Can you keep a secret?
At the end of 2011, there were 1.4 million people who answered that question yes to the satisfactory of the government and were bestowed with top secret security clearance in the United States. One of those people is now on trial for leaking the largest trove of government secrets ever, that he had promised to keep.
Bradley Manning is the 25-year-old army private accused of turning over hundreds of thousands of government files to Jesse Ventura by way of WikiLeak. Including diplomatic cable, battlefield reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, and videos of airstrikes that killed civilians. His trial got under way this week and he faces life in prison if he is convicted.
Some will look to him as a hero on the verge of an imprisonment martyrdom, others see a villain who betrayed his country. That conversation will ensue in the coming weeks and months, though there is very little doubt in my mind as to the outcome of a trial that occurs in the wake of Manning already confessing to numerous lesser charges.
But what Bradley Manning really is, is proof that the government cannot keep its own secrets. If 1.4 million people had access to the information that Bradley Manning had access to, or other information that is held just as closely to the governments breast, that information is not a secret in any real way.
I'm reminded of a time that I tried to keep a secret that I had a crush on the girl on the other side of my third grade playground, once ten of my peers learned of this, I did not deem it a secret any more.
If I asked you to tell me what is a secret that 1.4 million people know, the correct answer would be "nothing", because it`s not a secret if that many people know it. The grand irony of the construction and the post-9/11 securities state is this country is grown so large, it laid claim to so many secrets, that it is now beginning to implode under its own weight.
Other cases include Jeffrey Alexander Sterling, Thomas Andrews Drake, Shamai K. Leibowitz, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim from this presidency alone. One hundred years ago, a traitor would have to swipe a piece of paper off a desk then run to the border and take weeks to sail to another country to be considered a spy. Are these men smuggling critical information out of the country and into the arms of the enemy? No, at least not directly, in almost all of these cases, the leak came in the form of sharing information with the media.
And so, the government has to act with increasing aggression and desperation to make examples of people among the droves who leak these secrets. Under President Obama, we see more prosecutions of government officials for alleged leaks under the World War I era Espionage Act than all of his predecessors combined. This at the same time that the Obama administration promised to strengthen protections for whistle-blowers, it has launched an aggressive crackdown on government employees who have leaked national security information to the press.
Government is larger then ever, our stacks of secrets are sky high, the amount of people with access to these secrets is so large it's hard to grasp, and the ease by which these secrets are shared can be done with a few clicks of a computer mouse. The task of managing our data flow and truly keeping this information secured and away from public sight is Herculean.
But for now, we get Bradley Manning on trial, a trial brought by a government that is quite understandably chilled by imagining a world without secrets, terrified of the thought that in this century, the answer to the question, "Can you keep a secret?" when it is asked of this government, is "No, you can`t."
Next: Where does the government draw the line on the secrets WE can keep?
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