Gary wrote:-snip_
"As of 1/24/2003 The Homeland Security Office was delegated the right by the President to create "Top Secret" classification as it deems necessary. It creates a whole new loop of arbitrary data that often requires reclassification of old data which had been either declassified or which had received a lower classification."

As fas as I'm concerned once information is declassified it is open knowledge for all time. Government agencies may well wish to throw a veil of secrecy around things they have no right to if we allow it. The burden of proof should be on them to justify why something should be secret, not on us to make a case for why it should not be. This is specifically directed towards space exploration related technology, although a supreme court case involving atomic weapons related writings derived from publicly available knowledge established legal precedent in a more arguable arena.
I for one enjoyed reading about the weight and dynamics considerations of the Mars entry portion of the current mission. Such stories give insights to the creativity and resourcefulness of people involved in these great endeavors and of our mastery in handling the extreme natural forces involved. You cannot keep the knowledge of, say, sculpting secret because the tools or extra marble pieces can be used to harm someone.
I also find recent efforts to restrict availability of the details of planetary probes a bad trend which hopefully will be proved useless, it makes my job of modeling and portraying such spacecraft more difficult.

"There may be a few changes we need to implement to tighten both security and the content of the zone, but some of those discussions are best handled by e-mail off the pages."

No, I think anyone who has something to say should feel free to contribute, using common sense, without worrying about the kind of things people do, for instance, in China where people are imprisoned for using newspaper clippings to gather knowledge about things not explicitly stated by the government.
This is my first attempt at a post here, does everyone have to type into such a tiny text window? I moved this to a text program so I could look it all over.

Don