One of the basic underlying principles of our Declaration of Indipendence is that the government derives its powers from an informed American Public.
My how times have changed.
For the year 2004 what our report highlighted was that there was an excess of 15 and a half million classification decisions where someone in the government created an information product and decided that it was appropriate to affix classification markings to it.
-William Leonard, National Archives
More below the fold:
That's more than double the amount of classified documents compared to 2001. What is important to note here is not just that the American public is kept in the dark. To some extent I completely respect the need to keep
some policy and military secrets quiet. What is alarming is that these classified documents are kept
from our elected officials. Think about that. The people we elected to run our country have to basse their desicions on guesswork because the Executive branch won't tell them what's what.
And the price for us as American Citizens is not just ignorance. The price for classifying documents in 2004 alone was 7.2 billion dollars.
"The way the systems work, is more energy goes into protecting the information from other officials, from people that have control of taxpayer dollars... than actually goes into protecting it from our enemies"
-Scott Armstrong, Exec. Dir. Information Trust
At least 50 new categories of classification have been designated since 9/11. This, after the 9/11 commission concluded that one of the main failures on a federal level was overclassification of documents, and the ensuing lack of communication between departments.
What the hell are we doing? Overclassification not only leads to beaurocratic failures, but injures local and state officials abilities to respond to things such as natural disasters.
But what can we do?
UPDATE:
It was wisely pointed out to me that I did not include a source. It is NPR, and here's a link to the audio.