It’s important to remember that the ongoing disclosures regarding the global system of indiscriminate surveillance secretly operated by the U.S. government are only one part of this vast secret empire that we pay for and is operated in our names.

The operating principle seems to be: The surveillance state and its minions demand to know everything about each of us, our contacts, communications, emails, etc., but as mere citizens, we have no reciprocal right to know what they are doing, what it costs, where it is done, how many people it employs, and so on. Talk about asymmetry!

Civil Beat’s Nick Grube has had a couple of good recent stories as he has tried to slowly develop some sense of the outlines of how all this plays out in Hawaii, see “Reporter’s Diary: How I Got Probed at the NSA” and “Bow Ties, Spies and Money: A Look Inside Hawaii’s Intel Community.”

But reporter Nick Turse, writing at Salon.com, really puts the broader secrecy of the U.S. defense establishment in sharp focus (“US military treats journalists like terror suspects“). He spells out how military public information officers routinely go through an elaborate dance designed to give out absolutely no significant information without ever saying a clear “No”.

Here’s just one example spelled out by Turse in some detail:

Last year, reports surfaced of civilians killed during operations conducted or overseen by U.S. personnel in Honduras. In at least one instance, the Honduran Air Force shot down a civilian plane thanks in part, it seems, to intelligence provided by SOUTHCOM. Since the U.S. military is heavily involved in operations across Latin America, I requested records relating to civilian casualties resulting from all operations in the region.

That was in July 2012. In February 2013, I got a peculiar response from Villalobos, one I’ve never seen otherwise in hundreds of replies to FOIA requests that I’ve ever received from various government agencies. He didn’t say there were no such records. He didn’t tell me that I had contacted the wrong agency or bureau. Instead, he directed me to the United Nations Statistics Division for the relevant data.

The trouble is, the U.N. Statistics Division (UNSD) doesn’t collate U.S. military data nor is it devoted to tracking civilian casualties. Instead it provides breakdowns of big datasets, like the Food and Agriculture Organization’s figures on how many hectares of apricots were harvested in Afghanistan in 2007 (3,400) or the prevalence rate of contraceptive use for women ages 15 to 49 in Uganda in 2005 (19.7%).

I was surprised to say the least. And I wasn’t alone. When I checked in with the U.N., the Statistics Division wrote back: “could you please forward us the email you received from SOUTHCOM in which they suggest UNSD as a source, so we can contact them if they continue to give our address out in response to such inquiries which don’t pertain to our work.”

So I called Villalobos to complain. It wasn’t his fault, he quickly assured me. The decision had been made, he claimed, by the director of personnel. I asked for his name, but Villalobos refused to give it: “He’s not a public person.”

That’s the nature of the runaround. Months later, you find yourself back in the same informational cul-de-sac. And when it comes to the U.S. military, it happens again and again and again.

You’ll have to read the whole story to get to Turse’s description of being pulled out of line when returning to the U.S. from an overseas reporting trip and interrogated by a Homeland Security officer who refused to give his name, and who made it quite clear that having a reporter’s professional interest in national security issues is clearly enough to earn you a place on one of those secret lists of potential suspects.

Scary stuff.

If you refuse to pay for your share of all this, you face the possibility of being tossed in the slammer. And if you keep pushing for information about what you’re paying for, it seems you’re also facing the possibility of being tossed in the slammer. And given the totality of surveillance, it’s possible that reading about other people’s attempts to question may also pose future risks.

In the meantime, keep up with the disclosures.

“The NSA’s mass and indiscriminate spying on Brazilians”

“U.S. spy spread through Latin America” (a Google translation of the story published in Brazil)

“Brazil opens investigation into US spying”

“Google Data Policy Faces Brazil Probe After Snowden Spy Leak”

“Snowden made the right call when he fled the U.S.” (Dan Ellsberg)

Ellsberg write: “One lesson of the Pentagon Papers and Snowden’s leaks is simple: secrecy corrupts, just as power corrupts.”