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. Many of these documents still probably require some protection, but the overwhelming majority undoubtedly do not. In an open society like ours, it is unacceptable that so much of the official record of government policy remains inaccessible to the public. Tens of thousands of U.S. government officials spend large portions of their time classifying several million new documents each year.