Are we safer...in the dark?

[babylonsister]

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/03/are_we_saferin_.html

Are we safer...in the dark?

Information belongs to the American people, despite our government’s insistence that it does not. In this age of terrorism, knee-jerk secrecy aims to protect us from the evils of the world. In practice, though, it might do just the opposite.

By Tom Blanton

The American ideal of open government has reached critical condition and needs intensive care. We have enough lab results to know the news is bad:

*The oldest still-pending Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request is old enough to join the Army and go to Iraq (18 years).

*Backlogs on FOIA requests keep rising while the number of civil servants who the government assigns to FOIA keeps dropping — could there be a connection?

*Only one in five federal agencies actually complies with the 10-year-old electronic FOIA law that was supposed to put so much government information on the Web that we wouldn't need to file FOIA requests anymore.

*If you ask for historic presidential records, say from the Reagan White House, you'll wait a minimum of six and a half years (up from 18 months in 2001).

*The U.S. government has created more national security secrets each year for the past three years than at the height of the Cold War.

*The government spends more than $7 billion a year on keeping the secrets (not counting how much the CIA spends, which is secret), but only $320 million ($1.10 per citizen) on the Freedom of Information Act and $338 million on the entire National Archives.

*The Pentagon is waging information warfare overseas with dramatic expansions of propaganda and "psychological operations." The problem, internal documents revealed, is that in an Internet age, Americans will wind up consuming the lies, which is contrary to law.

more...

[Double T]

1. Looks like we have a FOIA system engineered for corruption, deception.........

and malfeasance.