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

Re:Maybe we shouldn't have impeached clinton?

[Umbral Blot]

Wow, clinton was impeached. Thats news to me.

Differences in costs.

[Randseed]

This has already been pretty much hinted at already, but it bears restatement. Mod me Redundant if it really annoys you; my karma is impenetrable.

Classifying something costs a lot more than declassifying it. To classify something, you get the data, then have to figure out whether to classify it. We're even so far. But then you have to protect the data, and there's an associated cost with that. Add to all that security clearance procedures,and it gets pretty expensive really fast.

Just the process of getting a security clearance is expensive. For the low level clearances, it isn't that expensive. They just check you against terrorist lists, check your criminal history, and call up the people you list. When you start applying for higher clearances, they personally interview people, and that's when it starts getting expensive: you're paying for the lodging and travel for the FBI guy, his salary, and all the bureaucratic nonsense that goes along with it.