Table Of ContentWriters Under
Surveillance
The FBI Files
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© 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information
storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book was set in Expo Serif Pro. Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN: 978-0-262-53638-7
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Contents
vii Foreword
xi Introduction
xiii Notes on Selections for this Collection
xv Guide to Exemptions
xvii Glossary
3 Hannah Arendt
9 James Baldwin
63 Ray Bradbury
79 Truman Capote
101 Tom Clancy
127 W. E. B. Du Bois
145 Allen Ginsberg
175 Ernest Hemingway
225 Aldous Huxley
237 Ken Kesey
263 Norman Mailer
289 Ayn Rand
307 Susan Sontag
327 Terry Southern
337 Hunter S. Thompson
357 Gore Vidal
373 Afterword
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Foreword
The TradiTional jus TificaTion for open access laws goes like this: “We, the
taxpayers, paid these government entities to produce the writings, images, videos and other
materials that go into the formation of policy. These documents belong to us. We paid to
produce them. We have the right to see them, to use them, to study them and share them.
They are our property.”
I love this argument, because I love free access to information, and this argument is very
powerful. To refute this argument, a secrecy advocate must argue against property rights. In
the 21st century, where property rights have been elevated to a human right — and even
more, to the most important of all human rights — any argument that can only be refuted by
denigrating property rights is a winning argument. If you want to win a debate, corner your
opponent so they must argue against property rights (this is a lesson that is not lost on both
sides of the copyright debate, and is the reason that “intellectual property” was promulgated
as an alternative to the once-universal phrase “creators’ monopolies”).
But the harnessing of government transparency to property rights is fraught with pit-
falls. For one, information is almost entirely unlike property. Property is exclusive and
excludable — when you leave my house after an evening’s socializing, you don’t take my
house with you; when I tell you my secrets and then take my leave of you, there’s no way for
me to take the secret back from your knowledge of it.
Information has multiple uses and contexts. Your house is yours. Your phone number
is an integer that can be found in the long string of numbers after the decimal in pi, in
the ledgers of public companies, and in the software configuration and databases of your
phone company’s switches. Your phone number is “yours,” but not in the same way that
your underwear is. Assigning property rights to integers is a fool’s errand.
The primacy of property rights at this moment is the reason we talk about information
as property: anything valuable must be property. The way we assert value is to assert prop-
erty rights. We are so trapped in this frame that we are unable to easily perceive it, but think
for a moment of how we talk about the most valuable things in our lives: our children.
Kidnapping is not “theft of child.” Infanticide is not “deprival of the use of a child.” Your
child is not your property, and your child is also not their property — your child (and you,
and me, and all the other humans) are not property, but we are all enmeshed in a web
of interests, some bidirectional and some unidirectional. My daughter has an interest in
herself; I have an interest in her too, as does my wife (who is her mother) and my parents
and my wife’s parents, and our daughter’s godparents, and her teachers, and her friends,
and Child Protective Services, and our neighbors. Some of those interests are stronger than
others, and some are limited to narrow domains of our child’s life and wellbeing, but this
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viii Writers Under Surveillance
blend of overlapping, contesting interests is undeniable, and the fact that none of these are
property rights in no way diminishes the value of that human life.
Information, like humans, is not property, but it is incredibly valuable. Hence Steward
Brand’s horribly misunderstood and brilliant aphorism: “On the one hand, information
wants to be free, and on the other hand, information wants to be expensive.”
Talking about government information as property is a handy way to win arguments
with secrecy advocates who are also property-rights advocates, but it is a gross and ulti-
mately harmful oversimplification. The state is not a business, and taxes are not a custom-
er-loyalty program. If a piece of government information was produced before you paid your
first penny in tax, you still have a right to see it. If you are a child who pays no tax, you still
have an interest in state documents; if you are a poor person who pays little or no tax, you
have the same right to government information as the one percenter who deigns to pay a
million dollars in tax rather than hiding it with an offshore financial secrecy vehicle.
The real reason we deserve to see the information our governments produce is so that
we can understand what our states are doing in our names — not what they’re doing with
our money. There’s no broad consensus on what constitutes good government, of course,
but whatever you think of when you think of “good government,” you can’t know whether
you have it unless you can pierce the veil of government secrecy.
Knowledge allows you to observe the workings of the state and form a hypothesis about
how to improve things.
Knowledge allows you to recruit others to your cause by revealing the workings of the
state and sharing your hypothesis.
Knowledge allows you to evaluate whether your hypothesis was correct, revealing
whether you improved things by trying your intervention out.
The freedom to know, in other words, is the foundational freedom that gives us the
freedom to do.
But knowledge in and of itself is not enough. The right to know without the freedom
to act on that knowledge is not empowering, it is a recipe for despair. Indeed, information
without agency is a literal tactic of torturers: during the Inquisition, torturers engaged in
a practice called “showing the instruments,” in which every implement that might be used
in the coming torture session was lovingly revealed and shown to the victim, to heighten
their anticipation of the horrors to come. Winston Smith knows exactly what’s in Room
101 and that is why he dreads it so much. Goldfinger’s laser slowly proceeds up the torture
table towards James Bond’s crotch — rather than simply lancing through his chest-cavity —
because Goldfinger wants Bond to suffer before he dies.
But again, knowledge is our necessary precondition for improving even hopeless sit-
uations. Knowing what rules the state imposes (that is, which laws are in force and what
they say) is the precondition for effecting civil disobedience by skirting the law without
breaking it. Knowing how the courts operate, or what procedures the police follow, or which
ministries will not reveal their secrets, gives us the raw material for formulating plans to
outmaneuver them, to reveal the shape of secrets by exploring the non-secret information
that surrounds them: “If you won’t tell me the names of everyone who is a police informant,
then tell me the names of everyone who isn’t one.”
MuckRock’s users have remorselessly tugged at every loose thread in the fabric of official
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Foreword ix
secrecy, unraveling schemes and capers, as well as unintentional farces. MuckRock’s beauti-
fully simple interface and community features do much to automate the process of not just
forming hypotheses about shameful secrets; but also recruiting others to help act on them.
Muckrock is the first step in the 21st Century’s great experiment in evidence-based rule, in
the presumption of transparency, and in the use of transparency to effect change.
This volume you hold now is an extrusion into the physical world of something vast
and digital, huge in the way that only digital things can be huge, where adding another zero
to an already inconceivably large number is as easy as typing a single keystroke. We have
never in our species’ history possessed this sort of tool. It is a ferociously exciting prospect.
As states move to assert the right to know more and more about our personal business,
MuckRock represents the best hope for people knowing more and more about their states.
It’s a race we can’t afford to lose.
Cory DoCtorow
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