Government Secrets

There's an excellent article in the Naples Daily News today (where I am, on vacation), about the troubling trend towards secrecy on the part of the federal government. OpenTheGovernment.org, a coalition of 67 organizations, has compiled a report, Government Secrecy: Decisions Without Democracy 2007, detailing how the George W. Bush administration has increased secrecy and decreased public oversight of government. (Interestingly, the Naples Daily News article doesn't attribute the secrecy directly to the current administration until the ninth paragraph of the story.) Here's a link to the story (at forbes.com, originally from the AP). Here's a link to OpenTheGovernment.org's press release. Here's a link to OpenTheGovernment.org's report.

The state secrets privilege was first recognized in United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1 (1953), which, like other legal notions arbitrarily imported from English law (e.g., obscenity, with Regina v. Hicklin, L. R. 3 Q. B. 360) don't necessarily apply, or shouldn't, in the U.S. There's no obscenity exception in the First Amendment, so why should there be an obscenity exception to the First Amendment? Take that, textualists! As well, Reynolds was probably decided incorrectly on the facts: when the accident reports about the plane crash that was the subject of Reynolds were declassified, it turned out that there were, in fact, no state secrets implicated in the case. See Hampton Stephens' March 14, 2003 article "Supreme Court Filing claims Air Force, government fraud in 1953 case: Case could affect 'state secrets' privilege," from Inside the Air Force, reprinted at the Federation of American Scientists Web site.

The same trend is, fortunately, not apparent in Florida—Charlie Crist, as South Florida radio talk show host Jim DeFede has said, is shaping up to be the best Democratic governor Florida has had for a while. His first executive order was to establish an Office of Open Government, and he's also established an Open Government Commission. See an article about Crist's open government efforts, on the Government Technology Web site.