Top Secret
In early March, FBI agents demanded access to boxes containing the files of the late columnist Jack Anderson. A leading investigative journalist for more than 50 years, Anderson broke countless stories embarrassing presidents and politicians.
"I got a knock at the door and two FBI agents showed up at my house," Mark Feldstein recalls. Feldstein is writing a book about Anderson- who died last December. He says the files went back to 1947.
"So I'm very perplexed why they want to be rooting around, doing a fishing expedition in a dead reporter's old files," he tells CBS News correspondent Joie Chen.
That fishing expedition extended to the National Archives in Washington. Quietly, the CIA and other government agencies were pulling public files from the shelves and stamping them secret.
"They were open and got shoved back into the vault," says Tom Blanton, head of the privately-run National Security Archives, also in Washington.
He and others were perplexed why documents were now considered a national secret.
Blanton mentions a CIA document recorded just after China infiltrated North Korea during the Korean war. The document, Blanton explains, claimed just two weeks before that there was little chance of the Chinese entering North Korea.
"Massive intelligence failure," Blanton says. "50,000 Americans died, in part because of that intelligence. Fifty years ago, widely published, widely known about, pulled from the files because it was embarrassing. There was no secret there."
In fact, National Archives officials say one third of the seized documents were removed improperly. And much of the remainder had little or no national security value.
"And what we know is that we are creating more new secrets today than anytime in the last 25 years," Blanton says.
It's estimated the government creates 16 million new "secrets" every year at a cost to taxpayers of more than $7 billion.
"There are real secrets, no doubt about it. But everybody's who's been on the inside of the system then comes out and looks back at it says, 'There's way too much classification,'" Blanton believes.
The modern system of classifying secrets and security clearances began during the Manhattan Project, the top-secret effort to develop the atomic bomb during World War II.
The project was spearheaded by General Leslie Groves.
"General Groves said, secrecy is aimed not only at our enemies, but also at our allies, Congress, other agencies, and our own people. Because it lets us stay in control," Blanton explains.
So who decides what ought to be classified?
Well the president as Commander In Chief has the power to do it. But he's busy. So he delegates the job to others. In fact the government has about 4,000 people who classify documents full time. But anyone who holds a security clearance can stamp something classified.
And guess what -- that's three million people.
"So the government is just piling up warehouses full of documents-stamping them all 'secret' and making less information available to the American people," says former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton.
Hamilton heads the Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington. But you probably know him best as the Vice Chairman of the 9/11 Commission. Hamilton, a Democrat, says too much secrecy makes us less, not more, secure.
"For the people who classify documents, stamping a document secret or top secret is easy to do. If you stamp too many things secret, you don't share enough information with the government. And the lack of sharing of information was the critical cause of the 9/11 attacks in our view," Hamilton says.
Yet while secrecy is the name of the game in Washington, so is the leak. Tom Blanton of the National Security Archives says every Administration plays the same game.
"We now have the transcripts of Henry Kissinger's phone calls. He was on the phone every day to reporters leaking selected tidbits that made him and President Nixon look good. That's standard operating procedure. That is probably 80 percent of the leaks," Blanton believes.
The issue of Government secrecy came to a head when CIA agent Valerie Plame's name was leaked to journalists as an apparent attempt to discredit criticism of the administration's decision to invade Iraq.
One journalist, Judith Miller, who was then with The New York Times, went to jail for refusing to reveal her source, who we now know was the vice president's chief of staff, Scooter Libby. Libby claims President Bush approved the leak.
"He was trying to spin the news. That is a leak," Blanton says.
On the other hand, the Bush administration was outraged by "unauthorized" leaks which recently led to two very damaging recent news reports:
Both stories won Pulitzer Prizes last month. They also earned the enmity of the administration.
"Seems to me these are cases worthy of and investigation by the Justice Department. And some of these reporters may deserve subpoenas more than they deserve Pulitzers," opines conservative talk-show host William Bennett.
Bennett served as Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Education, and was the first President Bush's drug czar. Bennett says no one, not even journalists, has the right to publish secrets during a time of war.
"That is a case for prosecution. Seems to me should be. We're at war. If the government is using some secret operation to get after the enemy, and I find out about these secret operations, and I tell everybody, I have not told just every citizen of the United States, I have told every enemy of every citizen of United States," Bennett says.
It's even been suggested that this sort of reporting might violate the World War I era Espionage Act of 1917, which sent 900 people to jail for disclosing information dealing with national defense.
"What's really going on here is the administration is trying to criminalize leaks that they don't like," says Tom Rosenstiel.
Rosenstiel is the director of the Project for Journalism Excellence in Washington.
"It looks from a distance as if the motivation here is to try and intimidate anyone in the administration or in the government from embarrassing the president by divulging things that they disagree with," Rosenstiel says.
In his new book, "America: The Last Best Hope," Bennett agrees that what he calls the "disinfectant" of publicity is usually the best "cure" for the government's mistakes.
Still, Bennett adds a caveat.
"Yeah, the light is the disinfectant but some things need to stay in the dark. I'm prepared to accept the views of most people who say we do over-classify. There are too many things that are over-classified. But in saying that we do over-classify doesn't mean there aren't things that deserve to be kept secret," he says.
And former Congressman Hamilton says the tug of war between government secrets and the people's right to know will always be with us.
"The paradox is that in a democracy you do have to hold secrets," Hamilton says. "But, at the same time, you hold secrets, you tend to make the functioning of democracy more difficult."