Out-of-Sight Oversight: The U.S. Congress and Classified Technologies

A key tenet of modern liberal democracy is a belief in a transparent process that facilitates an open debate, typically in the legislature, to determine social goals and resource allocation. Democratic governments are also charged with ensuring the national security of their citizens, which may dictate the restriction of information from the public when it is considered to be in the national self-interest. In the United States, the competing forces of social candidness, on the one hand, and the secrecy inherent in national security, on the other, converge on and must be reconciled by the Congress.

The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, at one time a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and also chairman of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, believed that “of the many institutions of American government that emerged in the course of the 20th [sic] century, none has received, in relation to its importance, so little attention as that of secrecy.”¹ As a product of the Cold War, not only certain technological artifacts but also the associated social elements—goals, funding, facilities, and organizations—are hidden. In American society, the Congress is typically at the nexus for resolving conflicts between democratic openness, bureaucratic imperative, and military secrecy. This article will clarify these competing interests in the technology policy process by first identifying the historical restrictions on access to technological information imposed by the executive branch, and then defining how these conflicts play out in the congressional process for oversight of classified technologies.

Historical tension between openness and secrecy

Concern for governmental openness is not unique to modern democracies, but appears to be a part of the roots of civilization. If a government wants its citizens to comply with its policies, it must somehow communication those policies to the public at large. In one of the earliest public promulgations of government policies, Mesopotamian King Hammurabi (1795–1750 bce) had the legal code of Babylonia inscribed on a stone monument so that his people would know his laws. In South Asia, Emperor Ashoka (304–232 bce) inscribed his edicts on stone pillars scattered throughout his realm. Critical to the development of Western science was the Greek ethos of dialectic and demonstration as a part of an open debate of policy issues. According to G. E. R. Lloyd, for Greek “cosmological and natural scientific debates … in some cases the contest was adjudicated by a lay public.”² Even for societies such as the Pythagoreans, whose membership and rituals were secret, the mathematical form of the knowledge that they pursued was openly available.³ Although Greek technologies were under the purview of the artisanal and, therefore, lower class, there was no concerted effort to keep technological knowledge secret.

Over time, the leverage granted to societies by military and economic advantage led to a greater consideration for secrecy in technology.⁴ Yet counterpoised against this secrecy is the idea that “the rise of democracy focuses not only on the state’s instrumental strategies, but also on the emergence of a particular kind of knowledgeable citizen, the liberal individual who is capable of attesting, as an informed and reasoning witness, to the legitimacy of the state’s technological actions.”⁵ This tension between the openness of a liberal democracy and the protective instincts of national (both military and economic) security is a conflict between fundamental Western values that are played out through the restriction of technological information, through control of words and manipulation of narrative.

In Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, the scientists, the “merchants of light,” took an oath of secrecy to withhold certain discoveries—some being released to the government and not society at large, and others not being revealed outside of the scientists at Solomon’s House. Science and technology are not only commodities but also instruments of power, acquiring political influence in their own right. Not all technology, however, is created with equal import. Many governments have in place a detailed hierarchy of criteria that determine which technological discoveries and applications are withheld from the pubic and which are not. For those...