From Glenn Greenwald's Salon column:

Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama's closest confidants. Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama's head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for "overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs." In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-"independent" advocates to "cognitively infiltrate" online groups and websites -- as well as other activist groups -- which advocate views that Sunstein deems "false conspiracy theories" about the Government. This would be designed to increase citizens' faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists. The paper's abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here.

Sunstein advocates that the Government's stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into "chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups." He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called "independent" credible voices to bolster the Government's messaging (on the ground that those who don't believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government). This program would target those advocating false "conspiracy theories," which they define to mean: "an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role."

[...]

Consider the recent revelation that the Obama administration has been making very large, undisclosed payments to MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber to provide consultation on the President's health care plan. With this lucrative arrangement in place, Gruber spent the entire year offering public justifications for Obama's health care plan, typically without disclosing these payments, and far worse, was repeatedly held out by the White House -- falsely -- as an "independent" or "objective" authority. Obama allies in the media constantly cited Gruber's analysis to support their defenses of the President's plan, and the White House, in turn, then cited those media reports as proof that their plan would succeed. This created an infinite "feedback loop" in favor of Obama's health care plan which -- unbeknownst to the public -- was all being generated by someone who was receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in secret from the administration (read this to see exactly how it worked).

In other words, this arrangement was quite similar to the Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher scandals which Democrats, in virtual lockstep, condemned. Paul Krugman, for instance, in 2005 angrily lambasted right-wing pundits and policy analysts who received secret, undisclosed payments, and said they lack "intellectual integrity"; he specifically cited the Armstrong Williams case. Yet the very same Paul Krugman last week attacked Marcy Wheeler for helping to uncover the Gruber payments by accusing her of being "just like the right-wingers with their endless supply of fake scandals." What is one key difference? Unlike Williams and Gallagher, Jonathan Gruber is a Good, Well-Intentioned Person with Good Views -- he favors health care -- and so massive, undisclosed payments from the same administration he's defending are dismissed as a "fake scandal."

Sunstein himself -- as part of his 2008 paper -- explicitly advocates that the Government should pay what he calls "credible independent experts" to advocate on the Government's behalf, a policy he says would be more effective because people don't trust the Government itself and would only listen to people they believe are "independent." In so arguing, Sunstein cites the Armstrong Williams scandal not as something that is wrong in itself, but as a potential risk of this tactic (i.e., that it might leak out), and thus suggests that "government can supply these independent experts with information and perhaps prod them into action from behind the scenes," but warns that "too close a connection will be self-defeating if it is exposed." In other words, Sunstein wants the Government to replicate the Armstrong Williams arrangement as a means of more credibly disseminating propaganda -- i.e., pretending that someone is an "independent" expert when they're actually being "prodded" and even paid "behind the scenes" by the Government -- but he wants to be more careful about how the arrangement is described (don't make the control explicit) so that embarrassment can be avoided if it ends up being exposed.

In this 2008 paper, then, Sunstein advocated, in essence, exactly what the Obama administration has been doing all year with Gruber: covertly paying people who can be falsely held up as "independent" analysts in order to more credibly promote the Government line. Most Democrats agreed this was a deceitful and dangerous act when Bush did it, but with Obama and some of his supporters, undisclosed arrangements of this sort seem to be different. Why? Because, as Sunstein puts it: we have "a well-motivated government" doing this so that "social welfare is improved." Thus, just like state secrets, indefinite detention, military commissions and covert, unauthorized wars, what was once deemed so pernicious during the Bush years -- coordinated government/media propaganda -- is instantaneously transformed into something Good.

Burke and Greenwald both make the point that this kind of behavior is egregiously wrong period--it doesn't matter what your politics are or what your agenda is, because the end really doesn't justify the means if you care about principle on any level. And we are after all trying to live in a nation that is founded on and maintained through principle, as much as we struggle with that. That's an obvious point, but a necessary one--and one that's necessary not just for government, not just for public affairs, but also for academia.

When professors rise as far as Sunstein, Gruber, and Krugman have, it can be hard to remember that this is what they are. They come to seem untouchable, exempt, even a little unreal. Their academic standing may seem somehow minor, or beside the point; to think of them as violating academic professional ethics--in the way of a Ward Churchill, for instance--may seem almost embarrassingly petty or inconsequential. But from the perspective of academia--which has a huge image problem, one that arises in no small part from the public perception that academia is a politicized free-for-all accountable to no one--it's a big deal.

The activities and ideas of these three respected academic figures should be discussed and parsed. It may well be, for instance, that the only kind of dishonesty Sunstein and Krugman are guilty of, from an academic standpoint, is intellectual dishonesty, while Gruber has crossed the line into professional misconduct. In other words, Gruber's the only one who has broken a rule. Still, intellectual dishonesty can and should be named, criticized, and ultimately tamed through strong criticism--the kind that comes attached to consequences in the form of reputation costs if you come to be seen as a shill or a fool. And that criticism has to come from professional and intellectual peers.

Academics are happy to perform this sort of self-policing when they deem the politics of the offender to be offensively wrong: remember John Yoo and Lawrence Summers? But self-policing can't be only a mechanism of political self-purification. It has to be principled, fair, and adherent to ethical norms that transcend personal agendas.