Few people have understood and described the insidious corrosiveness of government secrecy as clearly as Daniel Ellsberg.
Ellsberg, who died Friday at age 92 at his home in Kensington, is famous for providing the Pentagon Papers — a top-secret history of the Vietnam War — to the New York Times in 1971. While no one was clearer than Dan about how secrecy threatens democracy by preventing the public from making informed decisions, he also taught me how access to secret information actually causes government officials to make what he called “smart dumb” decisions.
I first met Dan when I was helping to create the Freedom of the Press Foundation, co-launched in 2012 by several Electronic Frontier Foundation staffers, along with others. EFF is a nonprofit defending digital privacy, free speech and innovation. Our co-founder and board member, John Perry Barlow, who was also deeply involved, brought Dan into the planning. EFF served as legal counsel for the fledgling organization.
When Dan unceremoniously walked into one of the first organizing meetings we held at EFF’s red-brick Mission District offices, I was both tongue-tied and star-struck, as were most of us in the room, but he didn’t seem to notice.
He sat down and quickly helped us think through what the new organization should be and how it should function. First and foremost, he insisted that it stand up unapologetically for Chelsea Manning, the U.S. Army intelligence analyst who in 2010 had revealed American war crimes in Iraq by providing leaked documents to Wikileaks. Dan would later attend Manning’s trial.
He was also strongly in agreement that “Freedom of the Press” include Wikileaks itself, the nonprofit launched in 2006 by Australian editor and activist Julian Assange, which was publishing those governmental secrets.
Dan later spoke at a public EFF event in Berkeley discussing the National Security Agency’s spying, which EFF had been suing over since 2006. I listened intently as he explained how those given access to governmental secrets all too often become convinced that they are smarter and more capable than those who lack that information. He described a feedback loop in which officials inside a secrecy bubble start believing they are invincible, become subject to groupthink and so become increasingly unwilling to recognize legitimate criticism or concerns from outside the bubble.
He called them “smart dumb” people, conned by their own proximity to power and access to secrets into doing stupid things — such as, for example, continuing a war that was clearly lost or lying about weapons of mass destruction. Dan said such mistakes were as inevitable as they are insidious. He made clear that this was something he himself had experienced.
EFF helped facilitate Dan’s first real conversation with Manning at our November 2018 Pioneer Awards ceremony. Dan was exuberant that night: “I waited 39 years for her to appear in this world,” he said before detailing the significance of the documents she leaked. He praised both Manning and Edward Snowden — the National Security Agency subcontractor who leaked documents in 2013 revealing extensive global surveillance programs — saying, “I have often said that I identify more with them as ‘revelationaries’ than with any other people in the world.”
The world will never see another Dan Ellsberg, but we all benefit from his legacy — including the other whistleblowers and truth-tellers out there today who have been inspired by him, and those who will bravely step forward in the years ahead. May his memory be a blessing.
Cindy Cohn is executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital civil liberties organization based in San Francisco.