That's an exaggeration it's considerably cheaper to over classify or simply shred any documents that are not needed (or as far as the US goes do not fall under the records act since you can't shred those AFAIK) than to do a full impact analysis and declassify them.
Even if you do need to build whole new warehouses and staff them it is still cheaper than allocating the manpower for reviewing each document.
Yes but shredded stuff is lost (for the most part). Digitizing is expensive. It's the typical "the truck is going there anyway so one more item is practically free" problem. If you're very liberal about declassifying stuff then it's cheap. Retroactively declassifying is expensive. The system to handle classified stuff (the truck) already exists so the marginal cost is little even if the system isn't cheap. The savings can't be realized until you figure out a way to get rid of what's already there (everything else on the truck) so just classifying by default is a local maximum.
Regardless, there's much lower hanging fruit when it comes to government inefficiently using $.
Declassifying stuff is never cheap you can't be "liberal" unless you insist on being careless.
When you declassify a document you need to go over every word, check if it related to any source or material that cannot be declassified or ad hoc declassify additional material (which is why many times when there is a FOIA request for a document you can get more than what you ask for) go over every codeword and dig up everything that relates to that and run the same process on that material
also.
After that once you accepted the declassification you go on a hunt and collect all copies and revisions to ensure that there are no copies other than the final "declassified" one.
Declassifying documents is like pulling a string on a sweater you start pulling it and if end up unraveling the entire thing this is why the often redact whole paragraphs and even pages since the effort is too great and you don't want to risk leaving breadcrumbs.
Counter intelligence and OSINT agencies often practice on investigating declassified material and to see if they can gain any "unintended" intelligence from it and often they do and the declassification procedures are updated.
Governments need some level of secrecy to run, the level is dependant on the department and the subject but it secrecy is important none the less, people often don't realize just how many things can easily be screwed up by a tiny leak.
And the price for some misclassification can be high.
"Leaking" small pieces of information that doesn't seem relevant, over time, might help someone construct/discovery something big.
Example,exagerated: person A studies genetic deficiences. Person B studies some new yeast. Person C works as voluntary in vaccination campains in Asia. A "dinner receipt" gets desclassified revealing that now they are working together. A person D, Asian descendant, dies with some new untreatable disease while working with the former 3, and his death is also declassified with more details than necessary...
All these facts with a 10 year span. Could ring some bells, no?
The program to which you refer [0] was a horrible idea. Whoever thought it up, whoever approved it, whoever fucked it up the way they did, all of those people should be fired, rather than resting comfortably in the public blind spot created by exaggerated classification. If a similar fuck-up had been perpetrated by a truly public agency, heads would have long since rolled. The CIA has never accomplished a similar operation and actually kept it secret, so it's clear that all this secrecy is focused on the American public rather than our so-called "enemies". So, thanks for bringing up this example!
I would like to point out that WHO vaccination programmes were touted as "CIA/Zionist" conspiracies way before the CIA actually used them.
Polio vaccination in Pakistan is utterly hindered because the "village elders" and the usual suspects spread nonsense that the vaccines were donated by Israel and it's a Zionist propaganda to turn the male population gay and sterile.
Is this meant as some sort of defense of this tawdry stupid CIA bullshit? The fact that a particular vaccination effort faced this particular challenge should have been a reason not to make the situation with respect to the health of poor children worse for no benefit whatsoever. When inbred goat enthusiasts harbor some zany prejudice, it is not CIA's mission to confirm that prejudice.
