America has a classification problem, and has for quite some time. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once observed that if all the newspapers in the United States printed all the classified documents produced by the government on any given day, there wouldn’t be room in the papers for anything else. An unassailable impulse to classify information that might endanger national security has morphed into a cumbersome and expensive bureaucratic system in which great swaths of government activity are shielded from public view. Classification has become both a reflex within the federal government and a powerful get-out-of-jail-free card for the executive branch.

One minor consolation for the information-deprived is that our government’s approach to classification is so nonsensical that a brief survey of the year in secrecy reads like a comedy of errors.

According to a report from the president’s “secrecy czar”—yes, there is one—in the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) of the National Archives, the federal government makes some 231,995 “original classifications” a year. That’s twenty-six brand new secrets an hour. The annual financial cost of creating and maintaining these secrets, and determining who has clearance to know them, is $9.5 billion.

As the clock struck midnight on New Years Eve 2006, some seven hundred million pages of secret historical documents were declassified. But the volume of material that had been sitting there under lock and key for decades is so staggering that many of the documents aren’t actually available for perusal at the National Archives, because each one has to be processed before historians, journalists, and other document-fetishists can access them.

This is a typical problem: a law is on the books providing access to information, but the bureaucratic process for delivering that access is so dysfunctional that the access is effectively denied. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a similarly hollow entitlement: some 40 percent of FOIA requests are not processed in the year that they’re filed. And the public is catching on: the number of FOIA requests is declining every year.

For decades one of Washington’s silliest secrets was the “top line” budget number spent on intelligence. Steven Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists sued to get some current and historical budget numbers, arguing that no enemy, however crafty, could deduce useful information from the aggregate dollar amount spent each year. But the federal government wouldn’t cough up the numbers. With a straight face, the CIA argued that revealing what America spent on intelligence in 1947 would jeopardize national security. The 9/11 Commission saw things a bit differently, arguing that over-classification was not good, but bad, for national security, and this year the intelligence community was obliged by law to turn over the current top line budget number—$43.5 billion.

Administration watchers have long suspected that the real push for greater secrecy within the Bush camp came from the vice president’s office. In fact, when journalists tried to find out some simple, unclassified information about that office—like who works there—Dick Cheney resisted, refusing even to divulge the size of his own staff. Cheney is so secretive, he won’t even acknowledge how many secrets he keeps. When ISOO asked his office to supply statistics on its classification activities, they refused. When ISOO objected that the annual statistics on secrecy are compiled pursuant to an executive order, Cheney replied that he was not actually part of the executive branch, and didn’t have to give them anything. Then for good measure he tried to abolish ISOO altogether. (He failed.)

One irony is that our expensive classification system can’t stifle the simple human penchant for loose talk and human error. One of the administration’s most closely held secrets was the fact that telecommunications companies had assisted the National Security Agency in warrantless wiretapping inside the United States. (In a fit of rhetorical contortion, President Bush was careful to ask Congress for liability protection for the phone companies’ efforts, while refusing to acknowledge that those “alleged” efforts had in fact taken place.) Nevertheless, in August, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell sat down with the El Paso Times and, without so much as a prompt, acknowledged that the telecoms had indeed helped the NSA. Oops.

Another big secret in Washington was the number of private contractors who now assist the U.S. intelligence community. The government conducted an in-depth study to determine just how many of these contractors there were, but when they figured out the number, they wouldn’t reveal it, arguing that providing the number of contractors might allow America’s foes to extrapolate the overall number of employees working in U.S. intelligence. (And imagine what they might do with that information!) Then Tim Shorrock of Salon.com found a public Defense Intelligence Agency slideshow with a pie chart showing that the United States spends 70 percent of its intelligence budget on contractors. Embarrassed, the Office of National Intelligence responded not by acknowledging Shorrock’s scoop, but by arguing, unconvincingly, that the presentation was inaccurate—that the proof wasn’t in the pie chart.

This quixotic tactic—of denying a classified piece of information even after it has entered the public realm—found its best expression in August, when a federal judge sided with the CIA against former spook Valerie Plame. In February 2006, the agency had written Plame an unclassified letter about her retirement benefits that described her “20 years, 7 months” of service. The letter was published in the Congressional Record, and is still available on the Library of Congress’s Web site. But the agency didn’t want Plame to publish this public—and anodyne—biographical information in her book. The CIA “does not contest that the information is, in fact, in the public domain,” the judge opined. But for the agency to acknowledge the information as true might still “harm national security.”

Over-classified programs die over-classified deaths. One of the most promising signs that our intelligence community might be coming to its senses this year went almost completely un-remarked. For the past several years the United States has been developing a multi-billion dollar surveillance satellite so secret that Congress could not subject its merits to any sort of rigorous debate. You see, the satellite, known as Misty, was meant to be stealthy—invisible to observers on the ground—and the fear was that any debate or discussion of its epic price tag might alert foreign enemies to our plan. The problem was that the project was over-budget and over-due, and many believed the satellite simply replicated already existing capabilities. (Oh, and there was one other problem: the satellite wasn’t all that stealthy.) Misty was the single largest item in the intelligence budget for several years in a row, with a price tag topping $9 billion—until Mike McConnell killed it this summer. Little fanfare attended the decision, as most Americans weren’t aware of the program to begin with. But it must have freed up a big slice of that $43 billion budget to spend on more sensible things. (One official familiar with Misty pointed out that, for the money we were spending on the satellite, we could build “a whole new CIA.”) How much money was wasted before McConnell finally pulled the plug? How much time? We’ll probably never know. After all, that’s a secret, too.

Patrick Radden Keefe is a Program Officer and Fellow at The Century Foundation.