NSA: Disclosing How Many People It’s Spying On is a Violation of Privacy

Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall asked the National Security Agency a simple question: just how many people inside the United States it is spying on.
But the answer is anything but simple:

The query bounced around the intelligence bureaucracy until it reached I. Charles McCullough, the Inspector General of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the nominal head of the 16 U.S. spy agencies. In a letter acquired by Danger Room, McCullough told the senators that the NSA inspector general “and NSA leadership agreed that an IG review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons,” McCullough wrote.

Spencer Ackerman of Wired's Danger Room has the story: here

Also:

Why Government Wants to Keep Secret Things Secret

Yesterday, we told you the story of how Wired's Spencer Ackerman got the story about how the NSA thinks that telling you it's violating your privacy is a violation of your privacy.
Sadly, keeping secret and devising reasons why those secrets have to be secrets aren't exactly new to the government. Today, Spencer followed up with Washington's 5 Worst Arguments for Keeping Secrets From You.
For example:

Nuclear Experiments on People Would Have ‘Adverse Effects on Public Opinion’
Government secrecy is perhaps at its most pronounced with nuclear weapons. And most people would probably agree that discretion is the better part of valor when it comes to the US’s most dangerous arsenal. But that leeway probably doesn’t extend to atomic experiments on human beings. Still, back in the 1940s, the Atomic Energy Commission decided you couldn’t know about anything of the sort.
We now know that at the dawn of the nuclear age, the commission indeed used human guinea pigs to learn what the effects of atomic blasts and lingering radiation would be on the human physiology. In 1947, the commission wanted word that it was, among other things, feeding irradiated food to handicapped children kept very quiet. Its rationale was straightforward in its brazenness: We don’t want to be sued by an outraged public.

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