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

Maybe we shouldn't have impeached clinton?

[krelyk]

I hope people will wake up and realize what a bad mistake it was to elect Bush... twice!@!@$

Re:I need to know, I have a right to know!

[Halfbaked Plan]

You 'anti-Bush all the time, anytime' nutcases do a good job of discrediting yourselves.

He made the milk in your refrigerator go sour, too, didn't he?

Yet more opportunities for leftist paranoids...

[suitepotato]

I love how quickly and easily all of the myriad failings of the Clinton administration in the area of intelligence, and all the times they classified information, are conveniently forgotten and the sum total of all use, abuse, and misuse of classification quickly and hypocritically glossed over and forgotten.

Let us not forget that Mr. Habitrail for Humanity, President Jimmy Carter, went from claiming he saw a UFO and if elected he'd declassify anything and everything on the subject and promptly acted as though he never saw anything or said anything from the moment of his first preparatory intelligence briefing.

Exactly how much stuff did he declassify about Area 51, Lockheed's skunkworks, experimental aircraft development, etc? Oh yeah, NONE. To this day, it is still Shoot to Kill territory out there. If there's no need for classification, then why is that classified?

For that matter, during that period when the leftist Democrats were supposed to be so much more Soviet-friendly than anyone else and more commited to unilateral defense self-destruction, what of our nation's nuclear weapons program was declassified and released?

There are reasons, for whatever the party or politics of the administration, for classification and secrets. There are things that exist in this world, things which have happened, which if the public of the country and the world knew would lead to upheval and damage worse than anything we suffer by not knowing.

I can think of a dozen things in my own life I wish I'd never known and for which I won't sleep well ever again. But for those with even a shred of conscience, the price of knowledge of some things is to be forever peturbed by them and the only release is death. I feel for those who have to keep those secrets who can never again know ignorance.

For the shallow out there who need everything as an irreverent joke, consider what you'd give to never have seen your dad step naked out of the shower or your mother's c-section scar or your grandmother needing a sponge bath. Some things you just don't need to know or see.