Secrets and the press

The Associated Press is outraged that the Justice Department has been secretly rummaging through its telephone records, and who can blame it? But what really matters is what it means for all the rest of us. And if we don’t watch out, it will mean that the government keeps more secrets from us than ever before.
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The speculation is that the Justice Department wanted all those phone records for an investigation into who leaked information to the AP over a year ago about U.S. government efforts to foil a terrorist plot in Yemen. …

… It doesn’t take much imagination to see that people won’t be keen on talking with reporters if they think that the government may be indiscriminately monitoring thousands of phone calls by hundreds of reporters. And if the reporters can’t talk with sources that want to remain anonymous, then the rest of us won’t ever know the secrets that they would have told. At the heart of the First Amendment lies this basic paradox: In order to have all the information we need for our democracy to work, people have to be able to keep some secrets.
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This is not really about the press. It’s about the people and what secrets they will learn about their government. Every government must hold some things close to the vest if it is to govern effectively. There will always be a back and forth about how much should be known and how much should be kept secret. But make no mistake that, if we as a country decide that the government’s secrets are more valuable than those kept by the press, we will pay the price in not learning about secret wrongdoing until it is too late to do anything about it.

– David Westin in his blog for Huffington Post