Still working on finishing several books that I hope to write about in the next few weeks, but I felt kind of compelled to talk a little bit about classification and what a certain class of “we”, the wider public, never get to read, given the arrest of a 21-year old National Guard member for leaking the top secret documents that have been in the news in the past week.
In 1990, the anthropologist Adam Ashforth published an interesting reading of “official discourse” in South African history that argued in part that interpreting the transcripts of various commissions of inquiry as evidence about the subjects of inquiry was a mistake, because such commissions were highly staged performances that were not intended to create knowledge about a problem nor to solve it, but instead to manifest the state’s authority over discourse. Taken too far, this is a point that quickly shades into Hayden White’s Metahistory, wherein all historical scholarship is just a genre of writing about the present, with no particular truth value, in part because archives are seen as in fact providing no valid evidence about how the past really was—it is hard to separate out commissions of inquiry in the strongest version of Ashforth’s argument from every other official—and private—document one might find in archives and libraries, except as a particular genre of official writing with particular genre characteristics. (A point that Ashforth himself makes.)
In any event, along the way, Ashforth also sees torture in these terms, that what torturers learn from their victims is almost always immaterial. They usually know it already anyway and if not they know better than to trust what someone in enormous pain, in fear for their life, says to stop the pain. The point, he suggests, is simply to show that the hierarchy behind the torture can torture, that it has the power over bodies and information that torture entails.
In that spirit, let me suggest that the point of a great deal of classification is not to protect information that must remain accessible to a handful of people, to maintain asymmetries of information between adversarial interests in the favor of the classifier. The point is simply to say “We classify because we can; we classify to show you the distance between you and us.”
Let us take the case at hand. Jack Douglas Teixeira is now accused of having leaked a significant trove of top secret documents to a group of small gamers on Discord called Thug Shaker Central. Teixeira is a 21-year old National Guard member. Who had access to a significant trove of top secret documents and apparently triggered no special concerns by whatever method he used to share them with his Discord group.
I do not have to be a soothsayer to predict two future events in this case. First, the focus will be kept tightly on Teixeira, but second, there will be investigations and broad calls from pundits and politicians to classify more information and to classify it more stringently, possibly including an increase in criminal penalties for everyone who breaches it except for former Presidents.
When in fact everyone should be coming to the opposite conclusion. In the case of Wikileaks, in the case of the materials leaked by Edward Snowden, and in this case, the fact that it was so easy to get all that material is a sign that any adversarial party that wants to know all that knows it already. Earlier this week I voiced a half-suspicion that this is a deliberate act of disinformation designed to mislead the Russians about Ukraine’s counteroffensive. That’s looking like it’s not the case—at some point a conspiratorial suggestion like that fails simply because it requires too much planning and cunning. But the half-truth inside that paranoid proposition is that the real secrets that need to be kept really really secret are a different matter altogether than what most classification is protecting.
What most classification is protecting is the performativity of official knowledge. The press told us that some of the most damaging things in the material leaked by Chelsea Manning and others to Wikileaks early on were confidential assessments of foreign governmental actors by US officials. By damaging here we mean “embarrassing by fact of being public”, not “revealing something that was importantly secret”. If you’ve worked with the same people for most of your life, you’re often pretty sure who has a low opinion of you and who doesn’t. The consequences of having someone’s low opinion revealed in public is not that you learn something you didn’t know but that you now have power over them—you can demand an apology, you can act on what you suspected but couldn’t confirm. What you knew intuitively has now become a social fact. If the person who dislikes you has been undercutting you with others, that likely comes to an end—or forces that person into open enmity.
Those are meaningful consequences—something has changed in the balance of power. But it’s not just about the two parties involved, it’s the whole community. If people in general have been making decisions that are affected by this previously secret relationship, they’re now in a position to re-evaluate entirely the reliability of what they believed about the hater and the hatee and think anew about relationships, resources and responsibilities accordingly. Asymmetry of information is always about protecting the relative power of one party over another—and over a wider community. It’s only when you agree that this power should exist and that it is used well that you can endorse it.
In a democratic society, what classification has often meant is that wider publics don’t know some of what they really ought to know. The asymmetry of information is not well-used; it often turns out not to be true that dispelling it leads to “individuals making judgments about threats and information they are not qualified to make”, as Stanley McChrystal said about the Iraq War Logs. (Quite the opposite: it often shows how much the supposedly qualified were deliberately excluding information from their decisions that they didn’t want to know.) Not just for voting but for making other decisions—investing, travelling, generally trusting in the government’s probity and expertise, and so on. This is true even with non-governmental forms of confidentiality. To trust that important information that you ought to know and have every right to know is not being hidden by claims of confidentiality, you have to have evidence that confidentiality is being used sparingly to protect information that must remain secret for the good of the whole. Breaches of confidentiality often demonstrate the opposite, that it is being used to protect the reputation and power of the few.
Right now a wave of materials from the early Cold War is being (often grudgingly) declassified, joining archival evidence that was wrested from its creators via Freedom of Information Act requests. I can tell you that from research I’ve conducted over the past five years what it often demonstrates is that classification was used to protect both banally available information that everyone but the public knew and to protect information that was not banal at all but that the public desperately needed to know.
Here there is a known unknown, which is that we know there is other material which has remained profoundly classified all along. It’s possible that this is what has always needed to be eyes-only. Ask someone who has operated on the other side of classification and they will almost always tell you that there is material that really really needs to be secret. Ask them what that is—even in the broadest sense—and they will always answer “I can’t say”. As they would have to if they were right. That’s what the McChrystals fall back on: you may think from what you know now that we made bad decisions, but there’s information you still don’t have, and if you had it, you’d agree with us. What is that? Can’t say.
They say that as they would have to if they were wrong. Because generally they won’t want to talk about the banality of what most classification in the past has concealed, or the self-interestedness of some classification. Nor can they clearly tell us exactly how revelations that were portrayed at the time as deeply damaging to legitimate interests were in fact damaging, what the consequences have been and what counterfactually would have been if there had been no such revelations.
Would the United States have won the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan? I can’t imagine anybody saying that with any seriousness, though I’m sure some have tried.
The major difference is just that the United States and its allied partners would be in a better situation to lie about how badly both conflicts were managed and about how devastating the consequences have been. Did anyone on the other side of that classification wall doubt that the wars were mismanaged and the consequences were everything but the stated objectives? There may have been people who compartmentalized what they knew but didn’t want to know, but it wasn’t secret.
Does anyone involved in drone assassinations of high-value targets doubt that they’ve sometimes misidentified targets or killed innocents? The people on the ground certainly know it. I’m reminded of a very old Doonesbury cartoon about the “secret bombings” of Cambodia and Laos where Cambodians tell Phred, the strip’s Viet Cong member, about the secret bombings. One says, “There wasn’t any secret about them.” He continues, “I said, ‘Look, Martha, here come the bombs.’” What would have happened if the bombings had remained secret except to Cambodians and Laotians and Viet Cong killed by them? Would Vietnam itself have turned out any differently, considering that Nixon and Kissinger in the end settled for terms that were likely available in 1968 and that the whole fucking war turns out to have been profoundly pointless in the first place?
The mass of classification exists not to protect information from foreign enemies in order to increase the latitude and impact of our government’s actions against those enemies. The mass of classification exists because we are the enemy who is not meant to know. That has never been more clear than today: what a 21-year old with no special responsibility for decision-making knows might as well be on the news screens in Times Square in terms of the foreign actors from whom it is supposedly being kept—I refuse to believe that the Russian government can run troll farms that manipulate social media all over the world and yet somehow can’t get into the group of those many thousands with eyes on the documents that Teixeira allegedly distributed. We don’t need more classification, we need a review of classification practices that very precisely and parsimoniously identifies what must be secret and very precisely justifies why that has to be that way.
Image credit: "AEC Top Secret Cover Sheet" by RestrictedData is licensed under CC BY 2.0.