03/17/2005: 
Fraud & Conspiracy
The Age of Missing Information
from Slate
Steven Aftergood is Director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists and has been featured in these pages before. Slate is running a piece he authored in conjunction with Sunshine Week, a media effort to promote awareness of government secrecy in the United States.
From the Slate piece:
The government does a remarkable job of counting the number of national security secrets it generates each year. Since President George W. Bush entered office, the pace of classification activity has increased by 75 percent, said William Leonard in March 2 congressional testimony. His Information Security Oversight Office oversees the classification system and recorded a rise from 9 million classification actions in fiscal year 2001 to 16 million in fiscal year 2004.
Aftergood details some of the devices the administration is using to keep information from the public, including the use of the "sensitive but unclassified" moniker for information as mundane as phone books. For more, read the Slate article or drop by the Project on Government Secrecy website.
