How big is the trove of US data that we’re not supposed to see? Sorry, that’s classified. But we can produce an educated guess using numbers from the US Information Security Oversight Office.
Last year, the US government made 183,244 original classification decisions, according to the ISOO annual report. That doesn’t sound like a lot, considering what WikiLeaks has. But here’s the kicker – the government also classifies stuff that refers to or discusses or uses parts of original classified information. They call this “derivative classification.” How many derivative classification actions did the United States take in 2009? Oh, only about 55 million.
Plus, each classification action or decision typically involves about 10 pages of stuff, according to experts. Do the math – the US is producing some 560 million pages of classified information a year.
By way of comparison, the Library of Congress and other big document depositories such as Harvard’s library system each add about 60 million pages a year to their holdings.
And those 560 million pages of new secrets represent the work of only 12 months. Peter Galison, a Harvard professor of the history of science and physics, has calculated that since the late 1970s the US may have produced a trillion pages of classified info. That’s an amount of paper equal to the entire holdings of the Library of Congress,
The legendary physicist, Robert J. Oppenheimer, put the matter succinctly. “There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry,” wrote the man who led the Manhattan Project. “There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.”
Oppenheimer, a man of conscience and intellect who straddled the worlds of free inquiry and national security, was in a good position to understand the deep meaning of his words.
= new reply since forum marked as read
