The State of Personal Democracy: Is Government Really More Secretive?

Kicks off the ninth annual Personal Democracy Forum in New York City, a yearly confab of geeks, digital philosophers and policy wonks that plumbs the connection between technology and how we govern ourselves in the modern world. I’ve been to all but one and and here’s what I’d tell the assemblage of high-powered thinkers and doers this year:

The state of personal democracy is stronger than it’s ever been in U.S. history … and getting stronger.
Whoa big fella. Did you say stronger? Isn’t it received wisdom on your side of the political fence (that’d be progressive trending toward social democrat) that the growing security state is getting ever more secretive, conspiring with its corporate sponsors to deny citizens access to the very data their tax dollars pay for?

Aren’t we actually entering a dark age that locks up public information, relentlessly punishes whistleblowers, tracks leakers, and conducts the business of government under the metastasizing dark cloak of secrecy and security? Aren’t newspapers shutting down, journalists either unemployed or attacked, traditional muckrakers and honesty merchants silenced? Don’t you follow the Wikileaks Twitter feed or read Glenn Greenwald? C’mon Watson … you dishonest, pollyannish apologist for neo-liberal imperialists! (I’m merely anticipating the comments here).

In many ways, all that is true – the rise of a much larger security apparatus after 9/11, America’s endless wars, and what appears to be a growing gulf between the governed and those doing the governing – and the powerful companies and industries who pay for their political campaigns and control the lobbying efforts – are all valid objections to the authentic connection that democracy requires.

Yet I’d offer up a glass-half-full argument and urge a longer perspective with a few questions. In the nine years since the Personal Democracy Forum began less than a mile from Ground Zero has the Federal government made more information available, free and online, or less? Has New York City increased the access to municipal process and data – or has it decreased? Have state and legislatures around the county generally opened up information about how state houses work – or closed it off?

Further, are established democratic governments under ever-greater pressure to open up more than they have? Have leakers, whistleblowers, anarchists, activists, organizers and gadflies taken advantage of the digital nature of nearly all government documents to make sure the public has access to what was formerly secretive?

Around the world, even in places of conflict and repression, does the state have more power over information or less? Have reform movements and revolutionary organizers been able to use digital media to route around government bottlenecks? Have tyrants fallen, aided partly by the flow of information to those who formerly lived in the dark? Do even the largest centralized autocracies struggle to maintain the blackout on information they don’t like?

To boil it down to a question that will fit on Twitter: does secret state information stay secret longer these days?

The top-level answers to this question – “heck, no!” – and all these questions are obvious, even as the week-to-week and year-to-year trends are both challenging and troubling.
 
It’s far from pollyannish to observe that since the rise of the Internet, the world is a far less secretive place – especially for governments.

Ask President Barack Obama, now seeking a second term in office as this year’s PDF unfolds at New York University, convened by Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry in this nascent summer political season with a focus on the election process. How long did the details of Obama’s expanding drone program remain secret? How about the details of the bank bailouts, the auto industry deals, the negotiations with the healthcare industry in advance of his reform package? Heck, the raid on Bin Laden’s compound was tweeted by a guy who lives down the street. And I’d argue that the hue and cry about Obama’s security policy and its constitutional questions is so loud and so general because so much is known – not because it’s particularly secret.

Yes, Obama is the first Wikileaks President – whether he likes it or not (and whether or not that flawed and personality-driven organization is a particularly good model for greater personal democracy in the digital age). What Bradley Manning is alleged to have done with U.S. government secrets is what will happen – increasingly – with all government and corporate secrets. When Steward Brand opined that “information wants to be free” it really shouldn’t have been about cost, but about the increasingly friction-free process of transfer.

The President famously proclaimed on his first day in office in 2009 that his would be the “most transparent administration in history” – a statement frequently cited by critics on both the left and the right – but has fought Freedom of Information requests and pursued leakers, turning his famous proclamation “into a punch line rather than a re-election slogan,” as the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Trevor Timm put it.

And yet the American political process is still – and somewhat relentlessly – opening up. Just last week, you may have missed what the Sunlight Foundation’s Daniel Schuman called a “milestone for legislative transparency.” The House of Representatives moved to provide what’s known as “bulk access” to legislative information to the public. – this means anyone can download and work with the data used to publish Congress’s THOMAS online database of legislation and related documents.

This is a vast amount of information about the government operates slated to be released in usable format. Yet the same week brought criticism of the White House from Sunlight’s policy director John Wonderlich for its “self-promotional, selective disclosures,” in a post what was particularly critical of the Administration’s lack of transparency around military strikes that kill American citizens overseas. Asks Wonderlich: “How can due process possibly exist through permanently secret determinations?”

In a post two years ago lauding the Obama Administration for some of its early move in open data, Ellen Miller, the founder and executive director of Sunlight, still offered a cautionary note. “It is imperative that the onus remains on the White House to fulfill their big promises, and incumbent upon the media and we as citizens to hold them accountable for doing so. That is the best way to ensure that government truly becomes more open.” Thankfully, organizations like Sunlight continue to watch the public commons and hold the government accountable.

Sometimes it’s instructive to step back and look at decade-long trend lines. While Sunlight, PDF, and other advocates work to continue to open up government data and limit the secrets kept from citizens – a vital battle that deserves everyone’s support – a little historical perspective should provide a some wind in their sails. It was interesting this week to read the first joint Woodward-Bernstein byline in the Washington Post in nearly four decades, a piece that argued that President Nixon’s personal corruption was far deeper than the reporters knew at the time. Wrote the famed Watergate chroniclers:

“Today, much more than when we first covered this story as young Washington Post reporters, an abundant record provides unambiguous answers and evidence about Watergate and its meaning.
This record has expanded continuously over the decades with the transcription of hundreds of hours of Nixon’s secret tapes, adding detail and context to the hearings in the Senate and House of Representatives; the trials and guilty pleas of some 40 Nixon aides and associates who went to jail; and the memoirs of Nixon and his deputies. Such documentation makes it possible to trace the president’s personal dominance over a massive campaign of political espionage, sabotage and other illegal activities against his real or perceived opponents.”

The story was a fascinating one, and not just because it demolished the idea that the Watergate cover-up was worse than the crime – quite clearly the crimes were more widespread and venal than was reported at the time. Yet it struck me that a Nixon in the age of social media and digital databases wouldn’t stand a chance – and he’d have thousands of semi-pro journalists, political activists and digital muckrakers at his heels night and day.

What took four decades of painstaking reporting, document sifting, and historical research would find the light of day a lot more quickly in the digital age – through searchable databases, rumors and links spread by blogs, and leaks.

Considering the 40 years in between Watergate – indeed, the Vietnam Era – and today, progress in opening the data of government (and all the related information of politics) is rather stunning. When I was a young reporter in the 1980s, weeks of paper cuts and stacks of nickels by a Xerox machine was the cost of sifting public files necessary to uncover a decent political expose. I sat in a lot of dingy government conference rooms going through boxes and files.

Now I can zip into OpenSecrets.org and find the last 15 years of disclosure documentation in minutes. I can search for contracts, for RFPs, for years worth of votes and committee procedures. Not all that much isn’t known.

What’s often missing, of course, is the political will. That’s why so many open government activists remain critical of both major political political parties, the White House, and Congress. Foot-dragging continues, of course, as does the urge to keep too many things secret in this age of security.

Yet given the march of time and the vast evolution of government data – from dust-covered stacks and filing cabinets to open digital repositories – I think it’s absolutely fair to say that our government has never been more “open,” at least in the technical sense.

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