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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.'"
It's kind of an odd figure to give. Bucks spent for keeping secrets relative per bucks spent declassifying them. A higher number, as has developed, could be caused by more secrets being kept, a higher cost associated with keeping them. (Both is probably happening.) Or it could be caused by fewer old secrets being declassified, or declassifying getting cheaper. Not sure if any of that is the case.
The figure also doesn't really give any indication if the total number of secrets is rising (ie more new secrets than declassifieds) because keeping a secret certainly is more expensive than declassifying one. But how much more expensive, I don't know.
Like I said, kind of an odd figure to give.
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that keeping secrets is too expensive so he weaving such a web of deceit it becomes impossible to tell the truth from a lie.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Of course the counterpoint to that is that by hiding the information, the government can get away with not replacing the faulty body armour on the basis that nobody's going to find out about the flaws.
MIT Institute Professor Chomsky has spent countless months reading declassified material and observed that almost all of the material kept classified for 'security' reasons has no bearing on security. The main purpose appears to be to keep the general population out of the loop on what is happening and what decisions are being made.