This easing of formal controls was misleading, however, for censorship assumed new forms after 1947 and did not end in 1949. CCD’s sprawling bureaucracy actually peaked numerically in 1948, well after the U.S. State Department had complained that the censorship operation had “the effect of continuing the authoritarian tradition in Japan.” As liberal officers increasingly left GHQ and were replaced by more conservative technocrats, censorship became more stringent, arbitrary, and unpredictable.