ALL THAT SECRECY IS EXPENSIVE

The 9/​11 Commission, lead­ers in Congress — even the government’s top secret-​​keeper — all agree that Washington’s pen­chant for keep­ing infor­ma­tion under wraps has grown out of con­trol. Now, a coali­tion of watch­dog and civil lib­er­ties groups has doc­u­mented just how much it’s cost­ing to keep all those records away from the pub­lic eye.
During the 2003 fis­cal year, the fed­eral gov­ern­ment spent more than $6.5 bil­lion secur­ing clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion, accord­ing to a new “Secrecy Report Card” from OpenTheGovernment​.org. That’s an increase of more than $800 mil­lion from the pre­vi­ous year, accord­ing to the group, and a nearly $2 bil­lion jump since 2001. But it’s only a best guess, really; the report card’s account­ing doesn’t include a penny from the Central Intelligence Agency, which keeps even its over­all bud­get clas­si­fied.
“I’ve read sup­pos­edly clas­si­fied doc­u­ments where page after page after page didn’t tell me any­thing I didn’t already know,” Rep. Christopher Shays, who chairs the House Committee on Government Reform’s national secu­rity panel, tells Defense Tech. When asked what per­cent­age of gov­ern­ment records were being wrongly kept from the pub­lic, Shays replied, “I tend to think 90 per­cent is not an exag­ger­a­tion.“
My Wired News arti­cle has details.
THERE’S MORE: “Tony Tether, direc­tor of DARPA, is one of the big­ger [secrecy] offend­ers. Since he became direc­tor, more of what DARPA does has become clas­si­fied, and at a higher level. In some cases, the clas­si­fi­ca­tion level of pro­grams has gone up at the same rate or faster than those per­form­ing the work can upgrade their clear­ances,” says one Defense Tech pal.
“A sig­nif­i­cant and grow­ing ele­ment of DARPA’s work in infor­ma­tion assur­ance is clas­si­fied, and can­not be dis­cussed in this forum. The future thrust is for more of these efforts to become clas­si­fied. Why? Because of our increas­ing depen­dence on net­works, their vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties and tech­niques for pro­tect­ing them become more and more sen­si­tive. Accordingly, our efforts have become clas­si­fied,” Tether told the House Science Committee a few months back.
“Classifying vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties of mil­i­tary sys­tems, crit­i­cal vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties with no known fixes, or beyond state-​​of-​​the-​​art attacks can make some sense,” our pal con­tin­ues. “But clas­si­fy­ing tech­niques for pro­tect­ing net­works just guar­an­tees that the tech­niques will only be avail­able to the mil­i­tary, and will not be avail­able to pro­tect crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture and com­mer­cial net­works. Defensive com­puter secu­rity at DARPA has tra­di­tion­ally been unclas­si­fied, but that has changed since Tether has been around.”

August 27th, 2004 | Cloak and Dagger | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.