The Public Life of Secrecy

By Frank Trippett

"We are all, in a sense, experts on secrecy. From earliest childhood we feel its mystery and attraction. We know both the power it confers and the burden it imposes. We learn how it can delight, give breathing space, and protect. But we come to understand its dangers too: how it is used to oppress and exclude; what can befall those who come too close to secrets they were not meant to share; and the price of betrayal. "

Just so, and aptly enough, opens the book Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation, a new study by Harvard Lecturer Sissela Bok, an authority on ethics and author of the 1979 book Lying. Scheduled to be published in February, the book is scholarly, cool, painstaking and analytical. Even if it is not likely to crowd out works of romance, sex, adventure and physical fitness, its subject could hardly be more fitting, at a time when the human urge for secrecy sometimes seems on the verge of getting out of hand.

Not that Sissela Bok wants to rid the world of secrecy. Far from it. She argues that the practice itself is neutral, only good or bad according to the purposes it serves. Says she: "While all deception requires secrecy, all secrecy is not meant to deceive." It is benign, for instance, when it helps human intimacy or the casting of ballots in democracies.

Such hospitality toward secrecy is doubtless widely shared. To consider it evil in and of itself would be a considerable inconvenience to the human species. Everybody, after all, has things to hide; the mind, psychology teaches, even conceals information from itself. It is probably the very naturalness of concealment that tempts people to carry it to excess. There is, in any case, no end of secrecy.

No beginning is visible either. It is hidden in the remotest past. The tactic of camouflage that is instinctual among animals has been ornately elaborated in the human race. But no animal could mimic all the varities of mankind's surreptitiousness. Hidden or encoded information is the very mainspring of drama, suspense, excitement and adventure. The screening of information has always been indispensable to both war and peace, to murder and romance, to spying and spirituality. Extreme privacy plays a prominent role in the most ancient myths. Irascible Zeus, who intended to withhold the knowledge of fire from humans, was outraged when he learned that Prometheus had gone public with it. Zeus was so put off that he assembled a plethora of troubles and sent them down to mortals in the custody of Pandora. Everybody knows the calamity that resulted from the insistence on disclosure of Pandora's cargo.

Secrecy hardly fascinates mankind any more today than in the past, but it is certainly practiced more methodically.

The most thoroughgoing control of information is to be found in totalitarian societies such as the Soviet Union and China, where even weather reports can be highly classified by the government. But there is scarcely any shortage of dodging and hiding in the rest of the world. In the U.S., the concealment of information is carried out so routinely in so many pockets of society that he practice is accepted as part of the perennial social weather, hardly worth special attention. Americans indifferently shrug off he extreme privacy practiced by commerce, industry and finance; by professions like the clergy, law and medicine; by societies like the Ku Klux Klan and the Shriners. But they tend to sit up and take notice when secrecy of some sort erupts into drama and controversy: say, when a Congressman goes to jail because of the FBI'S Abscam investigation, or when a group of well-dressed Japanese businessmen get arrested and charged with stealing computer lore from IBM. Such episodes remind the public of how the clandestine pervades society. Day in and out, most people accept professional prudence--say, that of the fashion or auto industries--as just part of the passing lifescape. People enjoying Coca-Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken or Thomas' English Muffins give little mind to the fact that such products rely on legendary secret recipes that have been hoarded, perhaps, more closely than the H-bomb formula (which a number of amateurs have long since put together entirely from public sources).

Americans for the most part bridle at the concealment of information only when they catch government practicing too much of it. This response is easy to understand. Americans, after all, are early and often drilled in the creed that hidden government is anathema to democracy, and never mind that the U.S. Constitution was drafted in closed session. "Concealment is a species of misinformation," said George Washington, and U.S. political leaders ever since have publicly followed his cue. What they do out of the public gaze, however, is often quite different. That is hinted at by the fact that the classified federal documents in the National Archives run into hundreds of millions of pages. More than hints are available in histories of such disasters as the U.S. involvement in the Bay of Pigs invasion (after which President John F. Kennedy complained to one editor that if the press had only exposed the invasion in advance, "you would have saved us from a colossal mistake"). Democratic government's capacity for byzantine deviousness is probably best told by that epochal best-teller, the Pentagon papers--that "hemorrhage" of classified matter, as Henry Kissinger ruefully called it--which dramatized, in 47 volumes, just how far a government could go in clandestine and illicit duplicity.

The U.S. public tends to be generously tolerant of the withholding of material when it concerns military affairs. Such tolerance gives Pentagon bosses a lease to play games that are not always strictly tied to military security. In one glaring example, the Pentagon went into a culprit-hunting mode a few months ago when somebody made public certain classified information: a budget figure, as it turned out, and a blue-sky one at that, interesting (and embarrassing) not because it endangered the nation's security but because it suggested that coming deficits would be much bigger than the Administration had yet admitted. More usual in the military's perennial game of hide-and-leak is the sudden declassification of scary intelligence about the Soviet Union at just those moments when the Pentagon is leaning on Congress for fatter appropriations. Nobody questions the need for military secrecy, but even military leaders realize that the hiding of information can be carried too far: post-mortems on the failed mission to rescue the American hostages in Iran showed the rescue team to have been handicapped because of security so tight that one team element did not always know what the other was doing.

The practice of concealment can become excessive in any walk of life, but it is especially susceptible to being overdone when it is used purely to serve power, as in government. Officials, administrators, bureaucrats and legislators can come to enjoy the capacity to hide not only legitimate sensitive material but incompetence, wrong judgments and ethical transgressions. It is no wonder that in democracies as well as in tyrannies, government tends to expand its capacity to hoard information. The U.S., to be sure, took steps to check and curtail this federal capacity in the wake of the excesses surrounding the Viet Nam War, the Watergate scandals and some mischief credited to the CIA and FBI in recent decades. The Government has nonetheless already accumulated a good deal of momentum toward a yet greater capacity for keeping the public in the dark: in an executive order last spring, the Reagan Administration made the hiding of records easier for civil and military bureaus while, at the same time, undermining the 1966 Freedom of Information Act that was designed to give citizens better access not to secret but to "ordinary" Government information. Viewing particularly the Administration's move to restrict the flow of scientific information, Congressman George Brown Jr. of the House Science and Technology Committee says that the effect could be "to shoot ourselves in the foot."

One may be tempted to shrug off Government ways, consoling oneself with the cynical belief that even the most guarded information eventually leaks out. The trouble is that leakage is neither dependable nor always timely. "Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead," Benjamin Franklin said, and there may be truth to that. But such folklore is no substitute for a sensible public policy. The public vs. Government skirmish over how much classification there should be will probably go on forever and, in any democracy, should.

Secrecy is destined to persist as part of mankind's world in all of its political forms. Even though most often associated with deceit, acts of concealment can be both benign and indispensable to the protection of personal and public values. Secrecy may not be privacy by definition, but it is certainly essential to it. In totalitarian states, where Big Brother's eye is everywhere, privacy can be had only by the most meticulous practice of evasion and concealment. But throughout human history, people have relied on silence to safeguard the sacred as well as the intimate and personal.

Ultimately, the very nature of things is densely veiled. If religion arose to celebrate ineffable mysteries, science sprang into life to solve them. So it is science that has shown the universe to be an almost onion-like construct of secrets, with ever more of them lying under the layers peeled away. Atomic theory explained everything--until it was found that every atom contained entire worlds of other inscrutable particles that even changed their nature upon being observed. Today the quark is hotly pursued. When caught and analyzed, will it turn out to be the ultimate answer to the ultimate secrets of matter? Not unless the dossier tells when the quark happened to come into being and out of what materials and by what power.

To imagine any general reduction in human secrecy is intriguing but oddly difficult. It is not possible to envision a world from which all secrecy has gone. Some people have tried. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre felt that "transparency" should eventually prevail in human affairs and claimed to be able to imagine a time when people would "keep secrets from no one." Still, anybody contemplating humanity as it is must wonder whether, in a thoroughly transparent world, the species would not suffer spiritual anemia and perhaps terminal boredom. It may be diverting to speculate about the future of secrecy, but it can only be frustrating in the end. The future is the biggest secret of all.

--By Frank Trippett This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.