The United States government’s obsession with secrecy undermines the democratic principles it’s supposed to protect.
Excessive secrecy and overclassification has restricted our ability to understand the world around us, and our lack of knowledge is destroying our ability to make responsible decisions based on real facts.
Unwarranted secrecy is highly detrimental to a free society. For our democracy to work, we need to be properly informed. As Thomas Jefferson famously said, “An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will.”
Last year, a government report concluded that a record number of documents were classified in 2010. The number of people with security clearances working for both the government and private contractors exceeded 4.2 million, more than the population of Los Angeles.
Our country’s security infrastructure is dangerously bloated, inefficient and incredibly wasteful, according to many current and former intelligence agency insiders.
A recent book on the subject, Top Secret America, by Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin, outlines some of the most egregious examples.
The so-called “black budget” runs into the trillions of dollars and is totally classified, therefore impossible to track.
Disclosure of any aspect of its funding is a federal crime.
The Library of Congress adds around 60 million documents to its holdings each year — a huge amount of information by any standard. The U.S. government, however, classifies 10 times that amount every year: an estimated 560 million pages of documents.
For many scholars engaged in historical, scientific or political work, the harsh reality is that most of the government’s activities are completely off-limits.
This huge volume of classified material means that the actions of our government are impossible to verify, especially now that anonymous whistleblower organizations like WikiLeaks are being successfully targeted as cyber-terrorists.
Despite the wonders of modern technology and the Internet, our world is not one where free inquiry is necessarily encouraged.
It’s a world that is manipulated on a daily basis by global power interests. It’s a place where much of what really goes on is, apparently, none of our business.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
More “highlights” from the Oversight Office Report include:
• The National Archive announced it was working on declassifying a backlog of nearly 400 million pages of material that “should have been declassified a long time ago.”
• The CIA refused to release even a single passage from its study on global warming, claiming it would damage national security.
• The Department of Homeland Security has become so bloated with secrecy that even its budget, including how many employees and contractors it has, is classified — yet their intelligence reports “produce almost nothing you can’t find on Google,” according to a former Homeland Security undersecretary.
• The Justice Department refused to release its interpretation of section 215 of the Patriot Act, which is supposedly a public law.
Barack Obama ran for president on a platform of transparency. He was highly critical of the Bush administration’s lack of accountability, yet his administration has been far more secretive and hostile toward whistleblowers than Bush.
He has cracked down on public disclosure more than any president in history, and he’s nearly doubled the number of indictments against whistleblowers, more than all previous administrations combined.
Ironically, in March of 2011, Obama received an award for government transparency, presented to him at a secret, unannounced ceremony in the Oval Office.
A group of “transparency advocates” bestowed the award upon the president behind closed doors. The press wasn’t invited.
The federal government has hidden its crimes behind the veil of national security for too long. It increasingly resorts to the use of legal exemptions in order to withhold information that should have been made public long ago.
As President Kennedy himself said in an address to newspaper publishers on April 27, 1961: “The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society, and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.”
What’s particularly infuriating is that researchers and scientists doing classified work enable such secrecy to continue and thrive. This hypocrisy belies their stated mission, at least to proponents of a free society.
All scientific and academic inquiry is predicated on the ability to work from open and fully accessible sources. Valid scientific research must be available for examination and duplication by outsiders.
There’s a word for this: falsifiability. It’s a fundamental concept in research. If you lack the capability to “falsify” a theory — that is, to prove it wrong — then it isn’t valid. Your theory may be true, but scientifically speaking, it’s not valid.
According to former intelligence insiders, the highly compartmentalized black budget “special access” programs have access to technology which is 50, a 100, or even a 1000 years ahead of mainstream science.
The deep black world clearly has secrecy and vast resources at its disposal, but what kind of astonishing breakthroughs might they be sitting on? The government has the right to classify and lay claim to any technology it deems vital to national security.
The U.S. Patent Office is a major gatekeeper preventing the development of any commercially available technology which could benefit humanity but shrink profits for the global elite.
Cold fusion, anti-gravity, free energy, cures for every disease — these incredible breakthroughs could seriously destabilize the world’s economy and thus be considered a threat to the global power structure.
Breakthroughs of this magnitude would revolutionize our world so completely it might become virtually unrecognizable. I’m convinced that highly advanced concepts in physics, anti-gravity propulsion and life-extending biotechnology are being blocked by vested interests from reaching the outside world.
Important discoveries and inventions have been kept secret while study on them has continued unabated in highly secure research facilities like Sandia Labs and Los Alamos.
The authors of Top Secret America caution us, “The more a nation comes to rely on secrecy to maintain its form of government and its relations with other countries, the more vulnerable it is to political turmoil once those secrets are revealed.” A dire warning, indeed.
Think Arab Spring.
