The official budget for protecting America’s secrets is up to $11.37 billion, double the 2002 figure. That doesn’t include the black budgets of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the Office of of the Director of National Intelligence, which are themselves secret. Secrecy is a runaway train.
The official figure for documents classified by the US government last year is””hold your hats on this one””92,064,862. And as WikiLeaks managed to release hundreds of thousands of them online a couple of years ago, that’s meant a bonanza of even more money for yet more rigorous protection.
You have to feel at least some dollop of pity for protection bureaucrats like Fitzgerald. While back in 1995 the US government classified a mere 5,685,462 documents””in those days, we were practically a secret-less nation””today, of those 92 million sequestered documents, 26,058,678 were given a ”œtop secret” classification. There are today almost five times as many ”œtop secret” documents as total classified documents back then.
…So, today, the ”œpeople’s” government (your government) produces 92 million documents that no one except the nearly one million people with some kind of security clearance, including hundreds of thousands of private contractors, have access to. Don’t think of this as ”œoverclassification,” which is a problem. Think of it as a way of life, and one that has ever less to do with you.
Now, honestly, don’t you feel that urge welling up? Go ahead. Don’t hold back: That makes no sense!
“My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.” President Barack Obama
the more they have to continue lying to us, to maintain the illusion of legitimacy.
The result is an asymptotic curve approaching Peak Bullshit. It won’t be long now.
Yes, there’s a large and growing pile of stuff that’s classified – and over-classification is a massive problem, has been for as long as I’ve been looking at the classified world (about 30 years). That said, the lack of caveats in these figures as presented, the lack of important context presented, and the snipe hunt it is likely to lead readers who don’t know the background are frankly disturbing.
One really key thing that goes unmentioned here are the very, very different trends in original and derivative classification activity. Original classification (classification of the primary bits of information – i.e., the secret stuff we know) has decreased significantly since the highpoint in the late 80′s and early 90′s – derivative classification (classification of documents and work products that draw on that primary information – i.e., the documents that we produce mentioning the secret stuff we know) has increased markedly, particularly since 2008 when they apparently directed folks to start to account for the massive amount of stuff that’s published electronically inside the USG.
It sounds absolutely incredible that derivative classification (the documents drawing on secret stuff) has increased 16-fold between 1996 and 2011 (i.e., 1,600%), but when one looks at primary classification, that’s only gone up by 20%. What’s really increased here is the ratio between derivative and primary classification – in 1996 the ratio between the two was 54:1 – now it’s an incredible 725:1. That increase is primarily an explosion of information product drawing on classified information, not a massive increase of classified information itself. If one wants to be really concerned about something, be concerned about how it is that anyone inside the Intelligence Community can find the information that they need to produce their estimates and analyses, given the blizzard of interim product that the system appears to spew.
Similarly, on the declassification side, the arbitrary end-points chosen (1996 to 2011) are highly problematic. It goes unmentioned that the Clinton administration made sweeping changes in declassification, resulting in a massive increase in declassification activity that can clearly be seen in the data for the back half of the 90′s. When one instead uses the period prior to this 1995 phase shift as the basis for comparison, a rather different picture emerges. Instead of 2011′s 26.7 pages of declassified material comparing quite poorly to 1996′s 196 million pages, it actually compares quite well to the annual average of 12.6 million pages recorded between 1980 and 1994.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs
is due to the increase in ‘intelligence’ entities post 9/11 and huge increase of number of people holding clearances (and their associated busywork).
…a dream that was dreamed in the heart, and that only the heart could hold.
- Pádraig Pearse
…of the increase in head count. I’m sure the head count increase plays a very non-trivial role, but they also seem to be doing different things. My gut sense is that there’s more effort devoted towards pushing classified information out in ways that they didn’t previously (e.g., think of all of the stuff that they push out to the Homeland Security people). Additionally, the electronic publication formats just have to be playing a role in the increase – I don’t even want to think about what a nightmare accounting for things like wikis (which have been increasingly cropping up in discussions, particularly of crisis management) must be.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs