Random Thoughts, Notes, & Incidents

In the news: Official secrecy reaches historic high in the U.S. (International Herald Tribune) - Our government is now keeping secrets from us (classifying documents) at a rate of 125 per minute. Meanwhile, the rate of de-classification of old secrets has "slowed to a relative crawl, from a high of 204 million pages in 1997 to just 28 million pages last year."

Sure, security issues in war time drive a large part of this, but that's just the start. In 2001 Dubya extended the power to classify documents to the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Agriculture. "At the Agriculture Department employees can visit the agency's Web site and easily print out a bright-yellow 'sensitive security information' cover sheet."

Just what do you think the USDA or the EPA want to keep from you? In what new and creative ways are they letting industry destroy our environment and poison our food supply with genetic modification? Now we may never know.