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Fire Robert Gates Today
There is a fight brewing about whistleblowers in government service, and Robert Gates is fighting tooth and nail to stop meaningful whistleblower protections.
This is more than a fairness issue, this is a national security issue. The government, including defense and intelligence, simply do not work, and much of this comes from a lack of accountability, which has gotten worse over the past 8 years because of secrecy fetish of Bush and His Evil Minions™.
Excessive secrecy is a far greater threat to our national security than is excessive disclosure.
Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.
This is more than a fairness issue, this is a national security issue. The government, including defense and intelligence, simply do not work, and much of this comes from a lack of accountability, which has gotten worse over the past 8 years because of secrecy fetish of Bush and His Evil Minions™.
Excessive secrecy is a far greater threat to our national security than is excessive disclosure.
Cross posted from 40 Years in the Desert.
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I have had a clearance at various points in my career, and I have worked with sensitive data, and 90% of the classification served no purpose, and just made things more difficult.
Full disclosure: I had to deal with working around a full network scrub because of s dispute of interpretation of UK restricted information (whether it was classified, or proprietary)....What a pain in the tuchas.
February 18, 2009 8:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Excessive secrecy is a far greater threat to our national security than is excessive disclosure"
I'm long retired now, but I couldn't agree with you more. And the 90% figure is bang on. People who have never dealt with this stuff don't realize how stupid, expensive and counter-productive most of it is.
Classified material has to be continuously locked up and accounted for. Almost none of this really contributes to productivity or accomplishment of the mission. It does waste a lot of resources and manpower though. And it also presents lots of gotcha opportunities for sadistic or incompetent superiors for technical violations of meaningless rules.
As someone said, the real accomplishment of classification is to tag for your enemies where the godd stuff might be found.
February 19, 2009 1:20 PM | Reply | Permalink