No More Secrets: Seriously, Stop Trusting The Government

I’ve said this before: we cannot trust the government to keep secrets from the citizens.

They very obviously are not trustworthy.

Today’s stupid secret comes to us from Military.com, probably the best source online for inside news on the U.S. military: “Bill Would Force VA to Reveal Secret List of Toxic Exposure Illnesses“.

The U.S. military has a long history of exposing personnel to hazardous, toxic and radioactive substances with inadequate or no protective gear.

Many times they’ve done it intentionally, and secretly, as experiments.

A culture of blind obedience is ripe for abuse, after all.

In this case, folks are trying to force the Veterans Administration (who are responsible for veterans’ medical treatment) to publish the secret list of conditions they consider to have been caused or correlated with these exposures.

So, it’s not enough that the military has exposed (and almost certainly still does expose) serving personnel to nasty substances but the government has been keeping its analysis of the results of these exposures secret as well.

Because a culture of secrecy is ripe for abuse as well.

If the State is empowered to keep secrets, and is in the habit of doing so regularly, then a whole bunch of corruption and abuse is going to get hidden in there too.

It’s not just things like the identities of spies and the precise locations of nuclear warheads.

It’s also things like ignoring all standard rules for safely handling hazardous materials.

And things like secretly testing chemical warfare agents and radioactive exposures on civilian populations.

Things that people should be being prosecuted for.

And this system has proven over and over again that it cannot keep the good secrets without also enabling the bad secrets.

So, for as long as we’re stuck with this system we need to at least see that it can’t keep any secrets.

Maybe there is a way to let a State keep secrets.

Maybe with something like jury duty, where a randomly-selected group of citizens would regularly review all secrets for appropriateness?

And maybe coupled with a strong system of oversight that would incentivize the actual exposure and prosecution of wrongdoers within the government.

Maybe that would be enough to trust the government with secrets again?

Maybe.

But that’s not the system we have, and it’s not the government we have.

And the government we have cannot be trusted.

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arkady

Author at This Needs Fixin'

a pseudonymous observer of Things That Need Fixin'