had not learned yet. Free’s report ended on an unambiguous note: Cubans ‘are unlikely to shift their present overwhelming allegiance to Fidel Castro.’ Cantril later recalled:
“This study on Cuba showed unequivocally not only that thereat majority of Cubans supported Castro, but that any hope of stimulating action against him or exploiting a powerful opposition in connection with the United States invasion of 1961 was completely chimerical, no matter what Cuban exiles said or felt about the situation, and that the fiasco and its aftermath, in which the United States became involved, was predictable.
“These data were public, and were dutifully provided to United States Government agencies. (The Cuban Embassy sent for ten copies.) It is difficult not to think that the information in the public opinion survey might have had greater impact had it been classified. In a culture of secrecy, that which is not secret is easily disregarded or dismissed.” I hope that Congress addresses the commission’s recommendations seriously.
Final Report: Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy