‘Secrecy” sounds so sinister. And when we’re talking about government, that is as it should be. In a self-governing society, transparency is our default setting. Secrecy is the government’s way of concealing corruption, incompetence, and profligacy. There must be a presumption against it.
A presumption, however, is not a prohibition. Presumptions are rebutted by necessity. Speaking about the necessity of good intelligence to military operations and homeland defense, General George Washington observed that “upon secrecy, success depends in most enterprises . . . and for want of it, they are generally defeated.” The necessity of secrecy and the catastrophe that can follow when secrecy is breached — these are core concerns of national security.
They are also what the Hillary Clinton e-mail saga is all about.
We could go on at length about Clinton’s arrogance in setting up a homebrew communications network, an outrageous violation of the transparency standards that were her responsibility as secretary of state to enforce. It was a familiar exercise in Clintonian self-dealing: Anticipating running for president in 2016, she realized she was enmeshed in the Clinton Foundation’s global scheme to sell influence for money, so she devised a way to avoid a paper trail. Accountability, after all, is for peons: the yoke of recordkeeping requirements, Freedom of Information Act productions, congressional inquiries, and the government’s disclosure duties in judicial proceedings was not for her Highness. Instead, it would be: No Records, No Problems — a convenient arrangement for a lifetime “public servant” of no discernible accomplishment whom disaster has a habit of stalking. The homebrew server was for Hillary’s State Department what an on-site drycleaner might have been for Bill’s White House.