More Files Being Classified; Fewer Pages Being Declassified

Mostly because of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the federal government reports, the number of documents being classified in the U.S. jumped 10% last year, to 15.6 million.

The Information Security Oversight Office included the numbers in its latest annual report to the president.

Meanwhile, the number of pages that the government declassified continued to drop. Last year, 28.4 million pages were declassified.

That was a drop of 34% from the previous year.

The increase in the number of documents being classified has raised concerns that the government is being too secretive.

The report notes that over-classification of documents has been an issue for decades.

“It cannot be said conclusively from this report’s data that recent increases in the number of classification decisions were due substantially to the phenomenon of over-classification,” the Information Security Oversight Office report says.