Increase in the Number of Documents Classified by the Government
WASHINGTON, July 1 – Driven in part by fears of terrorism, government secrecy has reached a historic high by several measures, with federal departments classifying documents at the rate of 125 a minute as they create new categories of semi-secrets bearing vague labels like “sensitive security information.”
Doug Mills/The New York Times
Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, is among those calling for more openness.
Keeping SecretsA record 15.6 million documents were classified last year, nearly double the number in 2001, according to the federal Information Security Oversight Office. Meanwhile, the declassification process, which made millions of historical documents available annually in the 1990’s, has slowed to a relative crawl, from a high of 204 million pages in 1997 to just 28 million pages last year.
The increasing secrecy – and its rising cost to taxpayers, estimated by the office at $7.2 billion last year – is drawing protests from a growing array of politicians and activists, including Republican members of Congress, leaders of the independent commission that studied the Sept. 11 attacks and even the top federal official who oversees classification.
What more are they hiding?
