Last time I checked, the USA had somewhere around seventeen active federal intelligence agencies, and counting.  This is an enormous cost in a country where we claim we can’t afford to pay for people’s healthcare or their education, or for school lunch programs, or all sorts of other very important things that help a lot of people and could do a lot of good in the world.  So if we are spending so much money on these intelligence agencies, they must be pretty important then… but are they really? Are they actually doing anything valuable?  Well, as almost everything these agencies do is typically secret (withheld from not only the people but increasingly even congress), the short answer is who knows and probably not.

With the exception of the FBI, which is essentially a sort of federal police force, tasked with enforcing the nation’s laws (which is kinda important, or at least it would be if the agency weren’t being currently run by the criminals themselves), the rest of these agencies are basically spy organizations, and increasingly the spying seems to be being done more and more on America’s citizens, than at their behest.  (Not that it’s nice to spy on other people either.)  And of course, pretty much all of what they do is generally classified.

Here is a basic fact about democracy.  In order for the citizens to direct and control the government, they need to know what the government is doing.  The more transparency, the more democracy, and generally a better bet the government is going to be working to improve the lives of its citizens.  The more the government is run in the shadows, the less control the citizens have over it, and the more likely that it is doing things that the people who supposedly own it would not like, or even that actively hurt them.

So what’s the point of a secret, anyway.  I can think of reasons for one… like maybe you are planning a surprize party for someone and you think it will be more fun if they don’t know about it.  Of course, that’s not going on here.  In general, the most common reason for secrecy is to prevent others from finding out that you have done something bad.  As time goes on, I am becoming increasingly convinced that this is the case with classified information.

In a democracy, there are rules that the government must follow, rules that are there to protect the citizens and to prevent corruption, and most importantly to ensure that the government retains the trust of its people.  If the government operates in the open, it is forced to play by the rules.  If it instead operates in secret, then there are no rules.  And if there are no rules, you don’t have a government, you have a crime syndicate.

Now trust is something of a key here.  What Americans trust the government anymore?  Certainly nobody on the left, who bemoan daily their outrage burnout, and of course nobody on the right, who are busily stockpiling an arsenal of weapons just in case the government someday decides to come take them away, or to turn their sons gay or something… who knows anymore.  Anyway, we have for as long as I can remember made bashing the government’s ability to accomplish anything a national pastime… which, while seemingly a total waste of time, actually does serve a purpose—because as long as you don’t trust the government, you won’t trust it with your healthcare, with your retirement savings, with your kid’s education, and so on.  It is this very lack of trust that prevents us from progressing to a nation that cares for its people, and that helps rather than merely punishes its citizens when they step out of line.  And it is this lack of trust that keeps the country constantly bouncing back and forth between two hated parties every two years, no one ever satisfied with what is being done in their name, and nothing much in the way of progress ever getting done.

Unfortunately, the culture of secrecy has become ingrained in our imaginations.  Television and movies are full of dashing and dangerous secret agents, toiling endlessly in an eternal battle against those who would do us harm, constantly saving the world in the shadows, and only succeeding because they are allowed to not play by the rules.  And of course, as is also the case with any alien or supernatural show, we actively expect the government to lie to us at every turn.  It has become a well-worn and frankly tired trope to see government agents sweeping in and trying to convince us doltish citizens that nothing unusual is going on every time exactly the opposite is happening.  Yet, instead of lamenting that our government is not following the rules set out for it, or cursing the fact that we are constantly lied to, we get caught up in the excitement of these fictions and revere those who break the rules and lie to us, looking up to them as heroes and role models.  Hey, what kid does not want to be James Bond when they grow up?

However, I am confident that this poisoned Hollywood version of the world that we have been sold does not resemble much the truth.  I sincerely doubt that our world is really being saved all that often, nor that an army of shady and illegal agents are necessary to prevent our ever growing list of enemies from doing us harm.  In fact, I would argue that the best way for us to thwart our enemies is for us to play by the rules, and to be transparent about what we are doing… which essentially would prevent us from ever having enemies in the first place.

In my biased option, pretty much every single thing we have done militarily (or intelligence-wise) since world war 2 has only made the world more unstable and America less safe.  Take Iran for example—we spend so much time demonizing and fearing this relatively small and poor country, but they would not be a problem at all if we had not illegally overthrown their democratically elected left-leaning government and replaced it with a corrupt and unwanted monarch.  And all because we fear the cursed name of socialism, which ironically is precisely the solution we desperately need to save us from the ecological and economic avalanche that is currently bearing down on us.  But of course, Iran is hardly the only example—we did the same thing in Chile, in Central America, and possibly countless other places that we don’t even know about.  Hey, who even knows how much damage we have done to the world, because it’s classified.

Speaking of classified information, if you look back on the last few years, you see a number of high-profile cases of government agencies breaking the law pretty severely, using secrecy to cover it up, and then when some brave and well-intended individual informs the public about this, instead of the law-breaking agency getting in trouble, it is the whistleblower that is punished and treated like a traitor, all for the supposed crime of letting the citizens of the United States know that an actual crime is being committed. Bonus round: how many can you name in 5 seconds: Manning, Snowden, Winner… see a pattern yet?

So what’s the solution here?  Pretty simple actually.  Shut down all of these intelligence agencies except the FBI, and put the money we save into healthcare, education, and helping other countries fight climate change.  Make everything the government does transparent, and start going getting rid of government employees who do not follow the rules.  And if America really needs intelligence on other countries, perhaps we could create a single new agency for this purpose whose mission is to gather information efficiently and legally.  I envision a group of people whose job it is to simply live in some foreign country, learn the language, read the newspapers, watch the news, and talk to people who live there.  They are not there to influence or to overflow, but simply to understand what is going on.  And neither are they undercover or under some fake identity, but there in full cooperation with the nation they are studying, like some kind of low-level diplomats.  Give this a few years, and I suspect we would have a lot fewer enemies, a safer world, and that we would actually understand a lot more about our neighbors.

And sure, of course some level of security is always going to be necessary.  The general public need not know the passwords to log into secure military facilities, or the exact schematics of our weapons systems, or the names and addresses of our law enforcement officers.  The FBI may still need to do undercover operations into organized crime rings and such.  So in all these cases, I can see some argument for protecting some detail of information, but we still need to be transparent about What we are doing.  The citizens should know that we have secure facilities, that we have weapons systems, that we are investigating organized crime, the outcome of such activities, and most importantly, how much they are costing us.  In such cases it is not so much secrecy that need be maintained, but privacy and basic security.  And even in the case of things like FBI operations, I still think the nature of these activities should be disclosed, but perhaps on a six-month delay to prevent interfering in ongoing activities.  In any case, the rules for what information can be protected need to be clearly defined, severely limited, and only changeable via the passing of actual laws.  And of course, any information should always be provided unredacted and without question any time a congressional committee asks to see it.

And of course, all of this information should be freely and easily available to all American citizens… or at least as much of it as reasonably possible.  It is not literally possible to record everything the government does, but at the very least, we should disclose the budget, a list of all government agencies, how many employees they have, a detailed overview of each of their programs, and how much be everything costs. All of this could easily be put into some kind of government website along with all kinds of other neat information, like election details and monthly reports from all our minor diplomats, telling us about life in other countries.  In fact, our new department of information could actually be in charge of gathering and presenting the information about what the government it up to.  And of course, it should always be considered a serious crime under any circumstances for an agent of the government to knowingly lie to the public about what the government is doing.  (Particularly the president.)  This is not a propaganda agency.

Also, we need to expand and protect the existing freedom of information act.  Particularly we need to protect it from these bogus “government shutdowns” that keep only the “essential” parts of the government open (you know, the parts that punish and spy on you and drop bombs on things) and shut down the “non-essential” parts of the government, such as responding to freedom of information requests amongst other things (you know, the parts that actually help people).  In fact, I’m fairly certain that a permanent government shutdown is basically what the Republican party actually wants—all the punishment, none of the scrutiny, and none of the help.  So let’s make sure they never get anything like that.  The fix here is simple… just require that the previous year’s budget is used for the new year until congress can agree on a new one.  Problem solved.

OK, now I’m sure a number of you have already thought the phrase “naive hippie” or some such equivalent in your head—that I’m proposing making our country less safe or endangering our military or something.  Quite the contrary… I’m am proposing a path forward and upward out of the cycle of cruelty that we have created for ourselves—a way to make our country safer and our world more stable.  What I find naive is this ridiculous notion that we can continue on forever using these same inhumane tactics that have left our world a shambles and our country in a state of endless war.  The notion that we can just shoot our way out of every problem and that we can go on being arrogant and treating the rest of the world like shit and thinking it will never come back on us.  If we ever want peace, it will need to start with us, and it will take bold gestures, like a show of openness and an effort to regain lost trust.  In fact, the more open we become, the less we will need security and the less we will need a military, as there will be a lot fewer people out there who wish to do us harm… and there will be a lot less of us who fear the government and plot to do it harm.