Moving to Opaque.

I propose an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America:

No Government Operation or Process shall remain hidden or classified with any title that indicates it is to be hidden from the people of the United States for longer than 40 years, and no Government agency, regardless of position, may fail to disclose a secret operation that is greater than 40 years in age.

I know of a man (lets -for the purpose of false intrigue and mystery- call this man “Bob”) who served in 68-69. During this time he served as… well, for lack of a better word, a spy in Turkey.

“Bob” Found himself doing rather interesting things in Turkey, and when he left the military, he was instructed, as everyone who worked with him, that he had a “30 year lock”, which indicated he couldn’t tell anyone anything about his time in Turkey for 30 years.

However, Bob can now discuss his time in Turkey, which is good, and makes perfect sense, The technology Bob used is now completely obsolete, and the enemy Bob was Spying on (Those nasty Communists from the Soviet Union) are also gone. So Bob can’t really compromise anything at all.

But I have recently talked to people who have a 70 year lock (Which is pretty standard now, I’ve heard)… and more recently a person who has a 130 year lock… which means these people will never be able to talk about what they did for our government… ever (Unless technology really does some impressive things in the next 100 years to extend life)

That means that there are people out there doing things that we will never, ever, know about.

Our Government is going opaque.

The more opaque the government is, the easier it is for them to operate outside of the boundaries of what we, the democratic people of America, would find appropriate.

It should be noted that no one here voted to militarily support Israel, but we do anyway. And we have been attacked us for it. It puts us in the line of fire, something that an opaque government did for us.

(Not that I don’t support Israel, no one knows what I, or any of us support, no one asked us)

Secrecy is the primary operation of a military to protect and defend us. And this I will never argue with. But we are the people who foot the bill for the Government, and we are the people who pay in blood sometimes for the actions of our government, and we are the people who have to watch our family members march into conflict. It’s the least we can do to vote for it.

And when I vote for something, I want to be informed.

Thus, all I ask is transparency. I want to know that my government is on its best behavior, because if nothing else, they know we will find out… Perhaps not today (There is no reason to compromise our security for transparency), but someday we will know what our government did.

As it is now, we are moving to opaque.