Black markers are expensive
Holy sunshine! And I thought there were just philosophical and legal arguments for government transparency. Check out this financial fact.
It cost the federal government $9.5 billion to protect classified information in fiscal year 2006, according to Patrick Radden Keefe. His new policy brief calls for rolling back some Bush Administration practices and installing more transparency in the federal government. One of Keefe's points is that secrecy is expensive because you have to classify, store and protect the information.
I wondered how Keefe reached that figure so I followed his end notes. The $9.5 billion estimate came from a federal agency required to make a report to the president. And if you read the section of that report discussing the cost, you notice a sentence saying the estimate does not include the classification costs of a handful of military and defense intelligence agencies, including the CIA. A PDF of the 2006 classification report can be found here.
By the way, there also is a government report for classification costs in fiscal year 2007. That report estimates the cost was $9.91 billion in that year. A PDF of the 2007 report can be downloaded by clicking here.
— NC
Labels: secrecy
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Tribune's Bob Barr Blackout Watch: The Libertarian Party nominated Bob Barr as its presidential candidate 109 days ago, but the Salt Lake Tribune has yet to inform its print edition readers of his candidacy.
The Tribune's administrators are disabling the accounts of individuals who note this fact in the TribTalk forums or comments sections of SLTRIB.COM.
Barr is now on 43 state ballots across the United States, and is on track to be on 48 ballots.
Nationwide polls show Barr receiving support from between 5 to 6 percent of voters (or about 1 in 20 American voters), and between 8 to 11 percent support in some battleground states.
Only a handful of other presidential candidates can claim the same thing.
The CEO of MediaNews (which owns the Tribune), William Dean Singleton, was a significant financial supporter of Republican U.S. President George W. Bush.
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