Transparency

A question that came up in a G+ discussion sprung from this post:

Both the military and business have a legitimate need for secrecy/non-transparency — does the eldraeic equivalent really operate with complete transparency?

There so, they would say, speaks the voice of statism and paranoia – probably with one of those pithy little proverbs about Dark deeds flourish in darkness; what cannot be done in the light ought not be done at all. By their standards, of course, by which they would claim that human society is pathologically obsessed with secretiveness, distrust, public opinion, and a particularly idiotic way of turning what are obviously productive and cooperative relationships into adversarial ones¹.

The military – or rather, the government which makes it up operates under the most stringent requirements, of course. The Empire’s citizen-shareholders from before the founding down to the present day were very much not inclined to let people go around wielding power where it can’t be seen, because we all know where that leads to, thank you so very much. The constitutional settlement that permits the Empire to exist at all was very clear that if the sovereign powers were going to be wielded at all, they were going to be wielded right up front where everyone could see. Says so right in the Imperial Charter:

SECTION XII: TRANSPARENCY

Article I: Transparency

In order to promote good governance, and to ensure the fulfillment of the responsibilities to the citizen-shareholders of the Empire implicit in the coronargyr that is the basis of the right and authority to govern, the governments of the Empire and its constituent nations shall conduct their work as openly as possible.

Article II: Citizen Access

To fulfill this promise of transparency, any citizen-shareholder of the Empire, and any legal coadunation within the Empire, shall have the right of access to the documentation and archives of the government of the Empire; except for those which, for the public safety, must remain held in confidence, or which relate to public order operations currently in progress.

Something which is interpreted very strictly in the implementing Transparency Act as requiring the release of all information that can be released and permitting the distributed auditing of the Imperial government by any citizen-shareholder who cares to go digging through its files, and adjudicated unsympathetically with regard to contrary claims by a committee of the Court of Appeals for the Imperial Service, whose lords justice of appeal are functionally independent from the executive branch and selected by the College of Judicature that in turn answers only to the Curia, the supreme and independent judicial organ which is not at all interested in letting the Senate, the Imperial Couple, or anyone else play silly buggers with the rules by which it operates.

About the only things that a citizen-shareholder can’t see simply by going to es.gov and poking around are:

• the majority of the (content of the) Personal Files relating to individual citizen-shareholders, who have a property-privacy right in that information that, in this case, supersedes the public’s right to know;
• military files relating to military operations in progress³, only if necessary in the opinion of the CoAftIS, and which must in any case be released the very moment said operations are no longer in progress and no harm can be done by so doing;
• constabular files relating to police investigations in progress, only if necessary in the opinion of the CoAftIS, which again must be released the very moment said operations are no longer in progress and no harm can be done by so doing (which is usually presumed to mean “at arraignment”);
• Imperial State Security⁴ files relating to operations in progress (again, likewise, only if necessary in the opinion of the CoAftIS and while they’re in progress⁵) and/or which might compromise intelligence sources/agents in place⁶. All of these, of course, must still be released when their permissible-classification-time expires – and you’d be surprised how much gets released anyway.

The Transparency Act also adds some other minor fillips, such as providing that no exercise of the sovereign powers, such as the police power, is valid unless it’s on the record⁷. The police can exercise the rights of defense and common defense, same as anyone else, obviously, but anything they do by virtue of possessing the police power had damn well better be in a forensic log duly made available to the public for scrutiny, or it’s unlawful. Likewise, it has some very, very strict rules about destroying or losing information⁸.

Now, in the private realm¹⁰ – well, you don’t build a effective, cooperative, trustworthy (somewhat circularly, ’cause you have to give it to get it) team in a collegial atmosphere to get shit done by demanding that your employees cripple themselves by turning off this and shutting down that and avoiding communicating with the other, yadda yadda, just in case they might betray you later. What you create that way, very effectively, is an extremely toxic, paranoid, secretive work environment. And then you’ve just screwed yourself really hard.

Businesses, et. al., keep things from each other, sure, but if you can’t trust your own people, then you’ve already lost. And sure, sometimes this extending of trust doesn’t work out, but the damage that does is, by and large, far less than the damage of creating a seething sea of ick right up front.

Maybe all-y’all humans just suck at cooperating, they say. Seems like the polite possibility¹¹.

Footnotes:

1. Employer/employee, business/customer, industrialists/environmentalists², etc., etc., etc., ad totally naus.

2. “Environmentalists want less pollution. Industrialists want less waste. Pollution is waste. How for shit and waste heat did you monkeys screw this one up?”

3. Which, yes, does mean that people with an Imperial citizen-shareholder cert can go browse through, among piles of logistics data, routine patrol reports, the Board of Admiralty’s brandy rota, etc., etc., the Admiralty’s giant list of plans for invading absolutely everybody else and their big index of their Weapons Too Horrible To Use stocks. What? It’s not like no-one else has these things, it’s just that they lie a lot about them.

4. Which mostly means C&C and ExSec, and especially Fifth Directorate, bless their fuliginous hearts. (InSec loves to conduct intelligence operations as depicted in this beautiful ficlet that I regret not writing myself.) The other bits fall somewhere in the middle.

5. Even in cases like this, when it’s not going to immediately start a war, they’ll quite correctly publish the files after the exit briefing. (Some of these end up classified for years because if it were known, it would start a war; but by and large the Empire has no problem saying “yeah, we’re glad we killed the bastard” when they assassinate someone who needs killing, and the Iltine Union, dear fascists that they are, are at least smart enough not to want to walk into that meat-grinder. Besides, it’s not like anyone’s going to get that declassified factoid past the People’s Mental Hygiene Firewall of Ilth, either.)

6. Which does mean they release a crapton of stuff that ours don’t, obviously. Among the many things that annoys neighboring polities about ExSec is the amount of their classified information that gets routinely handed over from ExSec’s files to the public stacks of the Repository of All Knowledge, just ’cause it’s suitably unattributable.

7. This causes some squick among those foreign commentators who fail to realize that the Empire doesn’t have public executions as a deterrent, it has them as a very public statement that this is not the sort of thing that should be done in darkness, because it’s a short and slippery slope down from there to disappearing people at night and telling their friends they died in a car crash. Besides, if the consensus of the Mandate is that these classes of criminals should be made dead, then it’s both correct and necessary that the Mandate, it’s wielders, and the citizen-shareholders from whom it springs should own their gorram decision so, belike.

8. So, for one thing, any department that started losing e-mail the way the IRS seems to have been recently, for example, will have the Threefold Auditors of Impropriety all up in its business. If it’s just negligence, then people will just be fired en masse – since they do have sovereign powers, incompetence is absolutely not tolerated in the Imperial Service. If it turns out not to be negligence – well, then, that’s treason⁹, and the perpetrators will find themselves first before the Curial courts and then before a higher powers’.

9. The definition of treason covers a wide realm of possibilities in Imperial praxis, all things that involve fucking with the rights of the citizen-shareholders using the sovereign powers embodied in the Imperial Mandate they trusted you with to protect and uphold them. Basically, don’t.

10. Notwithstanding that this is also how the Imperial Service and Imperial Military Service treat their people. By and large, you don’t need to enforce a bunch of this stuff on the people walking around in Admiralty House¹², ’cause if they couldn’t be trusted to treat the information they might happen upon with appropriate respect and in accordance with security best practices, they wouldn’t be walking around in Admiralty House.

11. Compared to “all-y’all humans are naturally treacherous”, anyway.

12. Non-canonical name.