We don't disagree at all. The only thing I would add is that for every system of control there should be a counterbalancing system of inspection and audit. Con

We don't disagree at all. The only thing I would add is that for every system of control there should be a counterbalancing system of inspection and audit. Congress surely isn't up to the job, there is no IG that I'm aware of that works at the National Security cross-agency level, and even if there was the results couldn't be made public anyway. For all of those needs that we agree on, you can't leave the government an open-ended blank check. It just doesn't work. FOIA is supposed to be part of the control process, but if we can't even learn what the policies are for documents that we then are asking about, FOIA is not working. Constitutionally, there are supposed to be hard limits to the amount of control the government has. If, for instance, J. Edgar Hoover was keeping files on Elvis Presley, sooner or later we'd get access to them and institute laws constraining the application of domestic counterintelligence operations. Laws and rule changes that prevent this "sooner or later" process from happening are bad. Really bad. At the very least there should be a firm time limit on whether or not to admit documents exist -- perhaps 10 or 20 years. That's not optimal, but it would at least allow for the system to self-inspect and adapt and evolve ever so slowly. (I still remain _very_ concerned that the theory we are talking about and the actual application are two completely different things, but I guess the point of this rule change is that we'll never know.)