Feds Spending More
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WASHINGTON, DC -- The government is withholding more information than
ever from the public and expanding ways of shrouding data, a coalition
of watchdog groups reported Saturday.
Last year, for each $1 spent declassifying old secrets, federal
agencies spent a record $148 creating and storing new secrets, the
groups said. That's a $28 jump from 2003 when $120 was spent to keep
secrets for every $1 spent revealing them. In the late 1990s, the
ratio was $15-$17 a year to $1, according to the secrecy report card
by OpenTheGovernment.org.
Overall, the government spent $7.2 billion in 2004 stamping 15.6
million documents "top secret," "secret" or "confidential." That
almost doubled the 8.6 million new documents classified as recently as
2001.
Last year, the number of pages declassified declined for the fourth
straight year to 28.4 million. In 2001, 100 million pages were
declassified; the record was 204 million pages in 1997.
These figures cover 41 federal agencies, excluding the CIA, whose
classification totals are secret.
The report also noted the growing use of secret searches, court
secrecy, closed meetings by government advisory groups and patents
kept from public view.
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