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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.'"
$148! I can't believe the government spent that little on anything.
OK, here is the deal. Keeping secrets is simple for one reason: You have to fact check each new bit of classified information with a whole database of older information in order to decide whether or not something has bearing. It is often easier to simply start classifying everything that *might* have some bearing on national security than it is to actually go looking all of the time. So, what we are left with is an increasingly chaotic and poorly indexed "database" of national security "secrets" that are costing the taxpayer more and more to maintain and data mine. The problem of over exuberance with classification of documents is simply that costs of declassification to preserve history start spiraling out of control.
The thing that absolutely amazed me has been investigating my Grandfathers history. Many of his records going back to WWII are still classified and it was only a few years ago that he had certain medals delivered to his family after the declassification of other records. Of course it is likely that they do not have any real bearing on todays issues, and nobody likely checks them anymore against new issues, but the amount of history that is being kept away from American citizens is stunning. I am not saying that declassification is easy. Quite the contrary, it takes skilled analysis to sit down and go through documents line by line and word for word while retaining a comprehensive knowledge of current and past events that may or may not have bearing on the request.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Face it, our form of government is not democracy, but rather a form of kleptocracy. And that's just the start of what they're covering up ...
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
In the pdf is a graph of year vs. number of declassified and classified pages. The Clinton years are the only years since 1980 where more pages were declassified than new pages classified.
The correlation is so strong that it makes me think there's a lot more that we should be able to learn from that graph. Perhaps there are correlations between businesses owned primarily by Repubs vs. businesses owned primarily by Dems. Perhaps there are correlations with watchdog groups which try to keep the government in line. Perhaps there are correlations with specific lobbying groups and law enforcement agencies.
There's also a graph on secrecy orders issued vs. secrecy orders rescinded with respect to patents. Apparently this was a much more popular maneuver in the late 80s than it is today. It makes me wonder if that system may have become stagnant and no longer serves the purpose which it was created for.
I like graphs.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
With so many of the government services running on Windows, it comes as no surprise that the cost of keeping secrets secret is ever increasing.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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!
i am only supporting OpenSource/GPLed governments...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
... feel the need to hide behind secrecy.
If they could be proud, they would be loud.
Project on Government Secrecy http://www.fas.org/sgp/
Words to men, as air to birds.
Lets take the example that was listed in one of the links and see what the big deal is. The USMC came across some bad body armor. Some state its the result of using the bottom bidder. Others state that people need to know this. Both sides have valid points, but now consider this: Our enemies get a hold of just exactly how that body armor is flawed and use that against our men and women deployed. You can use your imagination from there. If it is classified, it is usually done for a reason that people who apply that classification know about. If they justified every application of a classification, why have secrets at all.
Maybe I will have others disagree with me. Fine, my response is not all inclusive just something to chew on.
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
Possibly the whole state bureaucracy, whole state machine is just like a Windows installation. It degrades over time and at some point you have to re-install from scratch.
i thought it was supposed to be secret?
Don't let the figures fool you.
The real figure is $3:$1.
The other $123 went towards buying the hammers and wrenches that they claim to spend $500 for - which they don't - those $500 aren't spent on the hammers and wrenches - it is actually used towards funding the stuff that they are trying to keep secret in the first place.
It shouldn't be much of a secret though that the secret is this crazy scheme of keeping secrets.
Got it?
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.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
If you ever work with classified data you'll realize it's almost impossible to get something declassified, since nobody wants to be the one who releases data that turns out to help an enemy launch the next Pearl Harbor or 9/11 attack. When you're a civil servant, the key to advancing is to not do anything that hurts your career, as opposed to businessmen (and to some extent, military) who advance their careers by doing something.
Also, not classifying sensitive data is a career-ending mistake, while over-classifying unimportant data is, well, nothing that will ever get you into trouble. Who's gonna know? So when in doubt you always err on the side of extra security.
Sometime in the '80s they made a change to the rules where if you classified something you had to put a date upon which the item becomes declassified automatically. Unfortunately, there's warehouses full of classified data dating back to the second world war (think Raiders of the Lost Ark here) that nobody has the time to look at, so it will never be declassified.
I suspect most of the old stuff will eventually be destroyed for lack of money, which is a shame from the historical perspective.
Clearly one can classify almost everything, but this will have major economic costs eventually. If your society competes with an open society which does not pay secrecy costs, execpt on a few things it does not want you to know about, can your society survive?
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
"In the pdf is a graph of year vs. number of declassified and classified pages. The Clinton years are the only years since 1980 where more pages were declassified than new pages classified."
I think there's a strong correlation to the end of the cold war and the lack of understanding of the magnitude of terrorist threats with the trend you've noticed.
Vote for Pedro
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.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Is Sweden still as open as it was in the 80's?
Some years ago, I read (in official info, received from the Swedish Institute) that
almost EVERYTHING produced by a Swedish gov't dep't, authority, etc. is freely
available for public access.
http://www.si.se/templates/StartPage.aspx?id=3
If that link has died/changed, pick your language at the top of the site at:
http://www.si.se/
There used to be an SI Fact Sheet (or 3) on all of this, but I couldn't find it
after 8 minutes at SI's web site...
(Perhaps Sep 11th has changed Sweden's openness? 'hope not...)
Surprisingly enough, openness applied even to such sacred cows (in other lands)
as [most of] the Prime Minister's mail & [most] individual's tax records (useful,
after all, to family-tree researchers).
While living/working in the Kingdom of Sweden over 5 chilly "winters," I tested the latter
claim... walking into the local tax office (Lokallaskattemindigheten, from memory...)
and - in English - asked to use the Office's "public computer terminal" - still speaking
English.
In about 5 minutes, whoever was using a computer terminal finished and I was escorted
inside, to a place with 2 or 3 computer terminals. A "Public (ie, limited / read-only)
Access" card was sweeped-in, for my terminal, and I was given practically unlimited access
(in time spent at the computer terminal).
Of course, I had to know enough Swedish to be able to understand the prompts & commands
needed to get to some sample data records, by my own & some few friends' and colleagues'
data.
I understand that only the names of children born out of wedlock would have been hidden
from me; also, data may be hidden at certain points in the processing cycle (eg, before
it is verified as accurate?)
The only cost became payable only if I had wanted to print out some of the date I found
(rather than copy into my notes, by hand).
(I wonder if - today - one could use digital cameras to photograph data while displayed
on screens, or - better - whether USB-disks can be used to gether much more information
in a more convenient & useful manner...? Does anyone know?)
The openness was said to go far beyond the example mentioned above...
Any publicly-funded report was to be freely available - on request - at various depart-
mental libraries.
Even corporate libraries could be pursuaded to loan some of their materials (via Inter-
Library Loan arrangements) to individual borrowers, in the community.
The idea was, I understand, that an informed public was a basic tenet of [Social] Democracy.
I didn't happen to stumble on any reports on the costs of supplying such information, or
of not providing it.
Has anyone got up-to-date info on how it is in Sweden today?
( cf: http://www.sweden.se/ for gen'l info )
"since nobody wants to be the one who releases data that turns out to help an enemy launch the next Pearl Harbor or 9/11 attack"
I don't think any leaked classified data made any contribution to Pearl Harbor or 9/11 though it is clever on your part to invoke those two traumas to win points for your argument.
In fact much of the "suprise" part of the "suprise attack" on Pearl Harbor was due to the high classification of Japanese communication intercepts which led to the many signals the Japanese were preparing an attack from being acted on.
There were certainly some strong indicators an attack at Pearl Harbor was imminent. It has created the long running conspiracy theory that FDR actually knew it was coming and wanted a devastating "sneak attack" so he could get a nation that was isolationist and pacifist mobilized for war. Weather it was FDR's intention or not it did work. Pearl Harbor propelled the U.S. into World War II with an enthusiasm that wouldn't have been there otherwise.
9/11 is not quite as clear cut, but it is clear a "classified" briefing in W.'s daily intelligence brief spelled out the danger of Al Qaeda launching an attack on the U.S. using airplanes while W. was on vacation in August and the attack came in September. All indications are the brief went unheeded and no action was taken. Little George apparently didn't for example tell the FBI to look in to this, because if they had they might have "connected the dots" that suspicious Arab men were training in the U.S. to fly airliners, a fact they knew but which had been sat on if not classified.
It is unavoidable that you do have to classify a lot of information in a world where you have enemies, especially ones intent on spying on you like the U.S.S.R, Russia, China and Israel.
But, a case can be made that classification causes as much harm as good since it destroys effective communication, WITHIN the government not just between the government and its people especially when it tilts of of control and delves in to excess.
Unfortunately classification is CONSTANTLY abused by people in government to conceal their failures and the failure of the government to do its job, and worse to hide some of its malevolent schemes. It's also integral in a government's creation of a false picture of the world in the minds of the population in order to manipulate them. Classification and propaganda go hand in hand.
A great example of out of control classification is the huge section of the congressional report on 9/11 in which the role of the Saudi people and government in 9/11 was spelled out in excruciating and embarrassing detail. Its hard to say why it was classified, most of the Congressman don't want it classifed. One guess is the Bush administration didn't want to embarrass their close personal friends in the House of Saud. The other is the Bush administration was engaged in weaving a propaganda web intent on connecting Iraq to 9/11 as an excuse for regime change and war, and 100 pages spelling out the Saudi's were in fact vastly more involved than Iraq would have been counterproductive to that propaganda effort.
A mostly forgotten case of classified data being released which exposed government malevolence and incompetence is the Pentagon Papers. Depending on your viewpoint this giant leak either exposed the bankruptcy of the American involvement in Vietnam and ended a misguidede war there, or their leak help collapse American resolve and contributed to its defeat there. Whichever it was, it was a high beam of truth about the reality of the situation there that classification would have suppressed were it not for Daniel Elsberg and his conscience.
@de_machina
Both sides have valid points, but now consider this: Our enemies get a hold of just exactly how that body armor is flawed and use that against our men and women deployed.
.pdf where the body armor was mentioned, it says that after the results were attained through the FOIA and was going to be released in newspapers, the government reversed the decision and recalled the faulty body armor.
They already have been using this flaw against us simply by shooting and killing our soldiers! The flaw exists regardless of whether or not it is publicized. Do you think the bullets have to know that the armor failed ballistic tests before they can penetrate it?
The only reason to keep that information secret is to avoid political embarassment at the expense of soldiers' safety.
In the
Thus freeing the information actually resulted in our soldiers being safer because they are no longer saddled with equipment that won't protect them!
This is completely typical of the way this war has been fought. Decisions that endanger our soldiers are made, and either concealed or backed up with bullshit. Guess what? Reality doesn't care what story you tell to cover your bad decision; your soldiers still die. But the cover up is never about making our soldiers safer anyway. It's about politics. Our war is being run by politics, and politics is the opposite of reality. War is not.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
:P
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...
Whee signature.