“Declassifying” Steven Aftergood.

On Monday night, Steven Aftergood lectured us about an area that most people are unaware of: declassification of secret documents. Every year more than 20 millions documents are classified as secret and this requires a budget of 9 billions dollars to maintain an infrastructure like that. Steven Aftergood, according to the FAS (Federation of American Scientists) website is “directs the FAS Project on Government Secrecy, which works to reduce the scope of government secrecy, to accelerate the declassification of cold war documents, and to promote reform of official secrecy practices”. There are many levels of classified documents and there are about 4000 governmental employees who have the power to decide if a document should be release to the public or not. The question is of course, should we trust them? An organism like FAS has the role of counter balancing the power of the government, and I think their presence in D.C is more than necessary. Aftergood described his organism as apolitical, and without really explaining the benefits of the release of those classifieds documents, he advanced the idea that democracy is the best antidote to terrorism, here stopped by secrecy. While he acknowledged the utility of keeping some documents out of anybody’s hands, like war plans etc, he believed that the current administration has a policy of keeping things as secret without a good reason.
While I was hoping a great lecture and exciting news coming out of it, I’ve got a lot of “I don’t know” answers and a lot of speculations as explanation. Let’s be honest, Steven Aftergood has exactly the same rights than any other citizen in the country to declassify those documents.