Lawfare Archive: Christina Koningisor on Secrecy Creep

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4.7 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 17 May 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

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Summary

From January 4, 2022: Government secrecy is pervasive when it comes to national security and foreign affairs, and it’s becoming more and more common for state and even local governments to invoke government secrecy rationales that in the past, only the president of the United States and the national intelligence community were able to claim. While some of the secrecy is no doubt necessary to ensure that police investigations aren't compromised and state and local officials are getting candid advice from their staff, government secrecy directly threatens government transparency and thus democratic accountability. Alan Rozenshtein spoke about these issues with Christina Koningisor, a law professor at the University of Utah and the author of “Secrecy Creep” a recently published article in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, along with the Lawfare post summarizing her work.

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1:18.6	I'm Carolyn Cornett and Turnout Lawfare with an episode from the Lawfare Archive for May 17, 2025. On Friday, a federal judge heard arguments on whether the government
1:25.5	can invoke the state secrets privilege to withhold
1:28.6	details about what it's done to facilitate the return of Kilmar Obrego-Garcia, who was mistakenly deported
1:35.7	to a prison in El Salvador. Lawyers for Abrago-Garcia argued the government has no basis for
1:42.2	invoking the privilege, which is reserved for information
1:45.2	that could harm the foreign affairs or national security interests of the United States.
1:50.4	For today's archive episode, I selected an episode from January 4, 2022, in which Christina Koenegasor
1:58.2	joined Alan Rosenstein to discuss secrecy creep, the phenomenon of state
2:02.9	and local governance invoking government secrecy rationales that historically applied only to
2:08.5	the president and national intelligence community. They discussed the increasingly common practice,
2:14.1	how government secrets affect government transparency, and more.
	...

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