on secrets...
Dec. 9th, 2010 09:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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."