I first learned about this when I read about a patent dispute. Someone (I don't recall the name) invented a coupler that could be used to easily splice a fiber optic cable (e.g. under water) and tap into all it's signal undetected. The inventor was denied patent rights and lost all control of his invention b/c the U.S. government claimed States Secrets, thus no court case on the matter could proceed.
Ooh, this lead to all sorts of interesting reading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_secrets_privilege
"""The privilege was first officially recognized by the Supreme Court of the United States in United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1 (1953). A military airplane, a B-29 Superfortress bomber, crashed. The widows of three civilian crew members sought accident reports on the crash but were told that to release such details would threaten national security by revealing the bomber's top-secret mission ...
...
In 2000, the accident reports were declassified and released, and it was found that the assertion that they contained secret information was fraudulent. The reports did, however, contain information about the poor condition of the aircraft itself, which would have been very compromising to the Air Force's case."""
So a Supreme Court case established precedence based on false claim of secret privilege from the government. That's pretty awful- if correct, it's a huge abuse of privelege.
Incidentally, I was not surprised to see Lucent mentioned in the Wired article- its predecessor, Bell Labs, had a very strong relationship with national security (The Idea Factory showed that the head of Bell Labs and the head of AT&T both maintained "secret schedules" where they would go to DC and share a lot of AT&T's access with security agencies.
I wouldn't jump to that conclusion. The state of military aircraft is extremely valuable information to an adversary that is trying to size up your forces.
While I agree (and actually support the concept of State Secrets), I want my Supreme Court cases and the precedences they establish to be grounded in cases where the facts actually support the idea that the government is protecting a state secret, rather than covering up its own problems. The secret documents in the Reynolds case were declassified later, and showed that it was unlikely their exposure would have damaged state secrecy (the russians had already cloned the B29, the accident report didn't give any details on the confidential equipment on board), and a fairly strong argument can be made they showed the government was trying to apply the privilege to hide their own failures in maintaining the aircraft, rather than protect critical secrets).
In short: privilege should be applied sparingly and the precedence for it should be unimpeachable. In this case, the precedence is not unimpeachable; the specific case is still considered contentious.
My point though is that a failure to maintain military aircraft is sensitive information that could be used by the enemy. You don't want your enemy to know your weak spots. I'm happy for the courts to give the government broad deference in these cases, especially when constitutional principles are not hanging in the balance.
Don't forget the time period that this happened in. The Soviets had tested their first nuke only a few years prior, Eastern Europe had fallen behind the Iron Curtain, communist movements were on the rise in the rest of Asia and had succeeded in taking China. The prospect of total war was very real. That you're doing a bad job of maintaining a certain class of warplane is very sensitive information in such an environment.
