2011 in Review: The Year Secrecy Jumped the Shark | Electronic Frontier Foundation

2011 in Review: The Year Secrecy Jumped the Shark | Electronic Frontier Foundation:

The government has been using its secrecy system in absurd ways for decades, but 2011 was particularly egregious. Here are a few examples:

Government report concludes the government classified 77 million documents in 2010, a 40% increase on the year before. The number of people with security clearances exceeded 4.2. million, more people than the city of Los Angeles.

Government tells Air Force families, including their kids, it’s illegal to read WikiLeaks. The month before, the Air Force barred its service members fighting abroad from reading the New York Times—the country’s Paper of Record.

Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees were barred from reading the WikiLeaks Guantanamo files, despite their contents being plastered on the front page of the New York Times.

President Obama refuses to say the words “drone” or “C.I.A” despite the C.I.A. drone program being on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers every day.