The Dark State: Snowden’s Revelations on Secret Gov’t Surveillance are the Tip of the Iceberg
http://www.juancole.com/2014/02/snowdens-revelations-surveillance.htmlThe Dark State: Snowdens Revelations on Secret Govt Surveillance are the Tip of the Iceberg
By Juan Cole | Feb. 21, 2014
(By Tom Engelhardt)
Intelligence officials have weighed in with an estimate of just how many secret files National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden took with him when he headed for Hong Kong last June. Brace yourself: 1.7 million. At least they claim that as the number he or his web crawler accessed before he left town. Lets assume for a moment that its accurate and add a caveat. Whatever he had with him on those thumb drives when he left the agency, Edward Snowden did not take all the NSAs classified documents. Not by a long shot. He only downloaded a portion of them. We dont have any idea what percentage, but assumedly millions of NSA secret documents did not get the Snowden treatment.
Such figures should stagger us and what he did take will undoubtedly occupy journalists for months or years more (and historians long after that). Keep this in mind, however: the NSA is only one of 17 intelligence outfits in what is called the U.S. Intelligence Community. Some of the others are as large and well funded, and all of them generate their own troves of secret documents, undoubtedly stretching into the many millions.
And keep something else in mind: thats just intelligence agencies. If youre thinking about the full sweep of our national security state (NSS), you also have to include places like the Department of Homeland Security, the Energy Department (responsible for the U.S. nuclear arsenal), and the Pentagon. In other words, were talking about the kind of secret documentation that an army of journalists, researchers, and historians wouldnt have a hope of getting through, not in a century.
We do know that, in 2011, the whole government reportedly classified 92,064,862 documents. If accurate and reasonably typical, that means, in the twenty-first century, the NSS has already generated hundreds of millions of documents that could not be read by an American without a security clearance. Of those, thanks to one man (via various journalists), we have had access to a tiny percentage of perhaps 1.7 million of them. Or put another way, you, the voter, the taxpayer, the citizen in what we still like to think of as a democracy are automatically excluded from knowing or learning about most of what the national security state does in your name. Thats unless, of course, its officials decide to selectively cherry-pick information they feel you are capable of safely and securely absorbing, or an Edward Snowden releases documents to the world over the bitter protests, death threats, and teeth gnashing of Washington officialdom and retired versions of the same.
MADem
(135,425 posts)A ship's schedule is classified, and the message traffic that accompanies a single port visit can go into the dozens, even hundreds, of documents, if the visit involves a lot of husbandry, offloading/onloading, or even personnel transfers. Once the ship visit is complete, there's no need to keep that shit classified but since it's old news, it's usually left to just get declassified by time--i.e., no one takes active steps to declassify the document.
There are a lot of "classified" documents that are bullshit. Clinton tried to get a handle on this and he was achieving some success; Bush sent it back in the other direction.
You can read a lot of "classified" information in the world's newspapers, and it's not as a consequence of anyone breaking into files and stealing stuff--it's that some people like to feel important by stamping a high classification level on something that isn't "Confidential" or "Secret" never mind "Top Secret (NOFORN)."
bemildred
(90,061 posts)People with higher clearance got more respect. So naturally, it proliferates. A lot of people want it. If nothing is done about that, the problem will recur. People do like their status markers.
MADem
(135,425 posts)Like junior high school!