Bill Galston on How Much Transparency We Really Want

My Brookings colleague Bill Galston has this thoughtful and important column in the Wall Street Journal on the tension between privacy and transparency in the recent controversies over intelligence collection:

Effectiveness and accountability collide—a tension that can be managed more or less well but never entirely abolished. In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, Congress and the executive branch pieced together a new strategy for managing this tension. Institutions such as congressional intelligence committees and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would ensure executive branch accountability while preserving necessary secrecy. The current surveillance controversy challenges the entire post-Watergate regime. Many members of Congress have come to doubt that the intelligence committees permit sufficient accountability; an increasing share of the public now doubts that the system established by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act adequately protects privacy. But what is to replace it? If secrecy is diminished in the name of public accountability and individual liberty, are we willing to sacrifice a measure of security?

The column isolates what I think is the true heart of the current debates: Whether we still believe, as a society, in the compromise we struck in the wake of Watergate. As Bill describes, this compromise accepted that the public was not going to see a lot of stuff, and neither were most members of Congress. It set up specialized institutions---designated congressional fora, the FISA, inspectors general, reporting requirements, and the like---to stand in for the public and act as proxies. And about the one thing that almost nobody is alleging is that, broadly speaking, the administration has dishonored this compromise. It has taken its programs to the FISA Court. It has kept the intelligence committees briefed. The inspectors general have done their jobs. The issue is not, in other words, whether the executive has played under the rules of the compromise. It is whether we have lost faith in the compromise---and if so, what the new compromise we want to adopt might look like. It is well worth, I think, debating the matter in these terms.