on secrets...

[acroyear]

US, Canada are close allies. That's classified? - Yahoo! News:

Sometimes, classified documents contained little more than summaries of press reports. Political banter was treated as confidential government intelligence. Information that's available to anyone with an Internet connection was ordered held under wraps for years.

Days after President Barack Obama's inauguration, the White House received a classified message from the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa. It was a primer for the president's upcoming trip to Canada and it included this sensitive bit of information, marked confidential:

"No matter which political party forms the Canadian government during your Administration, Canada will remain one of our staunchest and most like-minded of allies, our largest trading and energy partner, and our most reliable neighbor and friend."

The document could not be made public until 2019, for national security reasons.

Such non-secrets have a cost. The more stuff the government classifies, the more money it takes to keep it all concealed. The government spent at least $9 billion keeping classified information under wraps last year, and that doesn't include the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and others that keep their spending on classified information classified.

Most Americans can do little but take it on faith that those secrets are actually worth keeping. And advocates for open government say that when too much is classified, it makes it harder for the government to cry foul when legitimate secrets are leaked.

"The problem is, we've got a system that keeps way too much that is secret, and as a result we can't protect the real secrets nearly as well," said Thomas Blanton, the director of the National Security Archives, a private research institute at George Washington University. "And the stuff we really need to know is buried under a mass of trivia."

Comments

[thelongshot.livejournal.com]

I don't know if the "cost", so to speak, is increased much by this. Fact is, the systems exist, no matter how much they actually get used. Course, some of the cost may come on the back end when all of this stuff needs to be declassified.

That being said, I can see reasons why this happens. Fact is, many people often don't know what should and should not be classified, and therefore classify everything "just to be safe". It wouldn't surprise me if this was instituted as policy in some agencies and people keep doing it because it was always done that way.

Fortunately, I haven't run across that behavior often in my experience.

[blueeowyn.livejournal.com]

Part of the cost is if there is a FOIA request, someone has to go through the document, copy it, redact the copy, copy the redacted copy, etc.. so that the stuff that MUST remain secret/classified does so. This has a real cost and while agencies are allowed to bill a 'reasonable' cost for such things it is difficult to get that done esp. if the request is likely to be copied by multiple users.

[thelongshot.livejournal.com]

I did imply that above.

It is the reason why I have a preference to keep things in an unclass environment as much as possible, because it is a PITA to get things declassified if you need it in an unclass environment. For example, on the original contract I was on, we developed everything in unclass environments, and only brought it into the SCIF when we needed to test with live data. Course, on the follow-on contract (with a different company), they bought everything into the SCIF. Then there was the time I had to retype the code for a piece of software because they needed it on the unclass side...

[thatliardiego.livejournal.com]

Considering how many man-hours goes into putting together country team reports, it's probably easier to let the simplistic dreck like that stay in, than having people devoted to editing it out.

I speak from experience, both as someone who grew up in the US embassy environment, and someone who used to have a security clearance and had to go visit our lovely neighbors to the south for high-level contact group meetings on sensitive subjects.