Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author(s) and do not reflect the official position or policy of ADV or the International Association for Political Science Students (IAPSS).
The nature of democracy is that the governed must grant consent to be governed. However, once the electoral system is in place and the governed have elected their governors; regardless of partisan politics and the cyclical nature of power shifts – the decision to decide what is best for mass society has been passed from those who are governed to the governor. In this case, citizens, aka the governed, have granted trust and faith in their elected officials. This means that what is in a citizen’s best interests, including what information they have access to and how they are informed, is left outside their control.
Elizabeth Sanders (2015) points this out much more eloquently;
“foreign policymaking in democracies contains a paradox. On the one hand, democratic leaders are subject to the political constraints imposed by regular elections. On the other hand, scholars of American political behavior have long empathized that the public does not know much about foreign policy and often take cues from elites” (p. Sanders, 2015: 466).
I argue that governmental secrecy that relates to privacy and surveillance directly infringes on civil liberties and is unconstitutional. However, it is also necessary under certain umbrellas. Governmental secrecy related to national strategy and pursuing the national interest (in terms of military capabilities) is a necessary tool of statecraft. When contemplating the issue of secrecy in democratic societies, two distinctions need to be made: concern for privacy and surveillance and concern for national strategy and the national interest.
Figure 1:
Source : Author
Figure 1 shows that there are two important distinctions in how secrecy may be used by the government to withhold information from the public. The problem arises when the government uses secrecy as a means to spy on the populaces, they are representing rather than protect them. This reality has been particularly problematic when considering the National Security Agency’s (NSA) mass surveillance that has occurred since 2001, monitoring private calls of American citizens. Violations of Americans’ right to privacy extend beyond phone calls and also to social media. According to the Brennan Center for Justice (2022), federal agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of State routinely monitor social media, risking Americans’ rights to freedom of speech. This is an issue because it violates expectations regarding civil liberties and the right to privacy. Unfortunately, there is a significant amount of fog cloaking the governmental use of secrecy, whether about privacy and surveillance or as a direct result of executive misuse of power.
The United States has had several situations where the issues of a right to privacy and means of national security have directly butted heads. A specific example to consider is Watergate; the cloak of “national security” was utilized to disguise an erroneous misperception of authority (Bernstein, 1976: 201). However, the issue is not Nixon alone, but the reality that executive powers began to grant the F.B.I. a significant level of oversight that just so happened to invade individual rights to privacy (and increased uses of governmental wiretappings). Nixon was not the only president to do this; other examples include President Roosevelt, President Hoover, and President Truman (Bernstein, 1976: 201), and they are not likely to be the last to do so. Governmental secrecy becomes a problem when the system of checks and balances fails, and citizens are unduly under the scrutiny of governmental surveillance. However, while the conspiracy notions of secrecy and governmental spying is fascinating, the alternative use of secrecy in the name of pursuing national strategy and the national interest provides a necessary narrative for public misperception.
Secrecy is a necessary tool of statecraft because it is a necessary tool of governmental strategic implementation – meaning if I plan to drop a bomb on an Iran nuclear facility, I may not want that to be overtly known – but let’s not talk about the recent incident using Signal chat that included a journalist.
An example to consider with the necessary use of governmental secrecy is targeted killings and drone strikes, specifically looking at the use of the Obama administration. Under the Obama administration, it was insisted that drone strikes were an effective campaign to combat the threat in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan (Jaffer 2016: 19). Implementing these strikes successfully required a lack of public knowledge. However, the tension within national security and secrecy is what the government informs the public as being successful.
With the Obama administration, the statistics the public was given of the success of these strikes were often misconstrued. For example, Obama called these strikes effective because they had removed “dozens of highly skilled al Qaeda commanders, trainers, bomb makers, and operatives” (Jaffer 2016: 21). In reality, most of the time, the strikes took out foot soldiers who were quickly replaced (Jaffer 2016: 21). The use of secrecy to implement strategy is a necessary tool of the government; it has surpassed the legitimacy of hegemonic wars as a tool of statecraft. Nevertheless, the use of secrecy to cover up actual results damages the relationship between the citizens and their elected officials by diminishing trust. While governmental secrecy is necessary when implementing national security strategy, if used to hinder individual liberties or cloak the actual results of military actions, it diminishes the capacity in which the government should legitimately feel entitled to utilize secrecy as a tool of statecraft.
References
Bernstein, B. J. (June 06, 1976). The Road to Watergate and beyond: The Growth and Abuse of Executive Authority since 1940. Law and Contemporary Problems, 40, 2, 58.
In Jaffer, J., & American Civil Liberties Union, (2016). The drone memos: Targeted killing, secrecy, and the law.
Levinson-Waldman, R., Panduranga, H., & Patel F. (January 7, 2022). “Social Media Surveillance by the U.S. Government”. Brennan Center for Social Justice. Available at: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/social-media-surveillance-us-government
Saunders, E. N. (2015). War and the inner circle: Democratic elites and the politics of using force. Security Studies, 24(3), 466-501.
Author’s Bio-Note
Autumn Perkey is a recent Ph.D. Graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park, focusing on psychological/cyber warfare, foreign policy, and conflict processes. She previously completed her B.A. in political science from the Ohio State University in 2019.
