The Secrecy Commission tried to follow these principles. Problems in the Current System Like many of you, I have read thousands of classified documents and spent hundreds of hours in classified briefings. Most of this information has deserved to be secret, but some has not. Too often I have had the impression that information has been classified not to protect national security , but rather to protect national security officials from embarrassment or inquiry. First , too much secrecy undermines our democracy and weakens accountability.
Information is power.
Information and open debate are the lifeblood of democracy. Each time something is unnecessarily classified, a piece of information that could be vital to the development of sound policy is taken out of circulation. Excessive secrecy concentrates power in too few hands. Consultation between government agencies can be constrained. More than one billion pages of classified documents older than 25 years sit today in U.S.government warehouses.