Secrecy is a mode of regulation

From On Trump-Russia, too much secrecy keeps public in dark by Byron York.

National leaders of all stripes have complained for decades that Washington keeps too many secrets. Too much of the government's information is classified, the argument goes, making it nearly impossible for Americans to know what their leaders are doing.

"Secrecy is a mode of regulation," Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in 1997, when the congressionally-created board he headed, the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, released a report. "In truth, it is the ultimate mode, for the citizen does not even know that he or she is being regulated."

Moynihan hoped that a "culture of openness" would develop to balance the culture of secrecy. It didn't happen. A dozen years later, in 2009, the New York Times editorialized that the federal government's creation of "107 different categories of restricted information ... seems designed not to protect legitimate secrets but to empower bureaucrats." Still more recently, when the House held hearings on secrecy in 2015, the journalist Terry Anderson testified, "The Moynihan commission recommended some changes in the law, including an office of declassification. Nothing was acted upon."

Our government needs the capacity to keep secrets but secrecy is also a powerful tool for the government: you both need it and need to get rid of it.

York's is a long litany of instances where the Government, or parts of the government, have kept secrets which were only secret because they were embarrassing to one party or the other. Such secrets are always a conspiracy against the American public.

Time to let some sun shine in.