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LIBERAL COMMUNITARIAN APPROACH TO PRIVACY AND SECURITY 109

Accountability versus Transparency

In searching for measures to enhance scrutiny, one must make a sharp
distinction between two major ways of proceeding. (1) Enhanced transpar-
ency and (2) increased accountability (and oversight).
Enhanced transparency refers to an increase in the information about
counterterrorism measures provided to the media and the general public,
as well as to all members of Congress rather than to a select few with secu-
rity clearance who serve on specialized committees. Following the revela-
tions of the NSA programs in 2013, there was considerable demand for
such disclosures and for increased transparency. The president emphasized
36
that the programs were transparent, with aides stating that they were
37
going to try to be even more so, and additional information was released
38
by the government on top of the continued stream of leaks. At the same
time, over a quarter of the Senate has urged the White House to be more
transparent about its surveillance practices. 39
Although, as I argue later in this chapter, increases in transparency
are often not the best way to proceed when compared to improvements
in accountability, some potential ways to enhance transparency should be
introduced. For example, the government should release summaries of the
effects of its security measures without going into details that might help
terrorists.
The second approach is to increase the power of and add layers to insti-
tutional accountability and oversight mechanisms. Although both might
be called for, there are strong reasons to rely more on enhanced account-
ability and oversight than on much enhanced transparency. The distinction
reflects the well-known difference between direct democracy (which is the
idea behind transparency—the people will know all the details and judge
the merit of the programs) and representative democracy (which assumes
that a good part of the judgment will be made by elected representatives,
and the public will judge them in turn).
Significantly higher levels of transparency present two kinds of serious
problems. The first is well known and plagues all efforts for direct democ-
racy. There are sharp limits to the capacity of the public, which is busy
making a living and leading a social life, to learn the details of any gov-
ernment program and evaluate it—especially given that, in the end, they
cannot vote any program up or down, but have only one “holistic” vote
for representatives and all that they favor and oppose. Second, high trans-
parency is, on the face of it, incompatible with keeping secret that which
must be kept secret. Moreover, when the government responds to calls
for more scrutiny with the release of more information—so as to demon-
strate that the secret acts did, in fact, improve security and did not unduly