Toothbrushes and Diamonds

It is worth reading any article that begins: "If you guard your toothbrushes and diamonds with equal zeal, you'll probably lose fewer toothbrushes and more diamonds." - Former national security adviser McGeorge Bundy . And that is the way Ted Gup's article about this administration's "explosion" in secrets and those who are not supposed to leak them begins in the San Jose Mercury News (registeration may be required).

A quick overview of what Gup details: "In 1995, according to the Information Security Oversight Office, the stamp of classification - "confidential," "secret," "top secret," etc. - was wielded about 3.6 million times, mostly to veil existing secrets in new documents. Ten years later, it was used a staggering 14.2 million times (though some of the bump-up was the result of increased use of the Internet for government communications). That works out to 1,600 classification decisions every hour, night and day, all year long."