And You Thought Gas Was Expensive?

The cost of keeping secrets is at a new high — $9.91 billion.

That figure for 2007, a 4.6 percent rise over the previous year, is what the federal government spent on classification, according to the Secrecy News analysis of the Information Security Oversight Office's 2007 Report to the President.

"The ISOO annual report…presents a unique snapshot of declassification and declassification activity throughout the executive branch, though the data provided are often of uncertain significance and are cited with exaggerated precision," explained Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientist's Project on Government Secrecy, which publishes Secrecy News.

"ISOO reported uneven compliance with basic classification system rules and regulations at several agencies," Aftergood added.

Original classification decisions, or "new secrets" as Aftergood calls them, were up 1 percent, while derivative classification, or information that had previously been classified and was classified in a new form or document, were up 12.5 percent for a total of 23,102,257 classification actions in 2007, he reported.

Read more of the Secrecy News' analysis and the ISOO report online.