After the post I did over at Bring it On! about AT&T lawsuit and the fed's use of "state secrets' privilege..I got to thinking about it long and hard..ok..not hard but I couldn't sleep and I had a shit-load of research on the subject. I was flabbergasted at our governments ability to do just about everything in secret..or call it a secret..hell, to them its all secret at some point when they are trying to cover their collective ass's in the name of the GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR...their favorite reason for treating us like 'shrooms.
There was this cute little report put out last year called: Secrecy Report Card. Those lovely folks over at OpenTheGovernment.org put it out..god love em. This report breaks down quite a few of our Federal AND State Governments attempts to treat us like mushrooms..aka..keep us in the dark and feed us a load of bullshit. Here are some of the lowlights(in red) from 2004:
The FISA court approved 1754 requests to surveil someone or some group. It rejected....None! In fact, throughout its entire history, it has only rejected 4 requests. I am not saying this is bad, I am just saying it seems to just be a rubber stamp for the boyz in DC...at least the sumbitches went through the motions, so I really won't bitch about this factoid. It beats doing it all by themselves without ANY oversight what-so-fucking-ever, right?
The government decided to stamp documents secret a record 15.6 million times in 2004. The U.S. government last year(2004) alone spent $7.2 billion securing its classified information. That’s more than any annual cost in at least a decade.
Nearly two-thirds of the 7,045 meetings of federal advisory committees that fall under the Federal Advisory Committee Act were completely closed to the public, undermining one purpose of the law. (Others were partially closed.)
In 2004, the public made over 4 million requests for information from government agencies, which is a 25 percent jump in overall requests from the previous year, despite only a 5 percent rise ( to $336.8 million) in spending on FOIA(Freedom of Information Act).--Now, if your jaw bounced off the table after reading that number..wait till you see the next set...
Of the roughly 90 agencies surveyed by the Department of Justice, only 14 were able to keep up with FOIA requests they received. But that’s good news: Only 7 agencies had been able to keep up in 2003.
And last, but certainly not least, the item that had me running all over the friggin internet trying to find out how many times the Federales have used that lovely tool of secrecy, the states secret privilege: The “state secrets” privilege allows the sitting U.S. president to nearly unilaterally withhold documents from the courts, Congress and the public. At the height of the Cold War, the administration used the privilege only 4 times between 1953 and 1976. Since 2001, it has been used at least 7 times.
Its a good report if you want to get a little shock to your system or perhaps get really pissed off at what it costs to keep all those friggin secrets..secret, so I would like to suggest you check it out..its only 13 pages long. I can't wait for their 2006 report, can you, my dear reader?
Tags: State Secrets Privilege,FISA,FOIA,Secrecy Report Card
