For human targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan and wherever else America wages its war on terror, the drone is an invisible predator of the sky. Generally, the first indication of a drone’s presence is the explosion of a missile obliterating its target.

This system of unmanned surveillance and execution aircraft has largely flown under the radar of much of the American public—including that portion of the American public that reports in the country’s free press and serves in the United States Congress.

But the veil of secrecy cloaking America’s drone program was lifted slightly this past week with the appearance of memos and the testimony of President Obama’s counterterrorism advisor on Capitol Hill.

In the same week that documents related to the Obama administration’s drone program were made public, John Brennan, a White House deputy national security advisor, went to the hill for his confirmation as the new CIA director. And on Wednesday, The New York Times and Washington Post revealed they’d engaged in self-censorship over the drone program, even as the details they submerged were being published abroad.

“I think there’s a lot more there than we’re seeing,” says Daniel Schuman, who leads the Wasington, D.C.-based Sunlight Foundation’s transparency effort. “That’s the problem.”

Balancing the public’s right to know what its government is doing with the secrecy needs of national security is apparently juggling act that lawmakers and journalists are taking on in tandem. As Gawker noted, The New York Times and Washington Post accepted a CIA request not to reveal the location of a drone base in Saudi Arabia that was being used for missions in Yemen. The two American papers withheld the information for more than a year, even though the The Times of London had broken the news in 2011.

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