Government Secrecy in the Internet Age

Last Friday the Internet lit up with anti-government reports about a new Executive Order signed by President Obama that basically gave him the power to seize any and all U.S infrastructure for the purposes of national defense. People claimed the Executive Order “also states that the President and his Secretaries have the authority to seize all transportation, energy, and infrastructure inside the United States as well as forcibly induct/draft American citizens into the military.” And, if you had any doubt, it’s all in the full text straight from the White House! Sounds pretty bad, right?

Unfortunately, the only initial sources were biased websites like Activist Post (source of the above quote), so I figured I’d wait for some additional context. Bob Murphy casually brought it up for discussion, where someone linked to a Volokh post which linked to a Hot Air post which linked to an Outside the Beltway post which explained that the authority to make this Executive Order came from the Defense Production Act of 1950, related to the Korean War.

Obama’s Executive Order was an update to the original which had pretty much been updated by every President for the last half-century. Clinton’s 1994 version talked about “national defense requirements… in peacetime and in times of national emergency.” So the activists were wrong and right – it does look like a power grab by the federal government, but it’s a power grab that happened decades ago.

This makes claims of imminent martial law look rather silly, as the federal government has been asserting this power for decades without actually using it, but there’s still cause for concern that the federal government asserts that it has this power at all. As Doug Mataconis (Outside the Beltway) explains:

The fact that the President of the United States is still exercising authority granted during the Korean War and the height of the Cold War is yet another reflection of how power, once assumed by the Imperial Presidency, is never surrendered. The fact that an Executive Order like this was released on a Friday afternoon and has been largely ignored by the traditional media is an indication of just how easy it is for politicians to manipulate the news cycle. And the idea that the government has authority like that described in this document, even only in theory, and that most Americans aren’t even aware of it, is a reflection of just how little we know about the things that are done in our name.

See, some people might look at this and think, “Oh, brother, look at those libertarian / anti-government / anti-Obama / whatever people taking things out of context and getting all riled up about something new Obama did that has been going on for a long time.”

But I look at this and think, Good thing people got all riled up about this! They were wrong about it being new, but if they hadn’t gotten riled up about it I wouldn’t have even known that it existed at all. How many people knew about Clinton’s update back in 1994, when the Internet was yet young?

The Internet makes it harder for the government to be secretive. Even if people with strong biases take things out of context, people with other biases can provide more context and we can end up with much better knowledge of government activity than we had before. And I think that is a very good thing.