All That Secrecy Is Expensive

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All That Secrecy Is Expensive

By Noah Shachtman

Wired News

8-28-4

 

 

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. "

 

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