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In reply to the discussion: President Obama Indicts Sixth Whistleblower Under the Espionage Act [View all]Better Believe It
(18,630 posts)Boy, that's a whole lot of government documents classified in order to protect us from terrorists, subversives, pinkos and other un-American types. 54 million in just one year!
Do you think the "classification rubber stamp" is being abused just a wee bit in order to protect government functionaries and cover up possible misdeeds?
Noooooo. That would never happen!
From the ACLU Memo:
" The National Archives and Records Administrations Information Security Oversight Office
(ISOO) released its annual report on the governments security classification programs today,
revealing useful statistics about how much information the government hid from public view for
national security reasons in 2009.1 The American Civil Liberties Union offers this memo to
highlight the importance of this new data and to call for more significant reform of a bloated
secrecy regime that kills public accountability and cripples our constitutional system of checks
and balances.
Typically ISOOs annual reports are useful in determining whether the government is classifying
more or less information than in previous years. For 2009, however, ISOO changed the way it
counts classified electronic records making comparisons to previous years impossible but
providing a clearer picture of the amount of classified information the government actually
produces. The result is startling. Under the new counting system, ISOO determined the
government made over 54 million classification decisions in 2009, which is well more than
double the previous record 23 million decisions ISOO reported for 2008.
Read the full ACLU Memo at:
http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/Inerested_Persons_Memo_re_ISOO_Report_for_FY_2009_and_Derivative_Classification.pdf