Silly Secrecy

When the space shuttle Atlantis was sent aloft from Cape Canaveral on Dec. 2 it was widely reported that the vehicle carried an important new intelligence-gathering satellite. So far as the mission’s Air Force sponsors were concerned, however, even that smidgen of information was more than the American public had any need to know. The secrecy that the Air Force insisted on for the Atlantis’ flight was justified on the usual grounds that national security could be harmed if anything were said that might alert the Soviet Union to what was going on.

In fact, well before the Atlantis was launched word had leaked that (1) its cargo was a radar satellite code-named the Lacrosse; (2) the Lacrosse is able to surveil 80% of Soviet territory and can see things both at night and through cloud cover; (3) it cost a cool $500 million. Still, officially the word was mum. The public, which paid for the whole thing, had to be kept in the dark.

It now turns out, reports Aviation Week & Space Technology, that just about anyone with a modest investment in ultra-high-frequency radio equipment or an amateur-size telescope could learn a lot about what was going on hundreds of miles above the Earth, including the supposedly super-secret moment when the Lacrosse was deployed. Ham radio operators were able to eavesdrop on cockpit conversations aboard the Atlantis and on uncoded shuttle-to-ground chatter. And an amateur astronomer in Denver took a picture of the huge satellite as it was being put into orbit. With far better equipment the Soviets no doubt were doing even more.

So much for the persistent fallacy that labeling something secret can make it so. Yes, there are things that national security requires shouldn’t be talked about. But there are also a lot of so-called secrets that common sense makes clear aren’t worth trying to hide. One of democracy’s vital principles is the more that is known the healthier the system will be. The converse is that the more that government can hide the greater the danger that mischief will occur or that mistakes can be buried.

In the end the Air Force looked foolish trying to impose secrecy on the Atlantis mission. That’s something to remember the next time--as certainly there will be a next time--the compulsion to classify recurs.