By Cliff Montgomery- July 10th, 2009
America’s post-9/11 security classification system appears to cost taxpayers around $10 billion every year,states a recent government study.
Data classification activities in government and industry totaled $9.85 billion in 2008, a slight decrease from acost of $9.9 billion for 2007, reported Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) Director William Bosanko ina May report to the president.
But this study is important not just for the facts its relates, but also for those it doesn’t. For all its data, thereport also provides U.S. citizens with a quiet reminder of the iron curtain of secrecy which now suppressespreviously available information on their government’s activities.
A people can only be in charge of their government–and hence can only be free–if they know what thatgovernment is doing with their money, and what the state doing in the people’s name.
Democracy is nothing more than accountability for those who represent us. But accountability is only possiblewith a public knowledge of state affairs.
Hence in public matters, knowledge is freedom itself–and ignorance is slavery.
But that hasn’t kept those in U.S. intelligence from working to keep you ignorant.
For instance, basic classification expenditures were first revealed in April, 1994, without damaging U.S.security–even as the ever-secretive CIA claimed that its classification costs must remain secret.
Lawmakers like then-Senator Daniel Moynihan (D-NY) knew the CIA’s claim to be empty at best, especiallysince the revealed cost information was a simple series of rough estimates, and not detailed expenditures.
Sen. Moynihan later reminded the classifiers of a clear truth:
“Understanding the financial costs associated with keeping information secret is essential to any effort tobegin scaling back the scope of secrecy and making protection more efficient,” boldly declared the 1997Moynihan Commission Report. Such efforts may only succeed when basic classification estimates are madepublic knowledge.
As if to verify the truth of the Moynihan Commission’s finding to the CIA, for years after the Moynihan study thebasic classification costs of every other U.S. intelligence agency were openly reported in the annual ISOOreports to the president, without a hint of danger to the country.
But after 2005, the CIA’s disproven rationale for undue secrecy began to be adopted by other intelligenceagencies, making it harder for Americans to know just what our representatives are doing in our name.
In the ISOO report released this May, Bosanko noted that “the cost estimates from the Central IntelligenceAgency, the Defense lntelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the NationalGeospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the National Security Agency, arecompiled in a classified addendum to this report that is being transmitted separately [emphasis added].”
This means that the expenditure estimates for those major intelligence agencies now are being kept from theAmerican people, even though nearly all of these agencies previously released their annual cost estimates withno danger to national security.
If the most recent estimates are not being classified for legitimate national security concerns–and previouslydisclosed cost estimates make it clear they are not–then they are being kept from the eyes of the Americanpeople out of sheer whim. And that is a power public officials neither need nor deserve.
