What Is Top Secret In Washington?

A Washington Riddle: What Is ‘Top Secret’? -- David Sanger, New York Times

WASHINGTON — LESS than 24 hours after Pfc. Bradley Manning was convicted last week of handing off 250,000 State Department cables and defense documents to WikiLeaks, The Guardian published on its Web site the latest classified material from the leaker of the moment, Edward J. Snowden. That installment included the National Security Agency’s playbook for XKeyscore, a powerful surveillance program enabling the agency’s analysts to monitor and trace Internet searches around the globe.

The cases have provided lots of cable-television drama, from Private Manning’s court-martial to Moscow’s provocative granting of temporary asylum to America’s best-known fugitive. But the deeper lessons lie in how the government is stumbling in its efforts to protect its secrets in the Internet age. Washington has still not heeded two decades of warnings that the best way to protect America’s biggest secrets is to have far fewer of them and to recognize that much of what is stamped “secret” today is widely available on the Internet.

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My Comment: Because of the internet and mass communications .... we are living in an age where keeping secrets is becoming next to impossible. And while governments are focused on keeping secrets .... it is clear that this is becoming next to impossible to enforce.