Cost of Secrecy Continues to Increase

xerid writes "The Associated Press is running an article about the increasing costs of government secrecy. The information stems from a report (PDF Warning) posted at OpenTheGovernment.org. From the article: 'The government is withholding more information than ever from the public and expanding ways of shrouding data. Last year, federal agencies spent a record $148 creating and storing new secrets for each $1 spent declassifying old secrets, a coalition of watchdog groups reported Saturday. That's a $28 jump from 2003 when $120 was spent to keep secrets for every $1 spent revealing them.'"

Comments

Apples and Oranges

[Chmarr]

The article is a little off (and, not surprising, given the site it's on).

'cost of creating secrets' is NOT the same as 'cost of keeping secrets'. They're comparing apples to oranges.

Of COURSE creating a secret is more expensive. Because.. you're both creating the information, AND trying to keep it secret. Telling people what you know (revealing the secret) is pittance compared to the time and effort doing the research for something that is to be KEPT secret.

Sheesh!

Re:Apples and Oranges

[SnowZero]

The designs described by that page were state of the art in the 1950, and not detailed enough to build a bomb that will work with any certainty*. If you google around you'll find changes that have been made since then, but still many details are missing (which is good). What you don't find are the detailed designs for Russian "suitcase" nukes or the minaturized fission weapons used as triggers for modern fusion warheads. The article is a far cry from what the government has in its classified documents. The priciples and layout are there, but many details are missing. Critical measurements, information on the some of the materials, and timing delays are missing or unclear.

It's kind of like how a lot of software patents work, they give you the overview but skip the meat that would allow you to actually recreate the thing without a lot of testing. That's what nuclear safety more or less depends on now... keeping the details that are determined by testing secret. If I gave you a sketch of a 4-cycle piston engine, you could recreate one, but only after a lot of testing and several failures. Thanks to the NPT testing bans, we are now very good at noticing such tests.

(*) Of course, the "little boy" design is a concern due to its obviousness, but thankfully it requires a lot of U235 which is harder to obtain than Plutonium. I'd still rather not have the schematics released though, since there is zero benefit to society.

Re:Maybe we shouldn't have impeached clinton?

[cerelib]

Yes, he was impeached.

More than that, I think

[Descalzo]

I wonder if this $148 figure includes the cost of granting security clearance.

I had an opportunity to speak with an FBI man whose job it was to certify people for security clearance. The man is a world traveller, interviewing personally as many people as he could to get an idea of how trustworthy the candidate would be.
When I asked him about these interviews, he said he didn't bother with the telephone, but went right to the interviewee and looked them in the eyes. He told me he recently went to Elko, Nevada to go down into the mine to talk with the candidate's former co-workers. He also mentioned that if the candidate had spent time overseas, then the process becomes very complicated and time consuming.

Now, that sounds like a very expensive process to me. It seems from the article that this cost would not be included (it doesn't say specifically, but it only mentions documents), but it certainly would be a related cost.

Another (unrelated) point:

From the article:"...and the inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina shows the public needs to know what could happen in their communities and what the response plans are..."

What? Is it just me or did someone just drop the name Katrina to increase the emotional blow of his tirade? I don't see the connection. Are these response plans a secret? Is the possibility of a hurricane on the Gulf Coast some kind of NSA classified information?

I probably sound sarcastic, but if there is anyone who could enlighten me on this, let me know.

Re:Why not just call it what it is?

[IdleTime]

*sigh*

USA is both a republic (that is a statesform) and a democracy (that is a political state)
There is no contradiction between beeing a republic and beeing a democracy.

Re:Why not just call it what it is?

[daliman]

Kleptocracy, now that is a cool word. I didn't realise there were so many nifty ones... http://www.google.co.nz/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=de fine%3A+cracy My favourite is now pornocracy - http://www.google.co.nz/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=de fine%3A+pornocracy

Re:Wow

[Mr Z]

The number is meaningless by itself, but meaningful relative to other measurements of the same quantity. If you RTFA, they do also give absolutes, in terms of number of classified and declassified documents.

This ratio is just an attempt at a "single figure of merit," that, like so many other benchmark numbers, is not meaningful relative to anything other than other computed values of that metric.

--Joe

Basic Economics

[nurb432]

I think you need to go back to school and learn about the delay between action and reaction.

Today we mostly are experiencing the results of the Clinton fiscal policy. ( effects of the current war not included of course as those effects are felt faster then normal fiscal changes )

Much as the Clinton years enjoyed the results of Regan's polices.

Re:Is Sweden still an "Open Gov't" Kingdom?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sept. 11 didn't change much (except the american embassy has beefed up security for some inexplicable reason).

Most things are still very much available to the public. Any correspondence between government and citizen is public and can probably be found somewhere. Never really bothered to look.

And we do have a royal family, but they don't have anything to say about anything. We're technically a kingdom, but nobody refers to Sweden as "the kingdom of..." y'know? :)

Re:selling secrets

[Tarwn]

I'm thinking it likely had to do with the fact that the Committee on Government Secrecy was enacted during that period, following the end of the cold war, leading to the 25 year rule and the release of tons of material previously marked as secret.
From Wikipedia: In 1994 it was estimated that the United States Government had over 1.5 billion pages of classified material that was 25 years old and older.

And if we want to stretch things a bit, i guess we could give Clinton credit for creating this commission (though the only creation reference I have found so far is that it was created by congress, not the president)...

Unfortunatly, Clinton replaced the previous executive order on classification with Executive Order 12958 which, from the way it sounds in Wikipedia, actually drastically increased the number of people that could mark something as secret. Give it a little time to ramp up to speed and for govt. employees and contractors to get used to their new found powers, and suddenly we have growth again.
The funniest thing is, knowing how things play out in some office atmospheres (and the number of people with the capability to classify material), theres probably a monthly pool going on in more than one place on who can classify the most stuff in a month or who can classify the most mundane piece of informaiton ever...we're going to get to this stuff in 25 years and find out someone classified their greasy post-it note with a lunch order on it... :P