WHEN TRANSPARENCY IS THE ENEMY OF PERFORMANCE
POLITICS, DIPLOMACY, INTELLIGENCE, AND MARRIAGE
The appeal of metrics is based in good part on the notion that institutions will be unresponsive if they are opaque, and more effective if they are subject to external monitoring. Google’s Ngram viewer shows a steep ascent in the mid-1980s for both “performance metrics” and “transparency,” with the two terms rising more or less in tandem. And it is characteristic of our culture that we tend to assume that performance and transparency rise and fall together. But that is a fallacy, or at least a misleading generalization. For just as there are limits to the efficacy of measured performance, there are limits to the efficacy of transparency. In some cases, how well our institutions perform depends on not making them transparent. At issue here is not the question of metrics, but of performance in the broadest sense: success in what we’re supposed to be doing. To appreciate the dark side of transparency, let us begin not with organizations but with interpersonal relations.
Our very sense of self is possible only because our thoughts and desires are not transparent to others. The possibility of intimacy depends on our ability to make ourselves more transparent to some people than to others. As the contemporary philosopher Moshe Halbertal puts it,
If a person’s thoughts were written on his forehead, exposed before all, the distinction between interior and exterior would vanish, and with it also individuation. Privacy, expressed through the possibility of concealment, thus protects the very ability of a person to define himself as an individual. Furthermore, the self may create special relationships by displaying differential measures of exposure and intimacy. He moves through social space by allotting revelation and concealment and establishing differential measures of distance and closeness.1
In interpersonal relations, even the most intimate ones, success depends on a degree of ambiguity and opacity, on not knowing everything that the other is doing, never mind thinking.
POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT
A certain degree of opacity is even more necessary when it comes to politics, where there are many more actors involved, and hence more interests and more sensibilities. One major role of politicians is to broker those diverse interests and sensibilities and to arrive at arrangements that bridge differences. This strategy entails negotiation, trading off some interests against others in an attempt to attain a compromise that will be tolerable to a number of interests, though rarely entirely satisfactory to any one of them. To put it another way, it involves the bargaining away of many positions, at least as defined by the interested parties. More often than not, that is possible only when the negotiation takes place protected from the view of the various claimants, each of whom might try to veto any compromise that struck at their publicly defined, “transparent” position. What politicians call “creative give and take,” ideologues or representatives of special interests call “betrayal.” That is why on sensitive matters, the negotiating process is most effective when it takes place behind closed doors. As Tom Daschle, the Democratic former majority leader of the Senate, has recently observed, the “idea that Washington would work better if there were TV cameras monitoring every conversation gets it exactly wrong…. The lack of opportunities for honest dialogue and creative give-and-take lies at the root of today’s dysfunction.”2 That is also why effective politicians must to some degree be two-faced, pursuing more flexibility in closed negotiations than in their public advocacy. Only when multiple compromises have been made and a deal has been reached can it be subjected to public scrutiny, that is, made transparent.3
The same holds true for the performance of the government. Here, too, effective functioning often depends on not making internal deliberations open to the public—but rather on maintaining a lack of transparency. We need to distinguish between those elements of government that ought to be made public and those that should not be. Cass R. Sunstein, a wide-ranging academic who has also served in government, makes a useful distinction between government inputs and outputs. Outputs include data that the government produces on social and economic trends, as well as the results of government actions, such as regulatory rules. Outputs, he argues, ought to be made as publicly accessible as possible. Inputs, by contrast, are the discussions that go into government decision-making: discussions between policymakers and civil servants. There are increasing pressures to make those publicly available as well: whether through legal means such as Freedom of Information Act requests; or congressional demands, as in the case of congressional committees demanding the email correspondence of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the case of the Benghazi investigations; or illegal means such as the electronic theft and dissemination of internal government documents by organizations such as Wikileaks. Making internal deliberations open to public disclosure—that is, transparent—is counterproductive, Sunstein argues, since if government officials know that all of their ideas and positions may be made public, it inhibits openness, candor, and trust in communications. The predictable result will be for government officials to commit ever less information to writing, either in print or in the form of emails. Instead, they will limit important matters to oral conversation. But that decreases the opportunity to carefully lay out positions.4 All policies have costs: if internal deliberations are subject to transparency, it makes it impossible to deflate policy prescriptions that may be popular but are ill advised, or desirable but likely to offend one or another constituency. Thus transparency of inputs becomes the enemy of good government.
DIPLOMACY AND INTELLIGENCE
Transparency is also a hazard in diplomacy, and is fatal to the gathering of intelligence. In 2010, Bradley Manning, an intelligence analyst in the American Army, took it upon himself to disclose hundreds of thousands of sensitive military and State Department documents through WikiLeaks.5 One result was the publication of the names of confidential informants, including political dissidents, who had spoken with American diplomats in Iran, China, Afghanistan, the Arab world, and elsewhere.6 As a consequence, some of these individuals had to be relocated to protect their lives. More importantly, the revelations made it more difficult for American diplomats to acquire human intelligence in the future, since the confidentiality of conversations could not be relied upon.
Then, in 2013, Edward Snowden, a computer security specialist formerly employed by the CIA and more recently as a contractor for the NSA in Hawaii, systematically set out to copy thousands of highly secret documents from a variety of government agencies in order to expose the American government’s surveillance programs. Among the many sensitive documents he made available to the press was the eighteen-page text of Presidential Policy Directive 20 on cyber operations, revealing every foreign computer system targeted for potential action—a document published in full by the British journal The Guardian. The release of documents stolen by Snowden and publicized by leading media outlets was not only the most significant breach of American intelligence ever, it also represented a powerful blow to the national security of the United States and its friends and allies. Yet Snowden was hailed as a hero by portions of the public in the United States and Europe. At the heart of the Snowden debacle lies the belief that transparency is always desirable.
A thriving polity, like a healthy marriage, relegates some matters to the shadows. In international relations, as in interpersonal ones, many practices are functional so long as they remain ambiguous and opaque. Clarity and publicity kill. The ability to negotiate between couples or states often involves coming up with formulas that allow each side to save face or retain self-esteem, and that requires compromising principles, or ambiguity. The fact that allies spy on one another to a certain degree to determine intentions, capacities, and vulnerabilities is well known to practitioners of government. But it cannot be publicly acknowledged, since it represents a threat to the amour propre of other nations. Moreover, in domestic politics and in international relations as in interpersonal ones, there is a role for a certain amount of hypocrisy for practices that are tolerable and useful but that can’t be fully justified by international law and explicit norms.
In short, to quote Moshe Halbertal once again,
A degree of legitimate concealment is necessary to maintain the state and its democratic institutions. Military secrets, techniques for fighting crime, intelligence gathering, and even diplomatic negotiations that will fall apart if they become exposed—all these domains have to stay shrouded in secrecy in order to allow the functioning of ordinary transparency in the other institutions of the state. Our transparent open conversation rests upon a rather extensive dark and hidden domain that insures its flourishing.7
We live in a world in which privacy is being eroded both through technology (the Internet) and a culture that proclaims the virtue of candor while dismissing the need for shame. In such a post-privacy society, people are inclined to overlook the value of secrecy.8 Thus, the power of “transparency” as a magic formula is such that its counterproductive effects are often ignored. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant” has become the credo of the new faith of Wikileakism: the belief that making public the internal deliberations of all organizations and governments will make the world a better place.
But more often, the result is paralysis. Politicians forced to reveal their every action are unable to arrive at compromises that make legislation possible. Officials who need to fear that their internal deliberations will be made public are less positioned to make effective public policy. Intelligence agencies that require secrecy to gather information on the nation’s enemies are thwarted. In each case, transparency becomes the enemy of performance.