
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, April 9, 1990                   TAG: 9004090270
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

SSHH, DON'T TELL

IT ALWAYS seemed that this kind of information should be a secret, but there are those who will blab. The U.S. government has come up with a number of the secrets it creates per year: nearly 6.8 million.

Nobody's actually counting. Keeping such close tabs would surely be a security violation of some kind. What the Information Security Oversight Office did is sample the number of times certain federal offices use the "top secret," "secret" and "confidential" stamps. Then it made a projection to arrive at a total for all offices.

The projection - and don't tell this to just anybody - was 6,796,501 for the fiscal year ended last Sept. 30. The Associated Press reports that this is a drop of nearly 35 percent from an earlier projection. The Navy saw that its own statistics indicated it was creating more secrets than the rest of the government combined. In some circles, that would be a source of pride; but the service decided the numbers didn't look right, so it trimmed them. Still, we wouldn't be surprised if all those piles of Navy secrets still exist, and somebody's keeping it secret.

Maybe the most interesting tidbit is that the Information Security Oversight Office, created in 1982, took seven years to come up with a figure. Since it started counting, then, it appears that more than 47 million government secrets have been created. Meantime, glasnost came to the Soviet Union. We've won another race.

by CNB