2011 in Review: The Year Secrecy Jumped the Shark
As the year draws to a close, EFF is looking back at the major
trends influencing digital rights in 2011 and discussing where we are in
the fight for a free expression, innovation, fair use, and privacy.
The government has been using its secrecy system in absurd ways for
decades, but 2011 was particularly egregious. Here are a few examples:
- Government report concludes the government classified 77 million documents in 2010, a 40% increase on the year before. The number of people with security clearances exceeded 4.2. million, more people than the city of Los Angeles.
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Government tells Air Force families,
including their kids, it’s illegal to read WikiLeaks. The month before,
the Air Force barred its service members fighting abroad from reading
the New York Times—the country’s Paper of Record.
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Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees were barred from reading the WikiLeaks Guantanamo files, despite their contents being plastered on the front page of the New York Times.
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President Obama refuses to say the words “drone” or “C.I.A” despite the C.I.A. drone program being on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers every day.
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CIA refuses
to release even a single passage from its center studying global
warming, claiming it would damage national security. As Secrecy News’
Steven Aftergood said, “That’s a familiar song, and it became tiresome
long ago.”
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The CIA demands former FBI agent Ali Soufan censor his book
criticizing the CIA’s post 9/11 interrogation tactics of terrorism
suspects. Much of the material, according to the New York Times, “has
previously been disclosed in open Congressional hearings, the report of
the national commission on 9/11 and even the 2007 memoir of George J.
Tenet, the former C.I.A. director.”
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Department of Homeland Security has become so bloated with secrecy that
even the “office’s budget, including how many employees and contractors
it has, is classified,” according to the Center for Investigative
reporting. Yet their intelligence reports “produce almost nothing you
can’t find on Google,” said a former undersecretary.
- Headline from the Wall Street Journal in September: “Anonymous US officials push open government.”
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NSA declassified a 200 year old report
which they said demonstrated its “commitment to meeting the
requirements” of President Obama’s transparency agenda. Unfortunately, the document
“had not met the government’s own standards for classification in the
first place,” according to J. William Leonard, former classification
czar. More
