New government-transparency database will decrease available info about intel agencies 
A new online government spending database -- designed to increase transparency as to how taxpayer dollars are spent -- will actually allow intelligence agencies to keep more secrets about their private contracts than before.
"[W]hen it comes to intelligence spending, there will actually be a net loss of public information because categories of intelligence contracting data that were previously disclosed will now be withheld," reports Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News.
The database, USAspending.gov, launched earlier this month to show taxpayers how government money is distributed to private companies and which lawmakers and congressional districts receive the most lucrative contracts.
It was never designed to disclose classified information, but as Aftergood and Daniel G. Dupont at InsideDefense report, even unclassified spending of intelligence agencies is being kept from public view.
The Defense Intelligence Agency, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and Counterintelligence Field Activity argued that including their unclassified contracts in the database would open a vulnerability in operational secrity, Aftergood reports.
"I appreciate your concerns that reporting these actions to the publicly accessible website could provide unacceptable risk of insight to your individual missions and budgets," wrote Shay D. Assad, director of defense procurement & acquisition policy for the Undersecretary of Defense, in a letter posted by Secrecy News. ""As such, I concur with your waiver requests to not report your unclassified actions to FPDS-NG [Federal Procurement Data System - Next Generation, aka USASpending.gov] at this time."
The data waiver is not retroactive, so contracts with the intelligence agencies before FY2007 are still available. These include contracts, according to Aftergood, "ranging in amounts from tens of dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars."
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