So What’s
The Secret?
Around 400 million people enter the U.S. each year, 87 million
on airplanes alone. If you’re one of them, it turns
out you’ve been investigated, assessed, and assigned
a secret rating by the Department of Homeland Security’s
Automated Targeting System. You’ll never know your rating
or what it’s based on, since it’s been exempted
from the Privacy Act which is supposed to protect people from
secret and possibly inaccurate government dossiers. But according
to information published in the Federal Register last week,
some or all of that ATS data is now routinely available to
local, state, and foreign governments, and to courts, government
contractors, and even private employers. Just about anybody
connected to government can see what’s in your secret
file except you, to learn how the government rates you as
a possible terrorist or criminal, or someone with unpaid parking
tickets, tax bills, whatever. And the Department of Homeland
Security says it’s going to keep all this stuff for
40 years and do whatever they feel like with it.
You have a problem with any of this? We do. Just like we do
with illegal domestic wiretapping and a range of other assaults
on our constitutional rights by our own government since 9-11.
We also have problems with our government torturing people
and holding them incognito in secret prisons around the world.
And we’re not talking about a few people either: the
number’s around 14,000 today that our government’s
made disappear in its war on terror.
Also last week, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich gave a
major speech where he advocated new and far greater restrictions
on free speech in general and the internet in particular.
“This is a serious long-term war,” he said “and
it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in
every suspect place in the country,” and “to close
down every website that is dangerous.” Such measures,
said Gingrich, are part of “a series of solutions so
compelling that if the American people say I have to be President,
it will happen.”
Few of us of course, view the threat of terrorism quite so
opportunistically as Gingrich. But a fair number of us seem
to feel the world has become sufficiently scary that the loss
of our basic freedoms may be a necessary price to pay for
protection from it. We don’t think so. Like everyone,
we want our government to keep us safe. But we think that
by and large, protection is nothing but a racket if it means
our freedom is just a word that hardly means anything anymore.
In fact we’re not at all sure some of the solutions,
like access to the ATS data, aren’t worse than the problems
they’re intended to help solve.
In the mid-90’s, our late Senator Patrick Moynihan chaired
a bipartisan blue-ribbon commission on secrecy in government.
What they found is that by hoarding secrets, government becomes
a kind of market and secrecy itself a form of regulation.
And they found that it keeps government from being held accountable
for its actions and prevents the public from engaging in informed
debate. Basically in a word, what they found is that secrecy
is un-American.
Closer to home we’ve had plenty of experience with secret
government. It’s landed us a $130 million county jail
project we can’t even get open, and a contract with
the Modoc Indians for a casino in Ellenville or maybe somewhere
else in the county if they find a town they like better. Ask
around, we did for years. Not a soul who attended those meetings
can even remember who else did. Just as the Moynihan Commission
said, no one’s accountable.
That kind of thing is one reason we’re so concerned
with the recent turn of events regarding the Belleayre Resort
project: Closed-door meetings on a suddenly urgent schedule,
gag orders on the participants imposed by Governor Pataki’s
office, and so on. Neither we nor anyone else has the slightest
idea what may be going on in those discussions. But when the
entire public permitting process and everyone with legal standing
in it suddenly move behind sealed doors, it’s the public
interest that we fear for. Because we’re concerned that
whatever’s happening may be an attempt to circumvent
the transparency that our state laws require. And when that
suddenly goes opaque, something may be wrong. What, if anything,
might be in this case, we don’t know.
We do know however that whatever’s taking place behind
those closed doors is happening right smack in the middle
of a very clear, very proscribed and very public permitting
process. For any who may have forgotten where in that process
we are, we’re waiting for DEC to rule on Crossroads’
appeal of a judges’ decision to adjudicate 12 areas
where their data and analysis was deemed inadequate under
state law to permit the project to move forward. Contained
in these 12 areas are all the unanswered questions about the
project’s local impact…from traffic to groundwater
to the God-awful tax deal proposed for the Town of Shandaken.
We fully agree with the judge that many of these questions
need better answers than we’ve seen. But there’s
a process for that, SEQRA, and a public venue, adjudication,
where the answers are intended to come out. And every citizen
of this valley and the state has a right to expect that open
public process to move forward toward whatever resolution
it holds.
We respect the efforts of all involved in these talks to broker
solutions. We think it’s right and good that such talks
take place. But we believe adherence to public process is
what matters here, and that secrecy on these discussions does
not serve that. In his book Secrecy, the American Experience,
Senator Moynihan seems to have summed it up nicely:
“...open sources give us the vast majority of what we
need to know to make intelligent decisions. Analysis, far
more than secrecy, is the key to security. Secrecy is for
losers.”
Our local experience leads us to agree. BP
