Government Secrecy

Ashley Simons

"Secrecy and a free, democratic government don't mix," President Harry Truman once said. Harry Truman understood the importance of an open government in a free society. Unfortunately, George W. Bush has a different outlook. From the first days of his administration, President Bush has taken steps to tighten the government's hold on information and limit public scrutiny of its activities. Expansive assertions of executive privilege, restrictive views of the Freedom of Information Act, increasing use of national security classification, stonewalling in response to congressional request for information - all these were evident even before the September 11 attacks (At Issue: Has the Bush administration misused government secrecy?). Since then the clamps on information have only tightened. The purpose of this paper is to examine some methods used by the government and to provide some explanations why the government is keeping the American public uninformed.

In a democracy, representatives of the citizenry may momentarily cloak their decision-making and their policies in secrecy for the good of the nation, to protect it from the enemies and to assure its survival. However, those representatives must remember that the secrecy they impose is only momentary and that the shrouded decisions and policies they make, once made known to the citizenry, must be acceptable to them. The citizenry, in turn, accept such secrecy only in limited instances and on a momentary basis in order to have the confidence that their representatives are making decisions and policies acceptable to them. A government failing to honor these arrangements may be one not worth the cost of preservation.

The federal government has a long history of making information secret. The marking of documents to indicate their protected status, confidential or secret, began as an informal practice in the early days of the federal government. It was an exercise carried over from colonial and confederation experience: civilian officials and military leaders unilaterally determined if documents merited restrictions (Relyea 3). The 'secret' designation referred to information in which its disclosure might endanger the national security, or cause serious injury to the interests of the nation or be of great advantage to a foreign nation. Similarly, 'confidential' could be applied to material of such a nature that is disclosure, although not endangering the national security, might be harmful to the interests or prestige of the Nation. The term 'restricted' is used in instances where information is for official use only and should be denied access to the general public.

According to an analysis released in August, 2005, by OpenTheGovernment.org, more and more government information is becoming less and less publicly available. OpenTheGovernment.org is an unprecedented coalition of journalists, consumer and government groups, environmentalists, labor and others united out of a concern for what U.S. News and World Report called a "shroud of secrecy" descending over our local, state and federal governments (Gordon 35). This organization focuses on making the federal government a more open place to make us safer and strengthen the public trust in the government. In its Secrecy Report Card, OpenTheGovernment found that the government spent $7.2 billion last year creating 15.6 million new classified documents and securing accumulated secrets - more than it has for the past decade (1).

The increasing secrecy is expensive to maintain. The U.S. government currently classifies documents at the rate of 125 a minute, using vague labels such as "sensitive security information," according to The New York Times (Government Secrecy Reaches Historic Levels). For every new classified document created, the federal government spent $459 securing that document (Government Secrecy Reaches Historic Levels). With 15.6 million new documents stamped secret in 2004, the federal government created 81 percent more secrets than it did in the year prior to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 (Kennedy).

The acceleration of secrecy began after the 2001 attacks, according to the Times, as officials sought to restrict access to information that Al Qaeda might use to take advantage of the United States' vulnerabilities (Jenkins 550). Such worries have not faded but more politicians and advocacy groups across the political spectrum say there is too much secrecy. While some increase in classification is to be expected in wartime, this dramatic rise runs counter to recommendations by the 9/11 commission who recommend reforms to reduce unnecessary secrets. Thomas H. Kean, Chairman of the 9/11 commission and a former Republican governor of New Jersey, told the Times, "We're better off with openness. The best ally we have in protecting ourselves against terrorism is an informed public" (Jenkins 550)

According to Jenkins in the Federal Times, roughly 4,000 federal employees are invested with the authority to classify information, and the tendency is to err toward more rather than less classification (551). This explains why last year more than 15 million new classified documents were generated; nearly double the number in 2001.

Where the Bush administration slows down is the process of declassification. In 1997, the federal government declassified a record 204 million pages. Last year, they could only manage 28 million pages (Jenkins 551). The Times cited examples of unnecessary classification, including: