Raised up as the rallying cry of every disgruntled person with a voice to shout with and an issue to press, government transparency (or lack thereof) appears to be the ultimate evil of any righteous cause. After all, if a government is corrupt, or up to no good, shouldn’t we, as the concerned citizenry, want to know? Common sense and a desire to protect oneself says yes. Not usually considered is if the government functions perfectly fine as is. After all, there is always something amiss, isn’t there?

Obviously, government ethics should be held to a high standard. But people often confuse ethics and transparency to disastrous effect. Consider the fall Student Association (SA) vice president for academic affairs (VPAA) elections. Regardless of your beliefs regarding the tar and feathering controversy, it started when a screenshot of a GroupMe from the Planning, Research and Elections Committee was sent to a VPAA candidate under discussion in that GroupMe for potential campaign violations. This act of sending a screenshot itself is clearly an ethical breach and potentially a separate campaign rule breach. The content of the screenshot itself definitely matters, but that doesn’t affect the ethical nature of the act. The fact remains that someone responsible for enforcing campaign violations unnecessarily impacted the election, potentially benefiting or hurting any of the candidates. In effect, the transparency was unethical.

More startling to me is that statements from the SA president in a private SA meeting were leaked and then brought up, again affecting this election. Ignore the statements themselves. The most powerful student body on campus has at least one person who would rather affect an election than do their job. As an elected official, it is unethical to engage in anonymous activities that affect elections. Should elected officials wish to support a candidate or an issue, it is paramount they do so publicly in order to face the consequences. Let me be clear: Everyone has the right to express their opinions, but nobody has the right to expose someone else’s if they were made in private.

Pipe Dream has (for the most part, correctly) continually slammed the SA for its inability to function as a cohesive unit. Yet in my memory, Pipe Dream has continually failed to address that this stems from lone individuals with ulterior motives. And when information is leaked, it has avoided pointing these ethical issues out. I am not talking about journalistic protections, or protections for whistleblowers. Even those people are in the public eye. The true issue at work here is that a few ambitious people often use the rallying cry of transparency to advance a separate agenda, and in this regard, are misleading people.

A truly ethical government requires a level of privacy that should be expected for all people, government officials or not. Attempts to break that privacy in the name of transparency, or any other “greater good,” always have negative consequences and are always unethical.

Nicholas Serrao is a junior majoring in economics.