Perspective: People around the globe have been steeped in the idea that government secrecy is bad
,” the mysterious ailment that has been affecting many U.S. diplomats. Many fear that a “foreign adversary” is responsible, despite claims spanning multiple U.S. agencies that it is “highly unlikely.” Reports first surfaced in 2016 of strange symptoms such as vertigo, migraines and memory loss suffered by diplomats stationed in Havana, in cities in China and other locations overseas.
The Enlightenment partly took hold as a response to perceived encroachment on the part of the state. Many thinkers began to articulate ideas of individual rights and privacy as well as the possibility of having a say in government. Enlightenment thinkers also began to promote the importance of public opinion and democratic values. Resistance to a state that seemed to intrude in private lives while remaining secretive then led to calls for government transparency.
Transparency became a way to fight against such tyranny in both the United States and France. Benjamin Franklin, who was postmaster general at the time, leaked the letters of the lieutenant governor and governor of Massachusetts, which claimed that the American colonists could not enjoy the same liberties as English citizens in the metropole.
During the French Revolution especially, many linked government secrecy explicitly to abuses of power and, in a related way, saw transparency as a safeguard against despotism. For example, when revolutionaries stormed the Bastille in 1789, the popular press feverishly wrote about the prison’s “horrifying mysteries” and “the dark details of history” buried in the prison’s records, the “archives of despotism.
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