Government's drowning in a sea of secrets
Thursday, June 5, 2008 12:59 AM PDT
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Government secrecy became a growth industry in the years following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Today, federal agencies are spending $134 creating new secrets for every $1 spent declassifying old secrets, according to the watchdog group OpenTheGovernment.org.
Ted Gup, author of “Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life,” calculated that the government created a staggering 14.2 million secrets in 2005, alone — a figure that works out to 1,600 new secrets every hour, night and day, throughout the year. Gup alleges that securing these secrets costs as much as $7.7 billion a year.
Efforts to slow this trend have been ineffective, for the most part. A six-member federal panel created in 2001 to sort through classified documents and decide which could be made public quickly found it was in way over its head. No surprise there. Less than a year after the panel’s creation, the CIA, Air Force and several other agencies began withdrawing thousands of declassified records from public shelves and reclassifying them as secret.
Documents federal agencies deemed worthy of reclassification as secret included a 1962 telegram containing a translation of a Belgrade news article about China’s nuclear capabilities, 1960 Cold War intelligence studies of political affairs in Mexico and papers dealing with the 1948 anti-American riots in Colombia. What led agencies to withdraw such documents from public shelves? The government won’t say. The criteria for reclassification is classified.
The government’s penchant for secrecy should concern us for a number of reasons. As Gup noted in an article written last year for The Washington Post, “Excessive secrecy is at the root of multiple scandals — the phantom weapons of mass destruction, the collapse of Enron, the tragedies traced to Firestone tires and the arthritis drug Vioxx, and more.” Members of the Sept. 11 Commission said excessive government secrecy was undermining efforts to combat terrorism. They wrote that the sheer volume of secrets, along with the many levels of classification and “need-to-know” safeguards, often render good intelligence useless.
The 9/11 panel offered what seemed a simple, but effective, way to rein in the great number of federal bureaucrats who daily classify information. The commission recommended establishing an independent body that would have the final word on all classification systems. In 2005, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., introduced legislation that would create that body. It’s time that bill received the serious consideration it merits.
When government employees and politicians fear the second guessing associated with hindsight, such as our understanding in 2008 of the WMD of 2002, it is no wonder so many documents become “secret.” A solution is needed.
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