Fergie's Tech Blog

U.S. Government is 'Overzealous' With Secrecy

Charles Pope writes in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

The United States is threatened by its fetish for secrecy, an expanding and often arbitrary impulse that adds 40,000 new documents each day to the federal government's mountain of "classified" papers.

That conclusion comes not from the ACLU or Moveon.org, though both organizations agree. It comes from Rep. Dave Reichert, a Republican from Bellevue and a former King County sheriff who is working on legislation that would refine the government's process for deciding which documents remain secret.

The urge to classify, he said, "has been institutionalized, and that's the problem. It's a Cold War mind-set, and it's a hurdle we have to overcome."

posted by Fergie @ 7/25/2007 10:31:00 PM