- The 9/11 Commission, leaders in Congress -- even the
government's top secret-keeper -- all agree that Washington's penchant
for keeping information under wraps has grown out of control. Now, a coalition
of watchdog groups has documented just how much it's costing to keep all
those records away from the public eye.
-
- During the 2003 fiscal year, the federal government spent
more than $6.5 billion securing classified information, according to a
new "Secrecy Report Card" from OpenTheGovernment.org, a coalition
of government watchdog and civil liberties groups. That's an increase of
more than $800 million from the previous year, according to the group,
and a nearly $2 billion jump since 2001. But it's only a best guess, really;
the report card's accounting doesn't include a penny from the Central Intelligence
Agency, which keeps even its overall budget classified.
-
- Some of the rise is understandable, with the government's
increased focus on security since 9/11. But even some of Washington's leading
authorities on government secrecy were caught off-guard by just how fast
classification is increasing -- and just how much money it's taking to
keep all that information locked away.
-
- "I thought the secrecy system would be in the $100
million range. Being in the billion-dollar range -- that's astonishing,"
said Steven Aftergood, with the Federation of American Scientists. The
group is one of more than 30 organizations that belong to OpenTheGovernment.org.
"This documents in an empirical way what many people have been feeling
intuitively: that the secrecy system is vast and growing."
-
- The report, which covered government activities from
fiscal years 1995 to 2003, marked OpenTheGovernment's first effort to put
a single dollar amount on spending for classification efforts. To compile
its numbers, the group relied mostly on publicly available information
from government agencies, including the Department of Justice and the Information
Security Oversight Office.
-
- The big problem with having too many secrets isn't that
it's a waste of money; it's that it jeopardizes security, according to
William Leonard. He's the director of the ISOO, and, essentially, the man
in charge of the government's classification policies.
-
- By keeping knowledgeable parties from sharing what they
know, "secrecy guarantees a less-than-optimal outcome," Leonard
told Wired News. "In analyzing intelligence, in developing military
plans, there's a price that gets paid."
-
- That's a view echoed by both the 9/11 Commission, in
its final report (PDF), and several of the Defense Department's top current
and former spies.
-
- However, Leonard disputed some of the figures in the
report card, which relied largely on his office for its data. For example,
OpenTheGoverment claimed that "14 million new documents (were) stamped
secret in fiscal year 2003." That's not quite right, Leonard said.
That figure represents all of the decisions to keep information secret.
Those include decisions on an original record -- a field report from Iraq,
say -- as well as on a secondary document -- like a summary of Army intelligence
-- that relies on that primary source.
-
- But despite the discrepancy, Leonard said he agrees with
the report card's "bottom-line conclusion, that secrecy is excessive,
and, yeah, it's expensive." Original classification decisions were
up about 8 percent last year, to 243,000, he noted.
-
- That's far, far too many, according to Rep. Christopher
Shays, who chairs the national security panel of the House of Representatives'
Committee on Government Reform.
-
- "I've read supposedly classified documents where
page after page after page didn't tell me anything I didn't already know,"
he said in a telephone interview. When asked what percentage of government
records were being wrongly kept from the public, Shays replied, "I
tend to think 90 percent is not an exaggeration."
-
- Compounding the problems is the fact that the government
can't seem to let go of secrets that just aren't valuable any more. It
took the CIA 20 years to declassify the fact that Augusto Pinochet, Chile's
dictator, had a taste for distilled wine. Overall CIA budgets from decades
back are still kept under wraps. And the pace of declassification has slowed
since 9/11: 43 million pages in fiscal year 2003, as opposed to 100 million
in 2001, according to the ISOO. Not surprisingly, the amount of money spent
on releasing information has also slipped, from $231 million in 2001 to
$54 million last year.
-
- At the same time, the public thirst for government information
seems to have risen. More than 3.2 million requests for federal documents
were made under the Freedom of Information Act last year. That's about
1 million more than in 2001.
-
- The cost of keeping secrets, according to OpenTheGovernment
coordinator Rick Blum, comes largely from maintaining the patchwork of
databases and networks that hold the government's sensitive information.
Physical security of classified information has also been a major cost
-- and a major concern. The repeated misplacement of secret disks at Los
Alamos National Laboratory has shut down the nuclear weapons center for
the last six weeks. That means a big chunk of the lab's annual budget of
$2.2 billion has been devoted to the security lapses, so far. Those figures
weren't included in the OpenTheGovernment report card.
-
- Today, nearly 4,000 people have the power to classify
documents, Shays noted, including the members of the Agriculture and Health
and Human Services departments, as well as the Environmental Protection
Agency. He believes one way to trim the government's secrecy costs is to
re-examine why so many people have that power.
-
- "We're burying important documents with meaningless
ones," he said. "So we're having a hard time finding valuable
information."
-
- © Copyright 2004, Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
-
- http://wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,64731,00.html
|
