Driven in part by fears of terrorism, government secrecy in the United States has reached a historic high by several measures. Federal departments now classify documents at the rate of 125 a minute as they create new categories of semisecrets bearing vague labels like "sensitive security information."
A 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 Meanwhile, the declassification process, which made millions of historical documents available annually in the 1990s, has slowed to a relative crawl, from a high of 204 million pages in 1997 to just 28 million pages last year.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.
Official secrecy reaches historic high in the U.S. - Americas - International Herald Tribune
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