The Empretzeled Secretocracy

By Joe Klein | @JoeKleinTIME | July 23, 2010 | +

Fred Kaplan has a smart (as usual) response to the Washington Post’s massive series about the proliferation of secret agencies. The main problem isn’t that our privacy is being threatened. It’s that this proliferation, by its very nature, can’t do the job it was intended to do:

It’s not that secrets are bad, or that contractors shouldn’t be involved in this sort of thing, or that (gee whiz) a lot of people have Top Secret clearances. It’s that, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, improving intelligence became an urgent issue, the money spigots opened up to make it so, and everything remotely connected to the issue was slammed behind walls of secrecy.

There were good reasons for doing all that. But it has spiraled out of control. And without control, it’s not just wasteful, it doesn’t just create a new sort of garrison—more worrisome than those things, it doesn’t solve the problem that it was intended to address.

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kevin

Just how secret is “Top Secret”? If that many people have it, I doubt it’s the top level of security clearance.
artraveler

With many agencies and groups saying that they didn’t know that another group is doing the same thing means that we haven’t stopped the issue of “silo” thinking. That is the same kind of action where the FAA knew that people were taking flying classes without learning to take-off or land but the info didn’t get to where others could put the pieces together. No corporation would tolerate such possible duplication of effort because, there is no assumption that cross-information sharing can lead to putting supposedly isolated facts together to create a whole. It looks like everyone said we need to “do something” but no one was assigning what each function’s “something” should be and more important, what their role shouldn’t be.
11charlie

“…and everything remotely connected to the issue was slammed behind walls of secrecy.”
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11charlie

It isn’t. I had a “Secret” clearance when I was a 20-year-old in the Army. Then I received a “Top Secret” clearance when I went into the Reserves.
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The strange thing I found out was that about 90% of the “secret” information you were supposed to keep secure can usually be found in any Jane’s publication, Armed Forces Journal, and Aviation Week & Space Technology, not to mention WaPo and the NYT.
Paul-no not that one

“The main problem isn’t that our privacy is being threatened.”

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For those who don’t click the link that’s JK’s unsupported shrug about privacy not the author’s.
http://patricksartor.wordpress.com patricksartor

“The strange thing I found out was that about 90% of the “secret” information you were supposed to keep secure can usually be found in any Jane’s publication, Armed Forces Journal, and Aviation Week & Space Technology, not to mention WaPo and the NYT.”
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Yes, and in International Relations classes in every University most of those things end up being handed out in articles to students. I was very surprised when I took international relations classes about how much supposedly “top secret” things our professors knew just from publications.
deconstructiva

Thanks for the Cone of Silence. Get Smart was a great show.
chillycat88

JOURNOLISTER ALERT!!!!!!!!!!!! Hack “journalist”….all Democrat talking point…NO facts….No original ideas all the time….if you want to be played for an idiot read articles by JOURNOLISTERS!!!!!!!!