The Fine Line Between Secrecy and Disclosure

Traducteur, Traître: This is a French idiomatic saying which makes sense. In English, it spells out “Translator, Traitor!”

Basically, it means that whenever you translate something from a foreign language, something gets lost or, at the very least, screwed up. Some translations are better than others. This is why they consider translation an art.

The issue being discussed here is not translation; it is disclosure. We have what the Constitution calls “First Amendment Rights”. We also have something called “National Security”. Think two Sousa bands, each playing like mad, about to collide on a football field.

Here is the Hit Parade, not in chronological sequence or order of intensity: Edward Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, Reality Winner, Julian Assange.

Some call these people heroes; some call them traitors. Indisputably, all were whistleblowers.

I once met an actual whistleblower. Not sure what she leaked while in city service. I do remember meeting her and learning that, in college, she had married an African exchange student. After having, I think, two children, her husband told her they would be moving back home.

When she got to her mother-in-law’s house in a nation I now forget, she was treated like dirt and made to perform all of the household tasks. There were also previous wives, all from the exchange student’s African homeland, none of whom he had disclosed to my whistleblower.

She promptly attempted to flee the country, finding out that her husband refused to let the children go. All of them managed to get back to the U.S. under cover of darkness, becoming the subject of a TV movie. But this is a digression.

What is at play here? What is at risk?

Without discussing each instance on its own, let me say that a “secret” such as the planned start of a military invasion on which the outcome of a Just War hangs (e.g., the ocean invasion of Normandy) is, by me, a genuine inviolate National Secret.

A hapless individual called Alan Turing broke Germany’s encryption system, giving us access to their war planning (their own national secrets).

How about actions we have taken which constitute mistakes, law-breaking, cover-ups? You be the judge. What is lost, what is gained, who goes to jail?—Kathryn Nocerino