Notes

5 W Main: State of Silence. On taking office, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to declassify the remaining files pertaining to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. The executive order stated that continued secrecy “is not consistent with the public interest.”

It’s still possible, though, that the American intelligence community will refuse to cooperate. In 1992, when Congress passed a law to release all JFK documents within 25 years, officials in the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency prevailed on a succession of presidents—including Trump himself—to keep thousands of pages secret. And it worked, at least until now.

Why is it so hard to get the the American national-security state to release classified informations, decades after it was classified?

As Matthew Connelly said here at The Signal last summer, there are a number of factors in play. More than a million people in the United States have a Top Secret security clearance, but only some two thousand government employees work to release files to the public. And the incentives favor overclassification: No one has ever been fired from the U.S. government for classifying too promiscuously, but the bureaucrat who lets the wrong thing slip out might not only lose his or her job but face prosecution, as well.

In State of Silence: The Espionage Act and the Rise of America’s Secrecy Regime, Sam Lebovic explores how the American national-security state is underpinned by a vague law enacted more than a century ago: The Espionage Act of 1917 is the keystone in this “secrecy regime.” Originally intended to help the government root out foreign spies, this obscurely worded statute has been reinterpreted and patched up so many times that it now gives the government a near-absolute right to censor its own employees—in many cases even long after they’ve left their jobs.

As Lebovic shows, the government polices its own employees so diligently because that’s the most efficient way within its means of controlling American public opinion. During World War I, the government could censor the press fairly easily. But that censorship sparked a counter-reaction. A free-speech movement began gathering momentum. The government, realizing it could no longer prevent the press from publishing state secrets, mounted a concerted effort to make sure such secrets never reached the press in the first place. So paradoxically, one of the main reasons the American secrecy regime is so vast is the fact that the American media can say what it likes.

—Gustav Jönsson