Government Secrecy Costing Even More Money These Days

"Psst! When are we launching those covert ops, again?"<a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&searchterm=secret&search_group=#id=87401972&src=b1ddfd1f8e430939dc7856063b40256a-1-68">photomak</a>/Shutterstock

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$12 billion is a lot of money. $12 billion can buy you one NFL lockout, the most expensive house in the world (twelve times over), or a month’s worth of occupying Iraq.

It’s also the amount the Obama administration spent to keep government information classified in 2011.

Via the Federation of American Scientists, citing figures reported last week by the Information Security Oversight Office:

The estimated cost of securing classified information in government increased last year by at least 12% to a record high level of $11.36 billion. An additional $1.2 billion was spent to protect classified information held by industry contractors…The ISOO report breaks down the expenditures into six categories (personnel security, physical security, etc.). But it does not provide any explanation for the rapidly escalating cost of secrecy…While some essential security costs are fixed and independent of classification activity, the failure to rein in classification and especially overclassification is a likely contributor to marginal cost growth.

For 2010, the ISOO put the total secrecy price tag at around $10.17 billion, a 15 percent increase from 2009. The 2010 and 2011 estimates are lowball numbers, though, because the ISOO reviews the classification of 41 agencies, but not the CIA and NSA, among others. (For certain intelligence agencies, the act of classifying is itself classified, so wrap your head around that.)

The ballooning financial cost of classification is more or less in lockstep with how the “most transparent administration ever” conducts business with regards to national security matters. When taken together with the Obama administration’s Xeroxing of Bush-era State Secrets policy—and its unprecedented clampdown on leaks and whistleblowing—it’s surreal to look back on what the president said on, for instance, his second day in office:

The old rules said that if there was a defensible argument for not disclosing something to the American people, that it should not be disclosed. That era is now over.

It’s safe to say that it is long past due to officially declare the Obama era a transparency #fail.

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It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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