I love this paragragh in time article, it sums up that secret information is anything they want it to be just to avoid accountability. They treat the public with contempt. Just classify everything then the public need not know anything.
"It was one thing ? and a commendable one, within limits ? to make it easier to share information. But that development coincided with another one: the generation of more secrets than ever. In 1995, Bill Clinton issued Executive Order 12958, which gave just 20 officials, including the President, the power to classify documents as top secret, meaning their disclosure would likely "cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security" of the U.S. But sneakily, the order also allowed those 20 selected officials to delegate their authority to 1,336 others. Nor was that all: according to a 1997 bipartisan congressional report of a committee chaired by the scourge of government secrecy, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, such "derivative" classification authority was eventually handed to some 2 million government officials and a million industry contractors. "
