U.S. government secrecy reaches historical high
By Scott Shane
The New York TimesWASHINGTON — Government secrecy has reached a historic high by several measures, with federal departments classifying documents at the rate of 125 a minute as they create categories of semisecrets bearing vague labels such as "sensitive security information."
A record 15.6 million documents were classified last year, nearly double the number in 2001, according to the federal Information Security Oversight Office. Meanwhile, declassification, which made millions of historical documents available annually in the 1990s, has slowed to a relative crawl, from a high of 204 million pages in 1997 to 28 million pages last year.
The increasing secrecy and its rising cost to taxpayers, estimated by the office at $7.2 billion last year, are drawing protests from a growing array of politicians and activists, including Republican members of Congress, leaders of the independent commission that studied the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the top federal official who oversees classification.
The acceleration of secrecy began after the 2001 attacks, as officials sought to curtail access to information that might tip off the al-Qaida terrorist network about the nation's vulnerabilities. Such worries have not faded; last week, the Department of Health and Human Services sought unsuccessfully to prevent publication of a scientific paper about the threat of a poisoned milk supply on the grounds that it was "a road map for terrorists."
But there is concern the hoarding of information could backfire. Thomas Kean, chairman of the Sept. 11 commission and a former Republican governor of New Jersey, said the failure to prevent the 2001 attacks was rooted not in leaks of sensitive information but in the barriers to sharing information among agencies and with the public.
"You'd just be amazed at the kind of information that's classified; everyday information, things we all know from the newspaper," Kean said. "The best ally we have in protecting ourselves against terrorism is an informed public."
Ah, but an informed public would have bounced these clowns into
jail, now wouldn't it?
