The OpenTheGovernment.org report on US government secrecy has just been published, and boy are its conclusions harsh: the US government is $6.5 billion/year keeping stuff secret (not counting the CIA budget, which is another secret), 90% of those documents don't contain anything particularily secret, and the result is that government agenciies and the public have their effective operations hamstrung because critical parts of the information needed to get by have been classified.
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.
