Secrecy or Democracy?

According to the ACLU web page on government secrecy,

Simply put, government secrecy is incompatible with a healthy democracy. As U.S. District Court Judge Damon Keith said, "Democracies die behind closed doors."

The government tendency to classify everything grew legs under George Bush and if anything has accelerated under Obama, despite his promise of a more transparent government. In a recent blog post on the website of the Federation of American Scientists, Steven Aftergood writes,

he Inspector General at each government agency that classifies national security information is required by the Reducing Over-Classification Act of 2010 to review the agency’s classification program as part of an effort to combat overclassification.  Those reviews are now underway.  But if properly performed, they could put the Inspectors General at odds with senior officials at their agency who habitually overclassify.

But at the Department of Justice, “misclassification of material” is arguably attributable to the senior leadership of the Department, if not the White House itself.
On May 22, Attorney General Eric Holder wrote to Congress to formally acknowledge that four U.S. citizens had been killed in counterterrorism operations, including Anwar al-Aulaqi and three others.  The death of Al-Aulaqi (and all but one of the others) at the hands of U.S. forces had of course been previously reported and had long been implicitly or explicitly acknowledged by U.S. officials.
But remarkably, Attorney General Holder wrote that this information “until now has been properly classified.”
In other words, information that everyone around the world who cared to know had already known for years was, according to Attorney General Holder’s letter to Congress, “properly classified” until May 22, 2013.  The disconnect between objective reality and official classification policy could hardly be more apparent.

Given that Holder and Obama are maintaining their status as serial secrecy advocates, we'll have to see what the DOJ comes up with to combat the tendency.  I am not hopeful.