Military and political secret-keeping are not foreign to me. I recognize the usefulness of secret troop movements and societies in winning wars and overthrowing monarchies, especially in the past. However, in our information age where information is available in avalanche proportions, we need to re-evaluate how much we rely on secrecy and whether we should continue to value it highly as a social tool. I think that secrecy by those who are well-intentioned is now much less valuable and often detrimental to the very causes they are hoping to promote via secrecy.
First, there are corners of the internet and whole other computer networks where people trade secrets. Much that is assumed to be secret really isn't, but the criminals and sneaky people are getting their hands on that information while the well-intentioned are mostly kept from it.
Second, the saying that "politics makes for strange bedfellows" is even more true when it comes to protecting secrecy. When secrecy becomes a goal in and of itself, police fraternities can unknowingly end up working alongside the mafia to target people who expose their common secrets. It's not something that has to happen intentionally, for it flows naturally from different organizations subjecting themselves to secrecy considerations. Let me show this in diagrams; grammar syntax concepts are quite useful for demonstrating this:
(copied from image online at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/C-command.png, Author: Ioscius)
People think of organizations in terms of hierarchies. People are controlled by those who are upstream of them in a chain of command: D dominates F and G, C dominates E, B dominates C, D, E, F, and G, M dominates B, C, D, E, F, and G. But B doesn't dominate A, D doesn't dominate C or E, and C doesn't dominate D, F, or G.
Syntax research reveals the concept of "c-command" where reference to a common concept/object results in "c-command" by objects that otherwise don't dominate and so can't command each other. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-command). Using the diagram,
- M does not c-command any node because it dominates all other nodes.
- A c-commands B, C, D, E, F, and G.
- B c-commands A.
- C c-commands D, F, and G.
- D c-commands C and E.
- E does not c-command any node because it does not have a sister node or any daughter nodes.
- F c-commands G.
- G c-commands F.
Substitute "secrecy-command" for "C-command" and you'll get the gist of what I'm getting at here. Secrecy is the common referent. Organizations with otherwise no hierarchical connection get drafted by circumstances into helping each other preserve the common cause of secrecy.
Treating secrecy of supreme importance makes different groups easy to manipulate and even turns allies against each other even when in many ways their interests and aims are the same because 1) everyone has become a guardian of secrecy ("no man can serve two masters"), and 2) that secrecy keeps the different groups from talking and comparing notes and realizing in what specific ways they are being used against each other.
What to do when secrecy has been contractually agreed to? When the penalty for disclosure could be loss of employment, position, security, etc.? Whistleblowers often take big risks (and are heroes, in my book).
Because such extreme protection of secrecy does not promote the public welfare, it is subject to legal attack under the spirit of the preamble to the US Constitution. Because people would not have agreed to maintain secrecy at the expense of the very goals for which they initially entered into an agreement, that secrecy portion of the agreement is subject to rescission under principles of equity (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescission_(contract_law)).
Technology changes society and reshapes the tools we use to get things done. Secrecy is a tool that needs to be examined openly for its usefulness or harmfulness...kind of hard to do given that it's about not being open, but it still needs to be done.
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