The continued leaking of details of the massive spying program being conducted by the National Security Agency is just the latest embarrassing example of the U.S. government’s inability to keep secrets.
More secrets were revealed recently by Edward Snowden than even Bradley Manning and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks ever imagined.
In an analysis in Sunday’s editions of The New York Times
A Washington Riddle: What Is ‘Top Secret’?
investigative reporter David Sanger posited a plausible reason why.
“When everything is classified – even secrets in plain view on the internet – then nothing is secret any more. The entire system loses credibility.”
I blogged about the abuse of the classification system in more detail today at
U.S. government penchant for secrecy needs to be fixed
Sanger points out the ridiculous way the feds “classify” everything … even newspaper articles, and data freely available on the internet.
Though every president has some degree of fault, much lies at the feet of the worst president ever, George W. Bush.
His so-called intelligence “failures” were not really that at all. He just ignored the now-famous CIA briefing warning that an attack by Al Qaida was imminent.
Ever since Sept. 11, the Cheney administration forced multiple federal “intelligence agencies” (isn’t that an oxymoron? Whoever heard of an “intelligent” government agency?) to share their data.
When Bradley Manning downloaded hundreds of thousands of classified documents, we learned that over 800,000 people had similar access to the same data.
How can they ever hope to keep secrets easily accessible to almost a million people?
They cant.
The system is broken and it needs a major overhaul. It is long past time for the U.S. government to stop stamping everything in sight “top secret” and allow the public to know what it is really doing TO us and FOR us.