Public Secrecy -- the Impact on Knowledge Systems

Read "America's Secret Obsession" by Ted Gup in the Outlook section of the Washington Post, June 10, 2007.

"If you guard your toothbrushes and diamonds with equal zeal,
you'll probably lose fewer toothbrushes and more diamonds."
McGeorge Bundy

Gup writes:

In 1995, according to the Information Security Oversight Office, the stamp of classification -- "confidential," "secret," "top secret," etc. -- was wielded about 3.6 million times, mostly to veil existing secrets in new documents. Ten years later, it was used a staggering 14.2 million times (though some of the bump-up was the result of increased use of the Internet for government communications). That works out to 1,600 classification decisions every hour, night and day, all year long. (And not one of those secrets is believed to reveal where Osama bin Laden is.)

Managing this behemoth has required a vast expansion in the ranks of those cleared to deal in secrets. By 2004, the line of 340,000 people waiting to receive a security clearance would have stretched 100 miles -- from Washington to Richmond. Many must still wait a year or more. And the cost of securing those secrets -- as much as $7.7 billion in safes, background checks, training and information security -- is about equal to the entire budget for the Environmental Protection Agency.

Gup does not mention that declassifying information that has been classified in the past is a mind-deadening job, with few incentives for either the agencies nor the individuals involved.

The basic issue that Gup addresses is the impact on democracy when bureaucrats, politicians and corporate executives can withhold information from the public. He correctly states that society needs to have some privacy not only for individuals, but also for functionaries within our institutions, but that it is important that we as citizens assure that the needs for privacy are balanced by the needs for public disclosure and openness.

The problem is in some ways parallel with the need to balance the use of intellectual property right protection to stimulate creativity and the flow of ideas with the use of the commons also to stimulate creativity and the flow of ideas.

The Information Revolution is changing everything, including the rates of change needed and occuring in institutions involved in achieving these balances.