When Security Becomes a Pretext, Justice Becomes a Casualty

The facts, so far as they are reported, are plain and therefore all the more disturbing. A firm engaged in the higher computations now fashionable, Anthropic, possessed high security clearances, enjoyed consistent praise from the very department that employed its models, and attracted no recorded doubts as to its trustworthiness. Then came a public quarrel between the company and the defence establishment about the use of those models. Suddenly, without any new evidence of danger, the company was branded a supply chain risk, its contract terminated, and that stigma extended across other arms of government. A federal judge has now pronounced these measures not only baseless, but illegal. When power moves this quickly from favour to proscription, the impartial spectator begins to reach for his wallet.

In the work I entitled *An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations*, I assigned to the sovereign three great duties: defence, the administration of justice, and the erection of certain public works and institutions. Here, the state purports to be exercising the first duty, but has been found wanting in the second. The judge observes that Anthropic was deprived of constitutionally protected liberty interests without sufficient notice or opportunity to be heard, and that the actions violated freedom of expression by retaliating against criticism of the ruler. To punish speech under the pretext of security is not to blend defence with justice; it is to sacrifice the latter upon the altar of the former.

In *The Theory of Moral Sentiments*, I argued that we judge our own conduct by imagining an impartial spectator, well informed but disinterested, whose approbation we sincerely desire. Let that spectator consider this case. There is no discussion, anywhere in the record, of untrustworthiness or of genuine supply chain risk prior to the quarrel; there is much to show official confidence. After the dispute becomes public, the risk miraculously appears. No new facts, only new irritation. The spectator, regarding such a transformation, would not call it zeal for the public safety; he would call it resentment dressed in uniform.

The failure of due process is not a mere technicality, a lawyer’s nicety to be brushed aside when tempers run high. The exact administration of justice is the chief cement of a commercial society, for it allows each person to plan, to contract, and to invest, knowing that he will not be condemned unheard. When a government can, without warning, destroy a firm’s reputation by proclaiming it a security threat, and do so for what a court finds to be purely expressive conduct, then every trader in that line of business must reckon less on law and more on favour. The higgling and bargaining of the market are replaced by the whispered calculation of political risk.

The effects do not end with one injured company or one injured president’s pride. They run silently through the price system. If innovators in these new arts of computation believe that a contract may be forfeited not for poor performance, but for public contradiction of authority, they will invest less, experiment less, and speak less honestly about the uses and abuses of their own creations. Capital that might have sought out bold improvements in productivity will creep instead toward safer, more compliant employments. Wages, profit, and rent will all adjust; but the labouring poor, who most need the fruits of innovation to cheapen necessaries and enlarge opportunities, will be the last to know why progress has slowed and prices remain stubborn.

I have long distrusted what I once called the vile maxim of the masters of mankind: all for ourselves, and nothing for other people. In my own time, it was commonly uttered by merchants seeking restraints upon their rivals. Here the maxim is adopted, in effect, by officers of the state. To terminate a contract, and to stigmatize a supplier, for the undisputed sole purpose of stopping public criticism of the ruler, is to treat the immense powers of government as a private estate, to be landscaped for one man’s comfort. That some of those involved may sincerely utter the word “security” changes little; the impartial spectator looks to motives proved by facts, not to convenient incantations.

None of this is to deny that the state may, and often must, act vigorously to guard its arsenals, its communications, its very independence. But precisely because these interests are so vital, any such action must be grounded on evidence, constrained by known procedures, and open, after the fact, to judicial scrutiny. When defence policy is made in wrath, without observance of law, it ceases to be defence at all and becomes only another form of faction. A commercial society prospers when self-interest operates under settled rules of justice and is thereby led—here I permit myself the old expression—by an invisible hand toward the public good. It decays when fear of retaliation becomes one of the principal costs of doing business with the state.