The Sixth Estate

Embassy magazine has what in most respects is a half-decent discussion of a key problem in the ongoing F-35 fighter saga: the Department of National Defence’s failure to disclose a summary of national needs which the F-35 (or any other fighter, for that matter) would have to meet. Instead, Canadians have been subjected to a relentless marketing campaign by the civilian government and by the military generals, who are, oddly, unencumbered by the usual restrictions on political advocacy by public servants. Even without holding a public competition for Canada’s largest military purchase ever, you’d think DND could at least identify what needs the F-35 is filling, and Embassy is right to rap them on the knuckles for it.

Where I have a problem with this article (yet again), though, is Embassy‘s failure to be genuinely inclusive. The “back and forth” method is cheap journalism, which is why it’s increasingly popular on everything from CBC to Fox News: introduce a topic, quote one person on one “side” of the issue, then someone from the other “side.” Seldom is the media so obvious in playing the role, as Noam Chomsky puts it, of defining the outer limits of “acceptable” or legitimate thought on an issue. The problem, in this case, is that both “experts” — Adam Chapnick and David J. Bercuson — are actually being paid by the military that wants to buy the jets in the first place. Chapnick actually says the military shouldn’t need to make public any need for fighter jets — every party should accept it in private and then present a done deal to the public. Embassy does not identify the potential for conflicts of interest here, or explain why it couldn’t find someone with an opinion who was independent from the military.

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Insufficient attention in Canada is being given to the expansion of the country’s intelligence services. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) more than doubled in the past decade, from $180 million in 2000 to $480 million in 2009. It is also expanding its foreign intelligence activities, in clear violation of the CSIS Act. The most obvious current example of intelligence largesse, though, is the new building being constructed for CSIS’s “partner” agency, the Communications Security Establishment. CSE’s new “Taj Mahal,” interestingly, also intersects with another critical problem: the hollowing out of government and increasing dependence on shady networks of secret contractors.

CSE doesn’t get a lot of attention in the news and has avoided scandals, unlike CSIS or its predecessor, the RCMP Security Service. This does not make it small or unproblematic, though. The organization has spent most of its history since 1945 essentially as a branch plant of American signals intelligence (the National Security Agency). The government did not acknowledge its existence until the 1970s, and it operated wholly outside Parliamentary law until an enabling act was finally passed in 2001. Befitting its low profile, its offices in Ottawa were until recently crammed into some nondescript buildings on the campus of Canada Post. That’s changed, and the new plans are for a massive new campus referred to (in public) as the Long Term Accommodation Project, or LTAP.

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One of the greatest ironies of some of the heavy-handed government responses to WikiLeaks is, as a new Secrecy News policy release proves, that it is illegal for people with security clearances to access leaked classified documents, but legal for people without security clearances. To this end, people who work for the military are not allowed to read WikiLeaks. The ironies of bureaucracy strike yet again.

The problem, at its heart, is a legal one. People in certain positions in government are subject to legal restrictions on what they are allowed to access or communicate (I won’t say can access or communicate, because that confuses legal threat with personal will, which is how we get into these sorts of paradoxes in the first place). That’s true even after information is leaked, because formally even leaked information is still classified. A document can be “Secret,” or even “Top Secret,” without actually being a secret.

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