Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Little Secrets

Washington loves its little secrets. And some experts in the field of classified documents say that's what a lot of them are -- little secrets. Thomas S. Blanton is director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. He says there's a steep increase in the federal government "overclassifying" and "pseudo-classifying" information. He testified before Congress today with that message.

That may sound like it keeps information out of bad guys' hands -- but it also keeps it out of good guys' hands, too. And, as the 9/11 Commission Report showed, that makes it harder for the left hand to know what the right hand is doing when it comes to protecting the US.

In 2003, the last year for which he had numbers, Mr Blanton showed that the federal government classified more documents than at the height of the Cold War. There were 15.2 million documents classified in 2003. The most since 1980. (National Security Archives)

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