National Security Is Not a Blank Check on New Computing Power

The scene is quickly told: at the launch of a new data‑driven portal for government business, the president of the United States declared there would be no joint venture with China in advanced computational systems, for such cooperation would, he said, be like “giving away secrets” to a principal economic rival. Here is power exercised not over one man’s estate, but over a whole field of invention and commerce upon which many men and women, by their labour and wit, now depend. The question that presents itself to me is plain: by what right, and under what conditions, may a single magistrate so peremptorily shut this door?

In my *Second Treatise of Government*, I described political power as a right of making laws with penalties, for the public good, and of employing the force of the community, all held on trust and derived from the consent of the governed. That trust is given, I argued, to secure their properties – in the broad sense of their lives, liberties, and estates. I knew nothing of these learning engines and great stores of data; yet whatever men mix their labour with, and rely upon for their subsistence and projects, falls under that larger title of property. When the state directs so consequential a domain, it touches not curiosities, but men’s livelihoods and their freedom of action.

There is, I grant, a kind of power in princes which I called prerogative: a liberty to act for the public good without, and sometimes against, the strict letter of the law, when the law has not foreseen some danger. A rival power gaining access to the secrets of one’s defence or critical instruments of government may well be such a danger; the law of nature, which forbids us to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions, obliges rulers also to prevent such harms where they reasonably can. If a joint venture in so subtle and far‑reaching a technology would plainly expose a people’s safety, a refusal to “mix it up” might not be usurpation, but obedience to reason.

Yet prerogative, as I wrote then and hold now, is not a standing right to do as one pleases under the word “security”, but a temporary trust, tolerated only so long as the people find themselves better protected by it. Two conditions especially mark the boundary. First, that the act serve the public, not the private, good of the governor or his faction. Secondly, that the power remain revocable – that is, open to later correction by known laws and representative judgment, once time and information permit. When an executive bars whole classes of cooperation by a bare declaration, without a clear rule, public reasoning, or evident path to review, he comes dangerously near making himself judge in his own case.

Here the want of visible formality is striking. We are told of no settled law that defines what kinds of cooperation in these powerful computational methods with foreign powers are permitted, under what safeguards, and by whom judged. We hear only that the nation is “leading by a lot” and should therefore not share. But the magnitude of an advantage is not itself an argument for its secrecy, any more than a rich man’s jealousy proves his title. The burden of proof, in matters of restraint, lies always on power. Free and equal persons may well consent to limits that shield them from a hostile state; they cannot rationally consent to an undefined discretion that reaches however far later fear or ambition might suggest.

Nor is it enough that many citizens may presently approve of slowing or walling off such development. Majorities, too, are bound by the law of nature and the rights of the minority. If the refusal of joint ventures were shown, through open deliberation and intelligible standards, to be necessary to guard lives and essential liberties, it would stand as a hard but lawful hedge around the common field. If, instead, it becomes one act among a long train of abuses by which executives claim every new domain of technology as their exclusive preserve, then what was called protection will be felt as arbitrary dominion, and men will remember they have an appeal beyond human authority.

I do not say, therefore, that a president must embrace such ventures, or that prudence may not, in this hour, counsel refusal. I say only what I said when monarchs sought to cloak overreach in the language of prerogative: that the key question is not what he intends, but what institutions, laws, and avenues of correction surround his act. Where there is a known standing rule, an impartial judge, and a manifest regard to the safety of the whole, extraordinary caution may be just. Where there is only a man’s confidence that he knows best, the name changes, but the thing is still absolute power, and free people are never bound to accept it.