Tag: transparency

Secrecy and the Divine Right to Deceive

Secrecy and lying are two sides of the same political coin. The Supreme Court declared in 1936, “An informed public is the most potent of all restraints upon misgovernment.” Thus, conniving politicians have no choice but to drop an Iron Curtain around Washington.

Politicians guarantee that Americans are left clueless on the most controversial or dangerous federal policies. The government is creating trillions of pages of new secrets every year. The total is equivalent to “20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with double-spaced text on paper,” according to The Washington Post. If those cabinets were laid end to end, they would stretch almost to the moon. The feds have accumulated the equivalent of hundreds of pages of secrets for each American, blighting any hope for citizens to learn of their rulers’ rascality.

“All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers,” George Orwell wrote in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. This is where government classification—i.e., secrecy—comes in handy. The more information government classifies, the easier it becomes for politicians to dupe the American people. In Washington, deniability is better than the truth.

Secrecy was usually not a grave peril to most Americans’ rights, liberties, and safety until the U.S. government began warring in the 1940s and on into this century.

Secrecy helped deliver a death warrant for tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. President Lyndon Johnson fabricated claims about an alleged North Vietnamese attack in the Gulf of Tonkin to sway Congress to give him unlimited authority to attack North Vietnam. Johnson assumed he was entitled to deceive Americans to vastly expand the war he decided to fight to boost his 1964 presidential election campaign. But other federal officials claimed a prerogative to blindfold the American people. When Assistant Defense Secretary Arthur Sylvester visited Saigon in 1965, he hectored American correspondents covering the Vietnam War: “Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid. Did you hear that? Stupid!” Sylvester declared that he expected the American press to be “the handmaidens of government.” Most of the American media has followed orders regarding foreign reporting most of the time since then.

In March 1972, President Richard Nixon, as part of his “pledge to create an open Administration,” ordered radical changes in how Uncle Sam kept secrets. Nixon announced that the classification system “failed to meet the standards of an open and democratic society, allowing too many papers to be classified for too long a time. Classification has frequently served to conceal bureaucratic mistakes or to prevent embarrassment to officials and administrations.” He promised “to lift the veil of secrecy which now enshrouds” federal documents. Nixon’s campaign against secrecy faltered after the Watergate coverup destroyed his presidency.   

In 1978,  President Jimmy Carter created the Information Security Oversight Office to oversee classification but secrecy regime continued and grew. In 1989, former Solicitor General of the United States Dean Erwin Griswold complained that “there is massive overclassification and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another.” In 1991, former National Security Council official Rodney McDaniel estimated that “only 10% of classification was for legitimate protection of secrets.” In 1997, a federal commission headed by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) lamented that “secrets in the federal government are whatever anyone with a stamp decides to stamp secret.”

In the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the percentage of Americans who trusted the federal government doubled. The George W. Bush administration exploited the new credulity to boost the number of classified government documents almost tenfold. The New York Times reported in 2005 that federal agencies were “classifying documents at the rate of 125 a minute as they create new categories of semi-secrets bearing vague labels like ‘sensitive security information.’” William Leonard, former chief of the federal Information Security Oversight Office, complained of seeing information “classified that I’ve also seen published in third-grade textbooks.”

But secrecy again signed a death warrant for thousands of Americans. President George W. Bush persuaded Americans to support invading Iraq by blaming Saddam Hussein for the 9/11 attacks, among other pretexts. Bush could vilify Iraq thanks to a sweeping coverup of the role of the Saudi government in bankrolling and directly assisting the 9/11 hijackers.

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Trump Should Immediately Stop Federal Agencies From Hiding Documents By Needlessly Marking Them Classified

Early in his third presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed to establish a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to “declassify and publish all documents on Deep State spying, censorship, and abuses of power.” The phrase “Truth and Reconciliation” recalls bodies established to investigate abuses by toppled Communist regimes such as East Germany’s, or the former apartheid government of South Africa. The framing suggests that Trump views the entire past decade, from “Russiagate” to the “lawfare” cases entangling himself and his advisers, as the fruits of an illegitimate regime that threw the rule of law out the window.

This interpretation of recent history, surely viewed as partisan by Trump’s opponents, will be tested by the facts, once they become better known and documented. But the president-elect’s suggestion that the workings of the U.S. government must be more transparent is long overdue.

According to Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and John Cornyn, R-Texas, who introduced a bipartisan “Classification Reform for Transparency Act” last July, the U.S. government spends $18 billion every year classifying information. “Over-classification,” they argue, “undermines national security by limiting information sharing between federal agencies,” as in the notorious intelligence failures before 9/11. American taxpayers, we might add, fork over billions every year in order to help their government hide information from them.

Like so many now-encrusted practices in Washington, the classification monster is of dubious constitutional provenance, born of the metastasizing of the U.S. security apparatus during the Cold War. Just as foreign military interventions denied taxpayers a genuine “peace dividend” after the fall of the USSR in 1991, the intelligence agencies created to oppose the Soviet threat, instead of disbanding after its disappearance, spread their tentacles ever wider.

In 2016, we were told that no fewer than “17 U.S. intelligence agencies” agreed on alleged Russian election interference — apparently an undercount, as the website of the Director of National Intelligence now lists 18. This averages out to a neat $1 billion spent annually by each of these 18 agencies to classify about three million documents apiece. Are there really that many secrets worth preserving from the public?

None of this is to reckon with the enormous back catalog of older documents still classified by the U.S. government, some nearly a century old. The CIA claims to have released the last classified World War I documents, but millions of World War II files remain closed. While researching my book Stalin’s War, I discovered that many of the files on Lend-Lease aid to the USSR were declassified only in the 1970s. While I was not surprised, owing to long experience with Russian archival restrictions, that Soviet files concerning the scale of American military and material aid are tightly guarded — undermining as they do cherished myths about the “Great Patriotic War” (the Russian government recently shut down its only Lend-Lease museum) — I could not fathom why information about U.S. generosity had been classified in Washington.

Frustrating as Russia’s recent nationalist turn and the shutting off of archival access has been for Western historians, most of us expect secrecy from Moscow. But we have a right to expect better from our own government. True, U.S. citizens have the right, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) passed in 1967, to request access to classified government files — but the government can reject these requests under nine “exemption categories,” covering everything from reasonable privacy concerns (bank and medical data) and trade secrets to open-ended concerns about “national security” and nebulous “legal privileges.”

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Canadian Lawmaker Calls for Increased Transparency After Images Surface of UAP Shot Down Over Yukon

New details have recently surfaced regarding an incident involving an unidentified object shot down over Canada’s Yukon territory in February 2023, including imagery obtained through a Canadian freedom of information act.

One of several shoot-downs that occurred in the days following an incident last year involving a Chinese spy balloon that traversed American airspace, Daniel Otis, a freelance investigative reporter writing for CTV News in Canada, revealed last month that he had successfully obtained images of the mysterious object obtained by pilots shortly before it was shot down. 

Following the widely-reported incident, Canadian Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre initially suggested the image should be released publicly, although the Canadian military did not officially approve such actions at that time. 

Despite pilot accounts that described the object as a metallic, cylindrical shape that appeared to possess a wire-tethered payload, secrecy on part of the Canadian government has only fueled public curiosity, giving rise to speculations about the object’s origin. 

Now, the release of the grainy, black and white image of the object adds a new layer of intrigue to the puzzling incident.

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FEMA Public Affairs Chief Locks Her X Account Amid Outrage Over Agency’s Disastrous Hurricane Response

FEMA Public Affairs Director Jaclyn Rothenberg locked her X account Saturday amid widespread outrage over the agency’s disastrous hurricane response in affected states.

How ironic, given Rothenberg is the agency’s “seasoned on-the-record spokesperson” whose only task is media relations and crisis communications.

FEMA’s website explains Rothenberg’s role in the agency:

Jaclyn is an appointee in the Biden-Harris Administration and was sworn in as the Director of Public Affairs at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in July 2021. Jaclyn is a public affairs, media relations, crisis communications strategist and seasoned on-the-record spokesperson. She has advised C-suite executives, high-profile elected officials, and political leaders operating on national and local stages. With nearly 15 years of experience, she understands the varying perspectives media, state, local and congressional leaders have on key issues and approaches her work with anticipation of how each stakeholder will react. 

However, Rothenberg’s official government account remains open.

Rothenberg’s move comes as the agency faces heavy criticism for its delayed response to the devastation left by Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida, with over 220 dead, hundreds missing, and millions of people still left without power over a week after the storm ripped through the South.

FEMA has not only been slow to respond, but according to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the agency doesn’t even have the funding to adequately address the crisis.

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Censorship and Transparency Issues in “Anti-Terror” Tech Alliance

Big Tech’s Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) alliance, often accused of censorship of legal content, continues to face allegations about an ongoing lack of transparency regarding its operations.

Founded two years ago by Meta, Microsoft, then Twitter, and YouTube (Google), it now has 25 members, and the stated goal is to flag and remove violent content from the internet.

The latest development regarding to controversial group – other than the ongoing transparency issues – is X deciding to leave the GIFCT board.

Two major problems have emerged around GIFCT’s activities and influence on the web: transparency, including around funding, and having a system in place that makes sure legal, non-violent content – such as that actually opposing terrorism, satire, media reports, etc – doesn’t get caught in the GIFTC net as well, resulting in censorship.

But, not one of the 25 members publicly shares how much content is removed (due to hash matches). Yet some idea of the size of the operation can be gleaned from YouTube’s contribution to the GIFCT database last year alone: 45,000 hashes.

There is also no information available about the number of appeals users lodge against content removal resulting from this process. It’s also unknown how many hashes are added by the companies themselves, and how many come from the government or researchers.

And apparently, GIFCT itself isn’t sure how many companies automate hash-sharing or flagging and removing content based on matches, and how many employ humans to do it.

The obscurity in which GIFCT labors is quite extraordinary, even by Big Tech standards: it is not known how many companies use the said database, and there is no independent auditing or internal review of the alliances’s work. In 2021, the BSR consultancy was hired to produce “a human rights impact assessment.”

47 changes were recommended, but the GIFCT board has not yet implemented any. And while at it – not even the founding four have always accepted suggestions coming from an independent advisory committee within GIFCT.

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Police reveal 10 years of Wiltshire UFO sightings first time

Police have revealed all the UFO sightings in Wiltshire over the last 10 years for the first time.

Following a freedom of information request, Wiltshire Police published all the reports they have received mentioning UFOs, UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena), aliens and more.

The results are both bizarre and intriguing, telling of mysterious and largely unreported experiences of the unknown.

As well as your common and garden UFO sightings there are alleged physical interactions with aliens, even inside people’s own homes.

The first log from September 11, 2016, describes a UFO in the sky and an alien in someone’s living room in Swindon.

Further information on why an alien would visit a living room in Swindon is not known, as the logs provided in the FOI are brief.

Down in Salisbury, a woman reported she was abducted by aliens the very same month.

There were a quiet three years with no incidents before another abduction was reported in Chippenham on April 5, 2019 – this time a man, naked.

Six months later a UFO was sighted in Trowbridge.

The last log is from January 17, 2021, again in Chippenham, and is not so much a sighting as a hearing. It simply states: “Ex-friend talking about aliens”.

Wiltshire Police’s slogan is “Keeping Wiltshire safe”, but it is not known what actions the local force take to tackle extraterrestrial tampering.

Wiltshire is not alien to unexplained phenomena as the county is famed for its crop circles which some people think are the result of otherworldly interference.

It had the most crop circles in England in 2023 and Honey Street, near Pewsey, is the home of the Crop Circle Centre.

Until 2009 the British government published an annual report on UFO sightings.

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Judge in South Carolina Shocks Leftists with Bombshell Ruling: Voter Rolls Are Public Record Under Federal Law

In a landmark ruling, a federal judge in South Carolina has declared that voter rolls are public records and must be made available for inspection by election integrity advocates, a decision that could set a precedent nationwide.

The ruling, issued by Judge Joseph F. Anderson Jr. of the United States District Court for the District of South Carolina, came in response to a lawsuit filed by the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to election integrity.

PILF sought access to the South Carolina Statewide Voter Registration List under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993, which mandates that states maintain accurate voter rolls and make records available for public inspection.

The SEC initially denied the request.

The SEC argued that South Carolina law only permitted access to these records by qualified electors of the state, not by out-of-state organizations like PILF.

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Lack of Transparency Surrounding U.S. Government’s Former UAP Office Director Raises Concerns

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) cannot explain why the former Director of its Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) office’s prior involvement with UAP was not disclosed to the media and public at the time of his appointment or during his tenure.

Recently, the DoD confirmed to Liberation Times that in 2018, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the former Director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), attended a meeting on the Hill about Skinwalker Ranch—famed for its ties to UAP.

A DoD spokesperson told Liberation Times:

‘Dr. Kirkpatrick had no involvement with Skinwalker Ranch.  He attended one meeting on it on the Hill in 2018, which he has publicly acknowledged.’

Liberation Times asked the DoD why Dr. Kirkpatrick’s attendance was never previously made public and whether he had disclosed this fact before his appointment to the AARO.

In response, a DoD spokesperson stated:

‘We cannot comment on the interviews that occur during the hiring process, including what was or was not discussed during them.

‘We do not comment on internal discussions and deliberations between a director and his staff nor between a director and senior officials above him.’

This situation is problematic for the DoD, as the AARO’s creation was supposed to begin a new chapter of transparency regarding the UAP topic within the U.S. government. 

It is unclear whether the blame lies with the DoD for failing to disclose Kirkpatrick’s involvement with the meeting, or with Kirkpatrick himself, who may not have informed the DoD before taking the role.

The situation also calls into question other aspects of Kirkpatrick’s background and AARO’s investigations which may have also been omitted.

His attendance of the meeting was in the public interest and is indicative of Kirkpatrick’s awareness of the topic of UAP before joining AARO. 

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Despite progress in data transparency, the FDA still keeps its data secret

History shows that hiding clinical trial data can be deadly.

Vioxx is a well-known example of how the US drug regulator withheld important information about the harms of the drug for over three years, before it was withdrawn from the market and tens of thousands of people died as a consequence.

Numerous initiatives have been launched over the past two decades to improve access to trial data after it became evident that what was reported in peer-reviewed journals was often cherry-picked and misleading.

Eminent scientists have succeeded in gaining access to trial data from the European and Canadian drug regulators, but a recent analysis published in the Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics, found that the US FDA still lags behind others when it comes to data transparency.

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NIH Refuses To Release Details Of COVID-19 Vaccine Royalty Agreement

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) is refusing to release additional information about an agreement it reached over a COVID-19 vaccine that has earned it at least $400 million.

The NIH declined to provide any materials in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The Epoch Times.

“The NIH withholds the entirety of the records as they are protected from release,” Gorka Garcia-Malene, an NIH officer, told The Epoch Times in a letter.

She cited an exemption outlined in the act that allows government agencies to partially or fully withhold information.

“In this case, exemption 3 incorporates 35 U.S.C. 209 (f), which reads in relevant part, ‘No Federal agency shall grant any license under a patent or patent application on a federally owned invention unless the person requesting the license has supplied the agency with a plan for development or marketing of the invention, except that any such plan shall be treated by the Federal agency as commercial and financial information obtained from a person and privileged and confidential and not subject to disclosure under section 552 of title 5,’” Ms. Garcia-Malene wrote.

“Exemption 4 protects from disclosure trade secrets and commercial or financial information that is privileged and confidential,” she added.

In February 2023, Moderna announced that it had paid $400 million to the NIH and would make additional payments in the future as part of a licensing agreement for spike proteins used in the company’s COVID-19 vaccine. The Epoch Times obtained a copy of the contract, which confirmed the payment but redacted details of the future payments.

The Epoch Times then lodged a new request, seeking more details about the future payments, which are said to be based on how many COVID-19 vaccines are sold.

Ms. Garcia-Malene was responding to the new request.

James Love, director of the nonprofit Knowledge Ecology International, said the information should be made public.

“The NIH put out several press statements about the royalty dispute with Moderna, and they should not now claim it is some secret confidential information. And when hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, the public interest in transparency is large too,” Mr. Love told The Epoch Times in an email.

“There are a lot of NIH officials who resent transparency,” he added.

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