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Comment by Simulacra | Hacker News Reader

I work in government relations and this is neither news, nor anything new. Deliberations at the highest level have to be confidential at times, because the players are speaking brutally honest. They need to be able to make decisions and speak their mind without the media and the public second guessing everything. Passing legislation or making policy over time is one thing, but in a crisis like this, they have to move fast. I think the last thing we want is for policymakers to have to stop and keep justifying every single thing they do, that will just lead to paralysis.

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==I work in government relations and this is neither news, nor anything new. ==

Lots of people in this article disagree:

> A high-level former official who helped address public health outbreaks in the George W. Bush administration said “it’s not normal to classify discussions about a response to a public health crisis.”

> Attendees at the meetings included HHS Secretary Alex Azar and his chief of staff Brian Harrison, the officials said. Azar and Harrison resisted the classification of the meetings, the sources said.

> One of the administration officials suggested the security clearances for meetings at HHS were imposed not to protect national security but to keep the information within a tight circle, to prevent leaks. “It seemed to be a tool for the White House - for the NSC - to keep participation in these meetings low,” the official said

Those quotes appear to prove OPs point about giving people in the discussions the ability to speak freely without second guessing from people like "a high-level former official".

The point of state secrets isn't to allow elected officials to say embarrassing things.

I didn’t say embarrassing, but if you’re talking about a mass casualty event and how many body bags are going to need, and limitations that are in the system, and where resources are going to be diverted, how many might die, etc etc the last thing you would want is the public questioning every single thing. Because they will. If they don’t, the opposition party certainly will.

The same logic used to keep lots of important information out of the prying eyes of voters and oversight committees.

==the last thing you would want is the public questioning every single thing. Because they will. If they don’t, the opposition party certainly will.==

And if you classify it wouldn't that also cause the public to question "every single thing" just the same? Seems like the case we have proves that to be true as they hid it and people are still questioning.

Using the classification system to shield yourself from criticism is abusing it. The criteria is damaging to national security, not damaging to an officials reputation.

Something such as "we should prioritize efforts in cities besides Seattle/New York as the virus has clearly spread beyond reasonable containment, yet can still be contained in Atlanta/Miami" could be reported as "U.S Government elects to leave the people of Seattle on their own."

Replace the cities or issue with anything you want. The point is, something has to be prioritized, and the ones who aren't prioritized could be seen as victimized.

Classifying doesn't keep you from having to prioritize things. Or people finding out that you prioritized certain regions over others.

Sometimes in life you actually do have to prioritize. The alternative is maybe doing a half measure and being far less effective. So the rational course is often to prioritize.

However, no politician/official necessarily wants to be on record as making this kind of priority decision.

So if you insist on radical transparency in these situations, you're insisting on people being less effective.

Not classifying meetings that have never been classified before is not insisting on radical transparency.

But even if you assume that politicians have misaligned incentives because they care more about optics than saving lives, why reduce transparency? You're making the assumption there are more good decisions with bad optics than bad decisions with bad optics. Which seems like an unlikely assumption to be true.

> Not classifying meetings that have never been classified before is not insisting on radical transparency.

Agreed. I was referring to the principle of the thing, not this specific instance.

> You're making the assumption there are more good decisions with bad optics than bad decisions with bad optics. Which seems like an unlikely assumption to be true.

I think it might be true in certain situations, e.g. emergency situations like we're in now.

Except that second guessing still happened after the classification, which disproves the point entirely.

They're allowed to have discussion that exist off the record. Classifying things mean they are forcing such discussions to happen in secure facilities and under very specific terms in order to prevent foreign interception. That seems a bit like overkill to me.

Yes, this is absolutely true, in a dictatorship. On the contrary, in open societies, it is precisely the fact that policymakers have to justify every single thing they do that provides the stability and prosperity that democracies generally enjoy and prevents the abuses of power that are endemic to dictatorships.

It is definitely not normal for public health emergency planning outside the military to be classified. If there is information in there whose public availability would cause serious harm to national security, something has gone terribly wrong — a far more likely explanation is that the classification decision is the kind of quotidian lie that undergirds the self-serving corruption that habitually ruins authoritarian societies.

If high level meetings are not classified it would be hard to brainstorm about the potential impacts on military readiness, quarantines, shutdowns, lockouts, etc.

Otherwise, meetings would have to be compartmentalized which would limit their usefulness.

If high level meetings are classified, important SMEs are unable to participate. This is not about protecting the deliberation process, this is more the typical Trumpian attempt to prevent embarrassing information from being revealed.

Clearly, there are trade-offs to be made. Making the meetings too open will also drive important topics and persons out of the room.

The important people have been kept out of the room by the secrecy urge. This isn't about preserving the ability to deliberate, it's about trying to avoid embarrassing Trump to the detriment of the process.

Wow, the Trumpists are downvoting. I'm not saying anything that isn't in the article.

> The White House has ordered federal health officials to treat top-level coronavirus meetings as classified, an unusual step that has restricted information and hampered the U.S. government’s response to the contagion, according to four Trump administration officials.

There's the first para of the article which contradicts most of the arguments you're trying to make. This is according to officials dealing with this problem today.

i wonder how people can think that targeted ads are dangerous but also think discussions like this should be public.

kay from the cloak and dagger, memory-erasing men in black knew: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals"

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