Shhh! An update

Updated I was going to do this as an update to yesterday's post on privacy that pointed to some recent examples of increasing government secrecy, but I decided this made the point so perfectly it deserved to stand on its own.

On August 5, AP reported that

[c]iting a need to keep information from terrorists, regulators said Wednesday the government will no longer reveal security gaps discovered at nuclear power plants or the subsequent enforcement actions taken against plant operators. ...

Until now, the NRC has provided regular public updates on vulnerabilities its inspectors found at the country's 103 nuclear power reactors, such as broken fences or weaknesses in training programs.

"We need to blacken some of our processes so that our adversaries won't have that information," said Roy Zimmerman, director of the commission's Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response, which was created after the attacks.

NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said commissioners voted to take the step March 29, but kept it quiet as agency staff worked to implement the plan.

So in other words they took a secret vote to create more secrecy and kept the vote secret until they were ready for the additional secrecy.

The kicker is that according to David Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists, information on such gaps is not revealed until after it has been corrected - which means it is useless to anyone planning an attack or sabotage. "It's all ancient history."

So what does this new policy accomplish? Keeping information about the sloppy security at high-value targets from the public.

It's not so much "don't ask, don't tell," it's more of "we don't tell so you don't know to ask."

Updated to cite Lochbaum as the source of the statement that problems aren't revealed until after they've been corrected. No link as the quote comes from a local paper and the online story is only available to paid subscribers to the print edition.