Domestic Spying and Secrecy

At the moment, the deabate over domestic spying is centered on the legality of Bush’s executive order. The question I want to ask is this: is the secrecy of the program justified? Is such a program something over which we could have had an honest and forthright debate or is the secrecy so essential to the effectiveness of the spying that Bush was justified in issuing the order in secret?

Bush argues that public acknowledgement aids terrorists: "our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk. Revealing classified information is illegal, alerts our enemies and endangers our country.” Twice in two sentences Bush links disclosure of the order to danger to Americans.

Is there are connection? How might knowledge of the order benefit terrorists? Terrorists would be alerted to the fact that America was being vigilant in the war against terror. Would they have taken additional precautions to avoid detection? It seems likely that terrorists already would have been doing everything possible to avoid detection. Surely any self-respecting terrorist would have already considered the possibility that a phone might be tapped. Therefore it seems unlikely that knowledge of this program would have changed terrorist behavior significantly. This being the case, the Bush’s secrecy hardly seems justified.

The only other reason for not making the spying public was that the public would not have stood for it. The justification for government secrecy is that sometimes doing what is in the public’s wishes requires that they not know what the government is doing. Bush seems to think he knows what is good for the American people better than they do.