The United States government’s obsession with secrecy is undermining the democratic principles it is supposed to protect. Excessive secrecy and over-classification has restricted our ability to understand the world around us, and our lack of knowledge is destroying our ability to make responsible decisions based on real facts. Unwarranted secrecy is without question highly detrimental to a free and open society.

For our democracy to work we need to be properly informed. As Thomas Jefferson famously said, “An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will.”

Our country’s security infrastructure is dangerously bloated, inefficient and incredibly wasteful, according to many current and former intelligence agency insiders. The so-called ‘black budget’ runs into trillions of dollars and is totally classified, therefore it’s impossible to track. Disclosure of any aspect of its funding is a federal crime.

The Library of Congress adds around 70 million official documents to its holdings each year – a huge amount of information by any standard. The U.S. Government, however, classifies more than TEN TIMES that amount every year. That number runs into the hundreds of millions. For many scholars engaged in historical, scientific or political work, the harsh reality is that most of the government’s activities are completely off limits to study.

This huge volume of classified material means that the actions of our government are impossible to verify, especially now that anonymous whistleblower organizations have been successfully targeted as “cyber-terrorists.” The number of documents being classified for national security reasons has skyrocketed in recent years.

Despite the wonders of modern technology and the Internet, our world is NOT one where free inquiry is necessarily encouraged. It’s a world that is manipulated daily by ‘supra-governmental’ global power structures; a place where much of what really goes on is apparently none of our business. We are taught to be good consumers from the day we’re born, and very little else.

Creating informed, responsible citizens clearly isn’t on the national agenda.

The more a nation comes to rely on secrecy to maintain its form of government and its relations with other countries, the more vulnerable to political turmoil it will be when those secrets are revealed.

Thousands of documents from World War II are still classified ‘secret,’ not to mention the fifty-five thousand or so documents related to the JFK assassination, which were supposed to be released in 2025. The federal government has hidden its crimes behind the veil of national security for too many years; increasingly resorting to the use of legal exemptions and loopholes to withhold information that should have been made public long ago.

What’s particularly infuriating is that researchers and scientists doing classified work enable such secrecy to continue and thrive. This hypocrisy belies their stated mission, at least to proponents of a free society. All scientific and academic inquiry is predicated on the ability to work from open and fully accessible sources. Valid scientific research must be available for examination and duplication by outsiders. There’s a word for this: falsifiability. It’s a fundamental concept in research. If you lack the capability to “falsify” a theory – that is, to prove it wrong – then it isn’t valid. Your theory may be true, but scientifically speaking, it’s not valid.

Because nearly all scientists and academicians are confined to public sources for their research, they end up with a version of reality which totally excludes the classified world. According to former intelligence insiders, the highly compartmentalized black budget ‘Special Access’ programs [SAPs] have access to technology which is fifty, a hundred, or even a thousand years ahead of mainstream science.

The deep black world clearly has secrecy and vast resources at its disposal, but what kind of astonishing breakthroughs might they be sitting on? The government has the right to classify and lay claim to any technology it deems vital to national security. The US Patent Office is a major gatekeeper preventing the development of any commercially available technology which could benefit humanity but shrink profits for the global elite. Cold fusion, anti-gravity, free energy, cures for every disease: these incredible breakthroughs could seriously destabilize the world’s economy and thus are considered a threat to the global economic power structure.

Breakthroughs of this magnitude would revolutionize our world so completely, it might become unrecognizable virtually overnight. Highly advanced concepts in physics, anti-gravity propulsion and life-extending biotechnology are being blocked by vested corporate interests from reaching the outside world. Important discoveries and inventions have been kept secret while examination of them has continued unabated in highly secure research facilities like Sandia Labs and Los Alamos.

As President Kennedy himself said in a speech to newspaper publishers on April 27, 1961:

“The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.” 

A dire warning, indeed.

[edited repost from 2014]