What You Don't Know Won't Hurt You, 58 Years Later

Should the size of the CIA's budget from 1947 remain secret? Wednesday, a federal judge said yes.

Comments

[dhex]

jesus fucking christ, matt, do you want the russians to win?

[Matt Welch]

dhex -- That comment deserves an award ...

[Franklin Harris]

The Ruskies... they'll see everything! They'll see the BIG BOARD!

[UFP]

Did you read the article, dhex? While your statement was quite clever, the issue is slightly more complicated that that:

Judge Ricardo M. Urbina of the D.C. District Court accepted the CIA's argument that disclosure of such historical budget figures would compromise the "intelligence method" of transferring funds to the CIA. The CIA budget is not directly appropriated but is concealed within various budget line items in the Defense Department budget.

Granted, I'm still not sure why the CIA budget needs to be "secret" at all, but this doesn't seem like completely invalid reason on the part of the judge.

[dhex]

sadly, i did read the article. the problem is that we have no way of judging how true or false this may be, much less the issue of redaction...

not to mention they're implying that they haven't changed their funding methods in half a century.

[vantigan]

There's no fighting in the War Room!