The recent kerfuffle about the New York Times' reporting on the SWIFT program, the now famous program through which our government tracks financial flows in an effort to stem terrorist funding, seems a bit, well, exaggerated. As far as I can tell from what I've read thus far, SWIFT has been in the news before, the government has routinely talked about tracking money flows and financial surveillance, and the terrorists would need to be ultra-stupid to not think that a program like SWIFT was being used to suss out abnormal or suspicious financial activity. In terms of real effects, then, the revelation by the New York Times does not seem as if it should have a substantially negative impact on our ability to fight would-be terrorism. Maybe it does, but thus far, the case has not been made particularly well.
This, of course, will not prevent the administration and its conservative supporters from having a political field day knocking the New York TImes (and other media outlets) for their left-wing, terror-supporting agenda. Nor will it stop the mainstream media from having one of their standard dramaturgies, wherein they spend their time acting out their fantasies of scandal and controversy amidst camera lights and planned witticisms. And the New York Times will defend themselves, debates will ensue over journalistic standards during wartime, blogger ethics panels will be convened, and the issue will slowly fade with a wink and a nod, the New York Times having theoretically confirmed that the Gray Lady still has some journalistic gumption after all and the Republican leadership having theoretically demonstrated that they really care about the War on Terror, dammit, that liberal journalists don't, and so on. One cannot help but feel that there exists a collusion between these two forces, a game wherein both parties know they're mugging for the cameras but neither party wants to call the other out, for fear that the public might catch on to the whole charade.
I do not mean to seriously imply that collusion exists, since collusion implies intentionality, foresight, planning, strategery, and what have you. The collusion here is more of a concordance, a set of narrative happenstances that follows scripts so ingrained and circular that the major actors can latch on to their respectively chosen identities and coast with them through the end of this particular scene, much akin to Ben Stiller's endless fascination with playing Ben Stiller, movie after tiresome movie. So what is it that makes this drama so compelling?
The answer, I think, is the appeal of the secret, or more importantly, the idea that what is at stake is a certain level of publicity that balances with a corresponding level of secrecy, and that, should the balance be tilted even marginally in one direction, the world will be torn asunder, either by Big Brother or Bin Ladin. Joshua Gunn has already noted this relationship, and in concluding his remarks he had a line I thouht particularly interesting: "In our time of spectacle and surveillance, the art of politics can be defined as the interplay of secrecy and publicity." I think this is intuitively, even demonstrably, correct. But I think the danger of this formulation - which is in no way to imply that it is wrong - is that it reveals the paucity of politics, since politics is now also synonymous and operatonally identical to journalism, to tabloid spectacle, and so on. Amidst all the leaking and juridical punishment of leaking, whereby some leaks are good and some leaks are bad, there is always the risk that something is being revealed that should not be, and that something is not being revealed that should be. The politics of leaking, as it were, which sounds like something I should turn into the title of a book at some point.