In Theory, Cheney Logs Are Threat to America

Warning: the American people are a threat to the American people. At least, according to the vice president.

As you may recall, the Washington Post has been suing the Bush administration for access to vice president Cheney’s visitor logs. A couple weeks ago, a judge ordered the Secret Service (which keeps the logs) to release them — or explain why, under current law, certain portions could be withheld.

But the New York Sun‘s Josh Gerstein tells us this morning that the vice president ain’t gonna show his dance card that easily. His legal team — better known as the Justice Department — has asked to block the judge’s decision, and they cite a pretty unusual argument for doing so. It’s called “mosaic theory.”

Mosaic theory has been around for a while, and it’s enjoyed a post-9/11 renaissance. It’s an increasingly common government argument for withholding sensitive national security-related information, because of “the potential for an adversary to deduce from independently innocuous facts a strategic vulnerability, exploitable for malevolent ends,” as a 2005 article in the Yale Law Review described it.

In other words, even if one piece of information appears harmless, if you put it together with other pieces of harmless information, the sum becomes dangerous in enemy hands.

It’s kind of like the MacGyver theory of information: this paperclip could be used to make a bomb, ergo, you can’t have this paperclip. However, unlike MacGyver, a mosaic-theory proponent doesn’t have to come up with the other ingredients necessary; all they have to do is wave the paperclip around menacingly. Perhaps surprisingly, it works.

How does this apply to Cheney’s visitor logs? Well, it doesn’t. Unless you take a step through the looking-glass, into a world where Cheney’s meetings with lobbyists and energy company executives are a dangerous paper clip in the vast repository of vital national secrets. And that, if combined with (fill in the blank), anyone who isn’t within the White House’s Circle of Trust is an adversary who could exploit the information for malevolent ends.

Indeed, this is how the Justice lawyers describe the apocalyptic result of releasing Cheney’s visitor logs: “Disclosure. . . could reveal an ever-expanding mosaic that would allow observers to chart the course of vice presidential contacts and deliberations in unprecedented fashion.” A terrible, haunting vision, isn’t it?