From G.W. Schulz, homeland security reporter at CIR.
We created a new website at the Center for Investigative Reporting to house our ongoing homeland security project. It includes the in-depth story we posted today in partnership with Newsweek about a little-known intelligence arm of the Department of Homeland Security. The full-length version of that story is available here. More of our work will be appearing at Americaswarwithin.org in the coming days.
In its first full year in office (FY 2010), the Obama administration generated a record-breaking 224,724 “new secrets” — a 22.6 percent increase over the year before, according to the Information Security Oversight Office and first reported by Secrecy News. Transparency expert Steven Aftergood also reports that as the volume of secrets goes up, so does the price tag for taxpayers to keep information hidden.
According to Secrecy News:
The estimated costs of the national security classification system grew by 15% last year to reach $10.17 billion, according to the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO). It was the first time that annual secrecy costs in government were reported to exceed $10 billion.
This does not include the costs for the intelligence agencies like the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office. Their spending on information secrecy is itself considered a secret.
In many ways, it was strange for me, because I was reading it as a regular reader. I did wonder, “Does this stand up to the test of time?” I remember in particular the last paragraph, when you’re writing such a long piece, you always think, “How can I wrap this up?” And I remember writing the bit about how, what bin Laden really wanted was to become a martyr to his cause, and that if the United States ever killed him, that this would cause a great uprising in the Arab world against the United States. So when I read that, and it was interesting, I immediately was back in the moment when I actually had written that, ten years ago, and thought, “Yes, this did stand the test of time,” because this was still the question, I think, when we killed him. You see it now in the debate over whether to release his photo—the question of, Does he become even larger in death than he was in life?
A Tight Deadline, 4,000 Words, Then Ten Years of Waiting - Columbia Journalism Review conducts a Q&A with Kate Zernike, Osama bin Laden’s obituarist for the New York Times.
We’ve got a four-month window to win the war. We have got to push as hard as we can with security.
Check out this video portrait of what’s happening to journalists in the age of Putin. Instead of becoming investigative reporters, some young journalists are turning to entertainment journalism as a way of avoiding violence.
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