Secrecy has generally shrouded government surveillence, and it opens a danger to a free and open society
In the US, secrecy has manifested itself in several ways. First the government has greatly expanded what can be considered secret. One of the truisms of national security is that secrecy is necessary in matters of intellegence, foreign policy and defense. If the government made certain things public—troop movements, weapons capabilities, negotiating positions—the enemy would alter its behavior to its own advantage. After 9/11, we generalized further, and now almost anything can be considered secret. The result is that US government secrecy has exploded. No one knows the exact number—it is secret, of course—but reasonable estimates are that hundreds of billions of pages of of government documents are classified in the US each year. At the same time, the number of people with security clearances has similarly mushroomed. As of October of 2012, of 5 million people in the US had security clearances (1.4 million at the top secret level). A 50% increase since 1990.
Pretty much all details of government surveillance are classified. Pre Snowden, you weren’t able to read the Presidential Policy DIrectives that authorized much of NSA surveillence. It was all classified, and would still be if the Snowden documents hadn’t resulted in a bunch of declassifications. This kind of secrecy weakens the checks and balances we have in place to oversee surveillance and, more broadly, to see that we are all treated fairly by our laws.
References
- Schneier, Bruce. (2015). Data and Goliath The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World CHapter 7. Political Liberty and Justice (111). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
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