It's not cheap
keeping the vast number of secrets the U.S. government does. These days, Uncle
Sam spends a whopping $11 billion guarding classified info, twice what it spent
a decade ago, the New York Times reports -- and that's just the secrets it will
tell us about. The total doesn't include any CIA or NSA spending because their
budgets are, naturally, classified. The head of Information Security Oversight
says that spending would boost the total by around 20%.
The figure is so
high in part because of the explosion of security clearances in the wake of
9/11, which detractors said has led to reams of mundane-yet-classified
information, and in part because of Cold War-era secrets that are still
classified decades later-and which the government still goes to court to
protect. "We are classifying far too much information," says one anti-secrecy
advocate. "The credibility of the classification system is collapsing under the
weight of bogus secrets." Newser
John
Fitzpatrick, head of the Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees
the government's classification effort and released the annual report, said that
adding the excluded agencies would increase the spending total by ''less than 20
percent.'' That suggests that the real total may be about $13 billion, more than
the entire annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency.
smh.com.au The costs
include investigations of people applying for security clearances, equipment
such as safes and special computer gear, training for government personnel, and
salaries. smh.com.au In 2011 Congress
appropriated $54.6 billion for the government's 16 intelligence agencies, which
was an increase over the previous two years, according to Andrea Stone of the
Huffington Post. But that number
doesn't seem to even begin to quantify how much is spent on secrecy as it
doesn't include the Pentagon's $51 billion "black budget."
businessinsider.com And like the
CIA, the NSA's activities and budget are kept secret. What is known is that the
NSA intercepts 1.7 billion U.S. electronic communications every day and is
currently undertaking a $2 billion, 1.8-million-square-foot expansion of its
headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., in addition to building a $2 billion, a
one-million-square-foot data collection center in Utah.
businessinsider.com Spending on
secrecy has increased steadily for more than a decade, driven in part by the
expanding counterterrorism programs after the 2001 terrorist attacks but also by
the continuing protection of Cold War secrets dating back decades. The total
cost for 2001 was $4.7 billion, the oversight office said.
smh.com.au
SM/KA
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