Are There Too Many Government Secrets?

Bloomberg editorial: Too Many Government Secrets Make the U.S. Unsafe

“There’s classified, and then there’s classified,” President Barack Obama said in a recent interview. Unfortunately, he’s right: The U.S. government classifies vast amounts of material as secret, top secret and the like, much of it with no relevance to national security.

This isn’t just a bureaucratic waste of money and a blow to the democratic ideal of government transparency. Overclassification makes the U.S. less secure, in that it distracts intelligence agencies from protecting actual life-and-death secrets, and undermines public support for data collection and other measures needed to keep us safe. Justice and accountability require a thorough reappraisal of the need for secrecy.

One person who understands the problem is Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, whom nobody could call soft on national security. In March, he asked his agency chiefs to find ways to make more documents available for public scrutiny. One striking suggestion: Switch from a system in which some materials are scheduled for declassification after a set period -- often 15 or 25 years -- to one in which officials actively look to identify documents that can be declassified sooner.

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WNU Editor: If it was not for the issue of Hillary Clinton's use of an unsecured private server to email documents that were "classified secret" .... we would not even be having this conversation. But the narrative is now being set .... especially if the FBI's report to the Attorney General on Hillary Clinton's handling of "secret" documents ... which should be released in the coming weeks .... recommends that she be indicted.