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