Classification can be viewed as the information equivalent of the national debt. Information we put off releasing is like debt we put off paying. Like the fiscal deficit, it costs a lot to service and maintain. Keeping things secret requires guards, vaults, background checks. There is evidence that the secrecy structure may collapse of its own weight before anything is done to fix it. Says Steve Aftergood, "The more secrecy you have, the thinner your security resources are spread, and there is a loss of respect for the system.
That promotes leaks. It's hard to keep things secret. It's work. People have to sit and read boring hearing records and black things out. It's easy to imagine they would miss stuff. Aftergood believes that accidental disclosure has been growing. Part of the reason is incompetence, part is semi-official policy. He wrote in the Bulletin that "'accidental' disclosure has the great advantage that it does not require anyone to exercise leadership or to take responsibility.
It has now become the preferred policy particularly since classification reform is not working. If current trends are taken to the limit, everything may eventually be classified - but nothing will be secret.
Aftergood concludes the leaks are a sign of institutional decadence. There are signs of reform. The Clinton administration has split the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which developed vital weapons and the Internet in the past, from the Pentagon and charged that its research should now focus on dual-use technologies with both civilian and military applications.
And after years of heaving and groaning, a new policy seems to be arriving. Late last spring, President Clinton issued a long-awaited executive order on secrecy reform. Effective this last month, the order will declassify hundreds of millions of pages of Cold War documents.
Under the new policy, most current secret documents will be automatically declassified after 25 years, and classification from now on will automatically expire after a decade - approximately the same length of time that has passed since government officials began drafting the new order.
There are loopholes, however, that will keep many sensitive documents under lock and key, including those relating to the president and to foreign government involvement.
And it will be the unenviable task of something called the Information Security Oversight Office to handle the laborious duty of declassification. With this order and with John Deutch, the newly installed head of the CIA, promising both a fresh look at classification policy and a new spirit of openness, it might seem that the work of McGinnis and other black budget watchdogs has come to an end. But it is far from clear that the new openness is real.
A Congressional committee on secrecy policy, which brings together such unlikely allies as New York Democratic Senator Pat Moynihan and North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms both share a concern over excess security , has yet to produce specific recommendations for bringing the black budget out of the shadows. And the panic reaction that followed the arrest of Aldrich Ames has created a thick and swirling atmosphere of fear that dims the prospects of secrecy reform.
But the current administration has already declassified a huge number of documents - from World War II, the '50s, and the '60s. Many of these represent what the black budgets of the past really meant. They are the meat on the bones of old numbers.
And, emerging like fiickering images from some time machine's screen, they seem almost surreal: they represent in effect the government's first admission of things that every history book already records. The mass of newly declassified paper will supply McGinnis and others with all sorts of nuggets of information. And their role will increase in importance: it has been left to private citizens, not government professionals, to poke through the rubble and make sense of it all.
One thing they have found is details of how, in the early '60s, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funded a program under the name Corona to find out if there was indeed a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union.
Orbiting spy satellites snapped high-resolution photos video was not good enough and then ejected the exposed film in reentry pods aimed at convenient oceans. There, the plan went, C cargo planes trailing great drag lines would snare the capsules and return them for processing and analysis.
It took many tries before the somewhat improbable system worked. In the official budget, Corona was advertised as a civilian space effort under the name Discoverer.
In fact, the pictures from the secret project proved that the threat of Russian bombers and missiles was far less than had been feared. Recently, some , images from to were made available, with sample images online at. Looking at them today is to see laid out, with Kodak clarity, just how misguided the defense buildups of the '50s and '60s were.
These images mark the arrival of the news from past decades, like light from distant galaxies. To see spy-satellite photos from the once supersecret Corona program, snapshots of the Cuban missile crisis, and close-ups of Russian airfields and ICBM pads makes clear how widely divergent are the time tracks of the black world and the real world.
In a sense, the black budget is the last legacy of the old Soviet threat: a mirror in which a now vanished Medusa of nuclear holocaust becomes, we hope, forever fossilized. The U. So, where does all that money go? Put all together, the intelligence agencies are looking to do five different things:. Within those goals, there are 32 different kinds of expenses.
It seems the United States has sensors set up around North Korea in order to detect seismic activity that may result from nuclear testing. Pay based on use.
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